Game Design Patterns

Find the fun and keep players playing.

Principles for designing games that are fun to play and worth returning to. For designers, producers and anyone on a game team, the cards move from finding a vision and a compelling core loop to building depth from simple systems, creating levels and content, polishing game feel and onboarding, and proving and balancing the design through testing. Examples lean mobile, but apply to any game.

55 cards · 6 suits · 5 recipes · 2 missions

What's inside

Vision8Is it clear which game is worth making?
Core Loop9Is the moment-to-moment play already fun?
Systems9Do your rules create choices that keep paying off?
Content8Have you planned enough levels and surprises?
Feel and Onboarding12Does the first minute feel good to play?
Test and Balance9Have real players proved it works?

A few cards

Vision

Player Fantasy

Name the role or feeling the player wants to live, in one sentence, before you design anything else.

Core Loop

Verbs First

List what the player actually does, then keep only the few verbs that matter.

Content

Teach, Test, Twist

Introduce a mechanic safely, test it, then combine it with something new.

One card in full

Feel and Onboarding

Game Feel

If the core action isn't satisfying with your eyes half closed, no content will save it.

Players decide whether a game feels good within seconds, long before they understand its rules. That judgement comes from tiny things: how fast a tap registers, how an object accelerates, how it settles. Steve Swink's idea of game feel treats this as real-time control plus polish, and it is something you tune, not something you hope for.

How to use it

Isolate the single action players repeat most (tap, swipe, jump, drop) in an empty scene with no rewards.
Write down three numbers for it: input-to-response delay, duration of the motion, and the easing curve.
Make five variants that change one number each. Play each for two minutes and rank them blind.
Add forgiveness where it costs nothing: input buffering, a few frames of grace, generous hit areas.
Lock the winning values in a shared file so nobody nudges them by accident.

Example

Celeste lets you jump a moment after leaving a ledge and remembers a jump pressed slightly early, so the controls feel precise even when your timing isn't. Tetris pieces lock with a short delay that gives you one last nudge.

Watch out

Tuning feel on a fast development machine. Test on the slowest phone you support.
Hiding a sluggish action under effects. Fix the timing first, then add Juice.

Pair it with Find The Fun and Thumb Zone.

Recipes

Balance Pass: Tune the numbers so no option dominates, luck rewards skill and the hard parts are hard on purpose.
Find The Fun: Go from a game idea to a prototype of one core action that people play with nothing to earn.
First Five Minutes: Get a new player from launch to the fun and a first win, with nothing that needs explaining.
Fix A Boring Game: Find why a working game feels flat and test a fix for it.
Make It Deep: Give a fun core loop the economy, growth and long-term layer that keep players for months.

Missions

Design a game concept: from a vague idea to a one-page GDD with pillars, a core loop, kill criteria and a paper prototype plan.
Run a playtest: from "we need feedback" to a script, a silent session, and a ranked list of problems with the card that fixes each one.

Related decks

Monetisation Patterns

Earn fairly from players who love your game.

48 cards

LiveOps Patterns

Plan events that keep a live game fresh.

48 cards

Player Research Patterns

Learn what your players really want.

48 cards

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