Steam Achievements section. There's one achievement here titled "HEXA Novice", with the requirement being to "Score 5,000 points in Arcade Mode". The icon for this achievement is a pixel drawing of a cake with a single candle in it, encased in a golden hexagon.
only a few select people will know why the icon to represent score-based achievements in this game is a cake
☄Comet was tied for the winner of Most Anticipated #playdate game in the 2025 Community awards this year.
Thank you all who voted for us, it really is an honor.
@drew-lo.bsky.social, @flipdock.bsky.social @xmenekai.bsky.social & @mouflon.cloud and I are working hard to get this game to you.
RowBot Rally — 2025 Playdate Community Awards WINNER! for Outstanding Visual Achievement (SDK), and The CRANKY Award.
rowbot rally, WINNER!! of the 2025 #playdate community awards for "outstanding visual achievement (SDK)", and "the CRANKY award" (best use of the crank).
i've only got 300 characters, but—!! thank you SO much for playing my silly boat game. it's rlly rlly cool to see that it's resonated this much!!
Share the love of gaming and enjoy some Pass 'N' Play Playdate games with your loved ones!
💛 play.date/games/pass-...
I'm going to go touch grass, and I think you should too.
You are wrong. You cannot make a game that 100% of people enjoy. You are correct that every player has a reason to play the game, and that thinking about these reasons is valuable, but you can never please everyone all the time. Often in the attempt you will end up pleasing no one.
And the fact that including the joyless games journalist who hates playing games doesn't give us a useful or satisfying answer is why demanding that a valid answer to the question must encompass even the games journalist is not useful.
This is the argument I have been making this entire time. The instant you start asking about "a kind of player and why they play the games they do," your answer no longer has to encompass 100% of people. You are agreeing with my point while disagreeing with me.
...Was because the game came from an big developer, or because a lot of people enjoyed the game. How do developers become influential? By making games that people want to play. We have circled back to "why do people enjoy games," and the pit-stop with journalism has added nothing to our answer.
"I don't give answers or instructions" says the person giving an answer
This is what I've been saying.
Yes, you are by definition giving advice. I am not arguing against the value of the question, I am arguing that your answer, and mostly the criteria you require for a "valid" answer, are not very useful even under your own standards. This argument is the middle point in the IQ bell curve meme.
In which an insightful answer is given, acknowledged, and refuted for not acknowledging 100% of the non-audience. You see why I have an issue with this premise?
Besides, the journalist's goal for their survival is to make money, and the task is to play the game. No contradiction, but not useful.
Of course not. It's a valuable question for any game developer, like you said—directly making the purpose of the question "how do I make better games" and not "what is art, but that's beside the point—your answer is just fundamentally flawed from the perspective of the group you're giving advice to.
Whatever your question is directed at, you directly state the answer is about making better games. What I'm criticizing is that your answer fails at that task, and your criteria for a valid answer that helps towards that task is flawed.
Quote:
"The more you ask this question, the better your answers will be.
The better you'll understand the players and their goals.
The better the quality of the game will be.
The better you'll become."
Followed by a graphic that clearly indicates the goal is to "make people play video games."
But that's not what you're asking. You're asking why people engage with a specific kind of art, and proposing that the most useless answer is more useful to the one criticizing/designing it than the questions people already ask, which are the same questions your answer needs to raise to be useful.
Heck, this particular answer I'm giving doesn't even have anything to do with "making games for yourself." I'm still talking about "making games for the target audience," which is a far more useful question.
Questions which are useless at the level you propose, precisely because your premise is fundamentally flawed, and which could be easily raised in a more useful context by asking for the general case. See my other comment chain.
The correct answer is "they enjoy this." Even the joyless journalist enjoys gaming to some extent because they'll get paid at the end. The correct question is "will people like me enjoy this game?" Or "would fans of this genre enjoy this game?" Then you can ask what makes that kind of game fun.
Why? Because each of them is interested in different things, and find different kinds of games fun. Stardew and Dark Souls are different examples of well-made, fun games designed for a specific target audience. If I wanted to make a Stardew-like, I would begin with "what do Harvest Moon fans like?"
Asking for an answer that covers 100% of people is a bad premise to start with, because people do things for different reasons. People enjoy games for different reasons. A Stardew Valley player and a Dark Souls player may never overlap, but in both cases "their reward centers prioritized the game"
Your answer sounds more "intellectual," but it is actually far less profound than simply saying "people do things they enjoy" and raises no questions that cannot naturally fall out of "why will people enjoy this?" It simplifies the entire conversation too much to actually be useful.
Well as a game designer I'm not designing my games for loveless journalists who don't pick their own games, am I? I'm designing games for the vast majority of people who choose to play games voluntarily and who don't receive press copies. This distinction is meaningless for the purpose you propose.
Very true! And to speak of inspiration in more concrete terms, a lot of it is everything you've been working on coming together at once. I think the most consistent way to invite inspiration is to be constantly engaged in creativity, to ask yourself a lot of questions, and to try and answer them.
Sitting down at my workspace, doing the remaining work I can do without further inspiration, asking myself questions and preparing to receive answers, that's my job as a creator. That's the 99% persperation. Inspiration's job is to notice me working and tell me what to do, but I need to be working.
I don't recall where I got it from anymore, but I picked up a quote years ago about how the job of an artist is to be there with the pen to the paper when inspiration decides to visit, and to hope that it will come back around again if you miss it. This is why pocket notebooks are so important.
So in other words, people play games because they think they're fun.
As someone historically afraid of learning how to use lisps I'm not sure I like how appealing this looks...
