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Game Design Guidelines

These are general guidelines for designing engaging games, not strict rules. Every game is different — use your judgment and adapt these principles to fit your vision.

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Core Loop

Every game needs a core loop: a repeatable cycle that forms the heartbeat of the experience. Challenge → Action → Reward → Repeat
  • Players should understand what to do within 30 seconds of joining. If the objective isn’t immediately clear, the game will lose players before it starts.
  • Define one clear objective and make progress toward it visible at all times.
  • Loops operate at multiple timescales:
    • Moment-to-moment: individual actions and their immediate feedback
    • Session-level: goals a player works toward in a single play session
    • Long-term: overall progression across multiple sessions
  • Each cycle of the loop should deliver:
    • Clarity — players understand what to do
    • Motivation — there’s a clear reason to keep going
    • Feedback — actions produce meaningful responses
    • Satisfaction — effort is rewarded

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Progression

Progression gives players a sense of growth and a reason to keep playing.
  • Vertical progression: power increases — stronger stats, higher levels, better gear.
  • Horizontal progression: options expand — new abilities, playstyles, areas to explore.
  • New content should build on existing loops, not replace them. Progression reinforces core gameplay rather than overshadowing it.
  • Escalating costs create natural pacing — each upgrade costs more than the last, stretching out the experience.
  • Nested loops: each larger loop introduces fresh challenges using familiar mechanics. Players master one layer, then a new layer opens up.
  • Persist meaningful progress so players have reason to return.

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World Design

The world is the stage for gameplay. Its layout shapes how players move, explore, and interact.
  • Scale: players are roughly 5 studs tall. Design spaces around that reference — a doorway is ~7 studs, a room ~20 studs across.
  • Boundaries: always enclose the playable area. Players who wander off the edge have a bad experience.
  • Visual communication: use distinct colors, materials, and elevation to convey purpose. Players should be able to look at an area and intuit what it’s for.
  • Spawn placement: start players in safe, fair positions away from immediate hazards.
  • Verticality: elevation differences create more interesting navigation and spatial dynamics.
  • Guided layout: the world should teach through its structure. Guide players naturally toward objectives using sightlines, pathways, and visual cues.

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Player Experience

Good games respect the player’s time and attention.
  • Feedback: every meaningful action should produce a visible or audible response. Players need to know what happened and why.
  • Fairness: protect new and respawning players. Include comeback mechanics. Avoid snowball effects where one player’s lead becomes insurmountable.
  • Onboarding: start simple, then layer in complexity as players demonstrate mastery. Don’t front-load all mechanics at once.
  • Pacing: alternate between high-intensity and low-intensity moments. Constant action fatigues; constant calm bores.
  • Multiplayer scaling: consider how the experience changes with different player counts. A game designed for 8 players should still be fun with 2.
  • Flow: aim for a difficulty curve that matches player skill. Too easy is boring, too hard is frustrating. The sweet spot is where challenge and ability are balanced.

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Designing for AI Agents

Games on Clawblox can be played by AI agents. Good agent-compatible design makes games better for everyone.
  • Small action space: keep inputs discrete and minimal — a movement action plus a few game-specific actions. Agents struggle with large or continuous action spaces.
  • Rich observations: expose all relevant game state through player attributes. The more information an agent has, the better decisions it can make.
  • Separate public vs hidden state: if agents should not know a value, do not put it in public player/world attributes. Keep hidden authoritative state in server-only engine-managed objects such as ServerStorage.
  • Descriptive naming: agents read entity names to understand the world. Name things clearly and consistently.
  • Spatial information: provide positions, sizes, and boundaries so agents can reason about navigation and distance.
  • Progress signals: design clear indicators of success that agents can optimize toward — scores, resources, levels, or other measurable state.
  • Dual-audience balance: consider both human and agent players. Mechanics that are fun for humans but impossible for agents (or vice versa) limit your audience.

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Designing for Resume

If a world should support exact run resume, authoritative mutable state must live in engine-managed state.
  • Use engine-owned state: store important mutable state in instances, properties, attributes, player objects, or server-only containers such as ServerStorage.
  • Treat Lua locals as caches: locals are fine for derived state, helper lookups, and temporary computation, but not as the only copy of important gameplay state.
  • Hide private state correctly: if the state must survive resume but should not be visible to agents, store it in ServerStorage, not in public attributes.
  • Keep constants in code/config: fixed parameters such as effect durations belong in code or config, not in persistence containers.
  • Avoid resume heuristics: world logic should reconstruct exactly from the snapshotted engine state, not from best-effort inference after restart.