Designing Games
Four games in development. Zero published. The process is the interesting part.
The situation
I design board and card games. Not as a side project I tinker with occasionally; as a serious creative practice where I'm working through real design problems every week. I currently have four games in various stages of development: Ichthyomancers, Neighborhood Crawler, Pixel Drifters, and Unplayable Characters.
None of them are published. None of them are finished. And honestly, the design process is more interesting than the finished product would be on a shelf; game design is where my thinking about experience and systems is most visible.
What game design actually is
People think game design is inventing rules. It's really designing decisions. Creating a system where every choice a player makes feels meaningful, where complexity emerges from simple interactions, and where the thing that makes the game deep is invisible to someone learning it for the first time.
A great card game has layers that reveal themselves over time. Your first game, you're just playing cards and seeing what happens. Your tenth game, you're thinking three turns ahead and reading your opponent's strategy. The rules didn't change. Your experience of the system did. Designing that arc (from “this is easy” to “this is deep”) is the hardest and most interesting problem in game design.
How I think about it
Ichthyomancers is a card game built around fish divination; reading fortunes through the behavior of fish. The theme is weird on purpose. The design challenge is making the core mechanic (drafting and combining fish cards with different properties) immediately intuitive but strategically deep. Every version I playtest reveals a new tension: this combo is too powerful, this decision point isn't meaningful enough, this rule creates complexity the player can see but doesn't enjoy. Each problem is a design puzzle.
Neighborhood Crawler explores nostalgia and place. The experience of being a kid in a neighborhood, where every yard and alley and shortcut felt like a world. The design challenge is capturing exploration and discovery in a tabletop format without the randomness feeling arbitrary.
Pixel Drifters and Unplayable Characters are earlier in development, but they're teaching me different things about pacing, player agency, and when constraints create fun versus frustration.
Why this matters outside of games
Every interesting design problem I've encountered in any field comes down to the same questions game designers ask: What is the person experiencing? What decisions are they making? Where is the friction, and is it good friction (challenge, engagement) or bad friction (confusion, frustration)?
When I'm redesigning a workflow at a game store, I'm asking these questions. When I'm filming a wedding, same thing. When I'm building an app or watching someone struggle with a poorly designed sign; same questions.
Game design isn't my hobby. It's my design practice. Everything else is applied game design.