One thing surprised me more than anything else while working on this project.
I always assumed that game development followed a fairly straightforward process. You either start with a story and build mechanics around it, or you build interesting mechanics first and then find a story that explains them.
Apparently, my brain had other plans.
The project didn’t begin with characters or a world. It began with systems. Lots of them. I kept writing down mechanics I genuinely enjoyed in other games and trying to understand why they worked. Some of those ideas stayed. Others were thrown away almost immediately. At the time, none of them had anything to do with each other.
The interesting part came later.
Once enough systems existed, they started asking uncomfortable questions:
Why does this mechanic exist?
Why would a player be doing this?
Why would the world allow it?
At first, I tried answering those questions with more mechanics. That only made things worse. Every new feature solved one problem while creating two more. Eventually I realized that what was missing wasn’t another system—it was context.
That’s when something unexpected happened.
Instead of inventing more gameplay, I started inventing reasons. Not because I wanted to write a story, but because every mechanic needed to belong somewhere. One explanation would suddenly make three different systems feel natural. Then another system would stop making sense, forcing me to rethink the original explanation.
It became a strange feedback loop.
A gameplay mechanic would inspire a piece of world-building.
That world-building would expose weaknesses in another mechanic.
Fixing that mechanic would improve the story.
The improved story would suddenly make another feature feel obvious.
I repeated this process so many times that I honestly stopped knowing which ideas came first. Some mechanics survived because the story needed them. Some story ideas survived because they solved gameplay problems I hadn’t even noticed before.
The biggest lesson I learned is that isolated ideas are rarely interesting. Connections are.
A single mechanic isn’t particularly exciting. A mechanic that explains another mechanic is. A story twist isn’t memorable because it’s surprising; it’s memorable because it suddenly makes previous events feel inevitable.
I’ve found myself deleting ideas much more often than adding them. Not because they were bad, but because they didn’t connect to enough other parts of the project. Every system now has to justify its existence by making several other systems stronger. If it doesn’t, it probably doesn’t belong.
It’s a surprisingly satisfying way to design something. Instead of asking, „What else can I add?” I now ask, „What does this improve?” Sometimes the answer is nothing, and the idea gets discarded. Other times, one small change unexpectedly strengthens half the project.
I’m sure this won’t be the last time I redesign everything from scratch. In fact, I’m almost counting on it.
For now, though, I’ve stopped thinking of game design as collecting features.
It’s more like solving a puzzle where every new piece changes the shape of the entire picture.
However for now, i’m done. Everything explains everything, nothing is missing. No idea, storyline or system is left stupidly hanging in the air.