my last 20 games!! 98% positive on steam :O store.steampowered.com/app/4044300/...

Designer Notes #94: Charles Cecil (@revolutionsoftware.bsky.social), co-founder of Revolution Software, lead designer of Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series. Part 2! www.designer-notes.com/designer-not...

This one has been long in the making, we've done a huge interview with @sorenjohnson.bsky.social of #civ4 and @mohawkgames.bsky.social fame, and two of his codevelopers @dalekent.bsky.social and @thesolver.bsky.social about tveir #4X game #oldworld ! spillhistorie.no/2026/04/22/b...

Designer Notes #93: Charles Cecil (@revolutionsoftware.bsky.social), co-founder of Revolution Software, lead designer of Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series. Part 1! www.designer-notes.com/designer-not...

holy moly, ok! we did it?? we made a collection??? it's the first 13 games, bundled up with unlockable dev notes, updated audio, some sneaky bug fixes, cloud saves, and Steam Deck support!! store.steampowered.com/app/4044300/...

One more thing: Loved being able to use the #GDC26 Podcast Booth for a live Designer Notes. Was a great experience being able to see and also talk with listeners before and after the show. Thanks for following me on this (lengthy) endeavor! (Should get to episode #100 soon...)

And that's a wrap - see you next year! #GDC26 #GDC27

Saltsman: I get over the "blank page" problem when making a game by starting on the art tab instead of the code tab (in PICO-8). #GDC26

Saltsman: Follow your ideas where they lead to end up in a place you never would have found without that process. #GDC26

Saltsman: Discovering the right formula for your idea is the process of having your darlings and killing them too. #GDC26

Saltsman: Ideas are much more important to protect than any other part of your project. #GDC26

Saltsman: Formulas are not the same as ideas. Ideas are what you want to say. Formulas are how you are hoping to achieve that. #GDC26

Saltsman: Truly easy things tend to be not obvious - no one may have considered skipping the normal steps. #GDC26

Saltsman: My manifesto for making games. How can we make it easy on ourselves. #GDC26

Saltsman: What if we could make games for ourselves? #GDC26

Classic scope creep... #GDC26

Holley: The Golden Secrets of Yotei's Event Deck. #GDC26

Holley: Shortcomings to the Event Deck in Yotei. It relies heavily on dialogue, which is expensive to make and can fatigue players who usually skip dialogue. #GDC26

Holley: The advantage of Yotei's robust and dynamic Event Deck is that we can focus on outputs instead of inputs. The player can make their own choices (the input) and the game can still lead them down a good path (the output). #GDC26

Holley: We could sometimes fake things by using the same voices for multiple characters during fast scenes (like combat)... as long as we weren't switching genders. #GDC26

Holley: The math for each Event's combination of conversations times voices times lines depends on how important the Event is. #GDC26

Holley: Hard reality for Yotei's VO budget. #GDC26

Holley: We had to do the hard work of having multiple ways (including different VO passes) to communicate the same Event. This one has four different dialogue sequences. Three will not be used. All that is multiplied by different languages and six different actors who cover multiple NPCs. #GDC26

Holley: These different player actions would have led to the same story beats (main quest, weapon unlocks) from the Event Deck. #GDC26

Holley: Camping Events are very important because it's a frequent player action that happens everywhere. We can rely on them in case players ignore all the other Event triggers. #GDC26

Holley: Here are examples of rules that are checked to determine which Event is chosen when camping. The situation needs to match how the Event will be delivered to the player. #GDC26

Holley: In Yotei, if multiple Events are valid, then we always choose the first one, giving the system a natural linear order. #GDC26

Holley: Each Event has multiple ways that they can be added to the game, depending on the context of the current encounter. #GDC26

Holley: Yotei sometimes reorders the deck depending on what you already are pursuing. Better not to overwhelm the player with multiple goals that are too similar. Every goal you give the player has a cost. #GDC26

Holley: We have a Loneliness card in the Deck that skips over giving the player a new task, to slow down the pacing and let the player experience the world in quiet. #GDC26

Holley: We needed a variety of Dealers because not all players do the same interactions. (Some may never look at a bounty board.) #GDC26

Holley: Various interactions (bounty board, camping, customer in sake house) are Dealers that draw from the Event Deck to give you a near-term goal, depending on your current situation. #GDC26

Holley: Yotei implemented a "dungeon master" to guide players through the game via a Event Deck of possible story beats, side quests, weapon unlocks, etc. #GDC26

Holley: In Yotei, we didn't want to overwhelm players with a map of nodes, making the "discovery" feel too mechanical. #GDC26

Holley: Yotei would be more open-ended than Tsushima, so making sure players found the unlocks and upgrades and progression they needed would be a challenge. #GDC26

Pardo: Developer are good playtesters at the beginning, but you won't know what game you have until you expand to larger groups of players in the actual world. #GDC26

Pardo: Once we started our daily playtests, design docs became irrelevant/unnecessary. Our development was now led from the results of each playtest. #GDC26

Pardo: Our first goal was to achieve a Minimum Lovable Game by building from the inside out. Start with the core to make sure it's actually fun. #GDC26

Pardo: This is the original seed for Arkheron that the team voted for. #GDC26

Pardo: We then stack-ranked the ideas again based on what game we thought Bonfire would be most successful at BUILDING into something great. #GDC26

Pardo: After winnowing down to seven game ideas, we stack-ranked them. 6 of 7 got number one votes, meaning the team was still very split. Led to a long discussion about why we made the choices we did. #GDC26

Pardo: Bonfire employees generated 30 pitch ideas and then each team member voted on their favorite five. #GDC26

Pardo: We pitched Bonfire as how we would build the team, not the game. It would have been a mistake to promise a game that would have been a mismatch for our team. #GDC26

Pardo: We became obsessed with game balance while developing Starcraft, which was an essential reason it became an e-sport, even if we never imagined it at the time. #GDC26

I've been making games full-time since 2005 and had games on Steam since 2015. Here's the number of years in the past decade that I've had a single game earn over $100k on Steam. ZERO

Pardo: When the team loves playing the game during development, they are driven to make it more fun/polished than all the other games out there which they could be playing instead. #GDC26

Pardo: How do you know if a game will be a hit? It's when the team can't stop playing it. They love playing the game more than making it. My cancelled games never reached that milestone. #GDC26

Pardo: One mistake with Titan was building the tech before we knew what the design/fun actually was. Also, I tried to stay the Creative Director even though my job had scaled above that level, and we needed someone else in that role. #GDC26

Pardo: Although we post-mortem after every project, each new project has its own set of problems and challenges that we had no way of seeing at the start. #GDC26

Rao: There is a fantasy that when you have a huge hit that the stress will fade away. We still think Hades is fragile, and the stress that it could lose what makes it special never goes away. #GDC26