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Featured Articles
The Simulation Meaning: Why Mechanics Need a Purpose
You can usually tell when a game knows what it wants to be. Not because of its story. Not because of its graphics. Because every system seems to be pulling in the same direction. The opposite is also true. Some games have perfectly functional combat, progression, crafting, and exploration systems, yet the experience feels strangely hollow. Nothing appears broken, but nothing feels meaningful either. The player is busy, but they are not immersed. This is …
Game Juice Is Selling the Player’s Actions
A lot of games misunderstand why certain mechanics feel satisfying. They focus entirely on function. Damage numbers go up. Enemies lose health. Objects move. Systems technically work. But the player still feels disconnected from the action because the game never properly sells what just happened. Game juice is the process of making the player’s actions feel meaningful. It’s not enough for an attack to mathematically succeed. The game needs to communicate force, weight, struggle, and …
Write Your First Narrative
Join us for Season 1 of The Design Lab Podcast, where we unlock the secrets of great storytelling. From blank page to final draft, learn the core techniques that turn ideas into award-winning stories that you can use in your games.
Latest Articles
The Design Filter: How To Tell Whether More Content Actually Makes A Better Game
BioWare’s closure raised a difficult industry question for me last week: what happens when we become better at counting production output than recognising design judgment? This is the question at a smaller, practical scale. When a proposed feature arrives, how do we tell whether it belongs in the game? I use a design filter. It asks what fantasy the feature supports, what decision it creates, how the game responds and whether the existing rules can …
Prototype With AI, Build With People: How To Test Game Ideas Without Letting Placeholders Become The Game
Every designer has had an idea that sounded excellent in a meeting. The mechanic is clever. The fantasy is clear. Somebody has already started describing the trailer. Then a player gets hold of the prototype, walks past the important object, misunderstands the rule and spends four minutes trying to climb a wall that was never meant to be climbable. That’s useful information. It’s also much better to discover it in a rough prototype than six …
Why Persistent State Makes Player Actions Matter In Systemic Games
A lot of game worlds have the memory of somebody walking into a room and immediately forgetting why they’re there. The player breaks into a secure facility, empties every cupboard, knocks out twelve guards, destroys the security system and leaves through a window. Five minutes later, the guards have returned to their original positions, the building is operating normally and somebody has apparently restocked every cupboard during an active emergency. Games can’t remember everything the …
Coherence Is Expensive: Why Consistent Game Rules Require Disciplined Systemic Scope
Systemic games are often described as though the solution is simply to connect everything to everything else. Fire affects grass. Water conducts electricity. Sound attracts enemies. Objects have weight. Characters remember what happened. Weather changes visibility. Food spoils. Doors react to pressure. Somebody suggests adding wind, and suddenly the engineering team is explaining why every loose object in the game now needs an opinion about aerodynamics. These relationships can create remarkable depth. When rules remain …
The Fear Of Letting Go: Why Game Designers Need To Author Rules, Not Outcomes
Games are expensive, complicated and held together by an alarming combination of specialised technology, production planning and at least one tool that everybody is frightened to update. When a team spends months creating an encounter, cinematic, environment or narrative sequence, it naturally wants the player to experience that work correctly. The problem begins when protecting every authored moment prevents the player from meaningfully participating in the game. The player can move, aim, select dialogue and …
Identity Needs A Verb: Why Playable Characters Are Defined By Action, Not Backstory
Games spend a lot of time telling us who a character is. We get biographies, costumes, voice lines, tragic backstories, cinematic introductions, and enough lore to explain why somebody has been angrily wearing the same shoulder pad for three hundred years. That information can describe a character, but it can’t make the player feel like them. Playable identity comes from action. If the game says I’m a detective, I need to investigate. If it says …
About Us
The Design Lab was founded by Myles Blasonato, a game designer, design director, lecturer, and researcher with experience across traditional games, blockchain projects, education, and interactive storytelling. Myles has worked with teams connected to projects such as God of War, Heavy Rain, and Destroy All Humans, and has spent years teaching, writing, and consulting on how games create meaningful player experiences.
What began as a personal portfolio and design blog has grown into a wider platform for exploring, testing, and applying new ideas in game design. Today, The Design Lab brings together a development team with more than 20 years of combined experience across a wide range of titles.
Our aim is to use that experience to help studios, developers, and creators build stronger immersive games – games with clearer systems, richer worlds, and experiences players want to share.
Latest News
BioWare’s Closure Shows What Happens When The Games Industry Values Output More Than Game Design
BioWare is closing. The next Mass Effect project, which was in early development, is ending with it. For the people losing their jobs, that is the immediate story, and it deserves more attention than another argument about what a studio’s catalogue means to the rest of us. But once we have acknowledged the people affected, there is a question the industry needs to sit with: how does a company that helped define the role-playing game …
Epic’s Reported AI-First Disney Game Shows Why Faster Production Still Needs Creative Ownership
A game can be built faster and still take longer to make good. Anyone who has watched a “quick” feature turn into three weeks of debugging, reworking, and asking “wait, why does it do that?” already knows the difference. That distinction matters in the news surrounding Epic Games’ upcoming Disney project. According to Game Developer’s report on Bloomberg’s reporting, the unannounced game has moved away from a planned March release target while its development shifts …
Paramount And Warner Bros. Merging Game Divisions Shows A Bigger IP Vault Isn’t A Creative Strategy
The game industry has apparently looked at its ongoing consolidation problem and decided the obvious solution is a larger building with more franchises inside it. Following Skydance’s completion of its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Games Studio and Warner Bros. Games are being brought together under one combined games operation. According to Video Games Chronicle, the new portfolio includes studios such as Avalanche Software, NetherRealm Studios, Rocksteady Studios, TT Games and Warner Bros. Games …
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