Design

An empty slot. What is written here is only “what has to exist before this slot counts as filled.”

What travels — “the way you win has to be two sentences”

The condition applied when starting a new game.

You must be able to write, in two sentences, how you win this game.

If you cannot, it is not designed yet.

Why that condition: you can start building while unable to write it. Move a character, add an attack, make an enemy. You can build for a long time.

And at some point “so what is this game about?” arrives. By then so much is built that undoing it is expensive.

Being unable to write two sentences usually means one of these:

Symptom	The actual state
Well… you can do a few different things	There is no centre
There’s this, and also that	Nothing has been chosen
I think I’ll know once I play it	I do not know yet

The two-sentence constraint forces a choice.

What has to be re-decided — “what does this game grow”

This one differs per game. Last game’s answer does not carry.

Almost every game has something the player keeps growing. It might be a number, a set of options, or understanding.

What grows	Then the game is
Numbers (level, power)	Accumulation — time is the reward
Options (skills, combinations)	Construction — deliberation is the reward
My own skill	Learning — mastery is the reward
What you come to know	Revelation — discovery is the reward

Settle what grows and most of the rest follows — what to reward, what to ration, where to gate.

And left unsettled you put a little of everything in, and none of them ever gets large enough.

The detailed record starts here

⚠ This is the same text as Design for Future game 1. There is not yet any basis on which the two slots differ, so I have not invented a difference.

An empty slot. What’s written here is only what has to exist before this slot counts as filled.

What travels — the way you win, in two sentences

The one rule from the wuxia game’s design that isn’t genre-bound.

When an enemy starts a form, a telegraph appears. Read its lineage, answer with the countering lineage, and the hit is negated.

Until those two sentences exist, adding systems doesn’t produce a game. In the wuxia project the form list actually got extended first — and the longer the list grew, the clearer it became that this was not a martial art but several attacks. Quantity is not a substitute for design.

What has to be re-decided — what the game grows

In the wuxia game what the player accumulates is not reaction speed but knowledge. That single choice determined the matchup table, the telegraph durations and the phase structure.

What the next game grows has to be decided here again. Settle it and the rest follows; leave it unsettled and everything else stays loose no matter how firmly it’s written down.