Gamedev

In Narrative Notebook #5, Bryant Francis unpacks what makes D-Cell Games’ UNBEATABLE land so hard: it refuses to explain itself. The rhythm adventure game drops its heroine Beat into a music-is-illegal dystopia with no transition, no exposition, no scene of her falling from our world into the next — just a change in sound and setting and a sense of “all right, here we go.” Co-director RJ Lake explains the philosophy behind it: “I don’t like stories pre-digested and I don’t like games where I’m being patted on the head or told I did such a good job.” The essay traces how UNBEATABLE channels the “artificial reality” of music videos (Vanessa Carlton’s piano driving around LA with zero setup) and needle-drop movie-title sequences, how Lake had to fight formulaic collaborators who insisted every scene be intelligible in isolation, and how the resulting creative trauma nearly killed his confidence in the project. The punchline is that by trusting the audience to construct meaning, the game makes its emotional impact feel earned rather than instructed — a useful counterexample for any game writer negotiating how much to hold the player’s hand. ...

David Strachan’s game-design essay argues the whole concept of a difficulty curve is wrong: games shouldn’t ramp up smoothly, they should be built around a difficulty saw — a series of mechanic-introduction arcs, each with its own curve. The insight came from Lemmings designer Russell Kay, who smoothed difficulty by breaking step-changes into chapters rather than difficulty settings, letting players choose and set expectations. The core problem: developers get good at their own game and lose the first-time-player mindset, so “how hard should a jump be” becomes meaningless without deliberate structure. Instead of one global ramp, group mechanics together and give each its own teach → practice → press arc — a new enemy type, ability, puzzle type, way of using a system (Mario’s triple jump), item, or rule. Smoothing means removing too-hard/too-easy spikes per mechanic, not flattening everything. The essay’s practical spine is the DO/DON’T list: optional collectables, alternate routes, dynamic difficulty adjustment (“actual magic sauce”), multiple learning channels (text, voiceover, button prompts, particles, visual cues), show-don’t-tell before giving a new weapon — but never punish bad performance with harder future attempts, never let players skip an area before learning its skill, never hide the main mechanic. Finding your skill curve empirically: death-location clusters (Mario Maker-style), level-completion deltas (80% finish L4 but 20% finish L5 → L5 is too hard or boring), structured tester questions on a spreadsheet, and watching streamed gameplay. It’s impossible to make a game for everyone — pick a target market. And the Portal 2 knowledge-shortcut trick: hide a level-skip that requires techniques learned later in the game, because if someone can trick their way to the end, the level has nothing to teach them. ...