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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 …
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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.

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Latest Articles

The Avatar Isn’t The Character. Identity Comes From Action
Games spend enormous amounts of time establishing who the player character is. There are biographies, costumes, cinematic introductions, tragic childhoods, complicated family trees, heroic musical themes, and enough lore to explain why somebody has worn one particular shoulder pad for the last three hundred years. All of that can help define a character, but it can't make the player feel like that character. A detective doesn't become believable because they wear a trench coat. A …
Good Friction Makes The Fantasy Stronger
A lot of games are designed around removing friction. Movement becomes faster. Failure becomes softer. Resources become plentiful. Objectives become impossible to miss. Characters automatically grab ledges, recover health, identify important objects, and politely solve half the problem before the player has finished working out what the problem was. These decisions can improve accessibility, pacing, and usability. That doesn’t make them bad. The problem begins when removing friction also removes the behaviour that makes the …
Games Shouldn’t Aim For Realism. They Should Aim For Believability
A lot of games are trying very hard to look real. Skin stretches over simulated muscles. Rain collects on individually modelled surfaces. Characters have pores, eyelashes, fabric fibres, dental records, and enough facial detail to make you wonder whether the art team has accidentally created a second human being. None of that automatically makes the experience believable. A game can reproduce reality with extraordinary accuracy and still feel artificial the moment a character slides across …
If Players Can’t Read The State, They Can’t Play The System
A game can track hundreds of meaningful states, but if players can’t see what changed or why, systemic depth feels random. Here’s how to make simulation readable without turning the screen into a spreadsheet…
When Everything Affects Everything: The Overconnection Problem
A strong systemic game isn’t one where everything connects to everything else. It’s one where the right systems connect in ways players can understand, predict, and use. When too many consequences propagate at once, depth becomes noise…
Rule Standards Teach Players What The World Believes
Players do not learn a game world by memorising every object, enemy, room, and interaction one at a time. They learn by forming expectations. Fire usually burns. Sound usually attracts attention. Heavy things usually fall. Locked doors usually need a key, code, tool, route, or alternative solution. Once the player sees these relationships working often enough, they begin to treat them as part of the world’s normal logic…
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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.

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Latest News

Nova Games Foundation Shows Game Graduates Need A Bridge, Not Just A Degree
Mark Cerny and Geoff Keighley have launched a university-affiliated fellowship program intended to support emerging game designers. Nova plans to select 20 fellows each year and provide each of them with $100,000 to develop an original game. Around a quarter may qualify for up to an additional $500,000 if their projects show particular promise. The money matters, but the structure surrounding it may be even more important…
Nexus Mods Acquiring SteamDB Shows Community Tools Have Become Critical Infrastructure
Some of the most important infrastructure in PC gaming wasn’t created by platform holders, publishers, or enormous technology companies. It was created by people who noticed that something useful was missing and decided to build it themselves. SteamDB began as an independent way to understand what was happening across Steam. Nexus Mods grew from a community modding site into a platform supporting an enormous ecosystem of players, creators, tools, and games. Neither started as a …
GTA 6 Propping Up Console Growth Shows The Industry Has A Concentration Problem
Grand Theft Auto 6 has become more than the biggest game release of 2026. It has become one of the assumptions holding up the console market’s growth forecast. As GamesIndustry.biz reports, Newzoo’s director of market intelligence, Emmanuel Rosier, believes console revenue would be flat or declining this year without Rockstar’s latest release. Newzoo currently forecasts console revenue reaching $46.9 billion in 2026, representing growth of 5.1% year-on-year. Switch 2 is contributing to that performance, but …
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