The Design House
How I take a game from idea to greenlight
A design house is the set of rules a game can’t break: the pillars, the player fantasy and the tests every feature must pass.
I build it first because it’s what lets a team move fast without drifting. Then I spend the rest of the project proving it right or rebuilding it.
| Five steps
1. Pillars before production
Three or four non-negotiable pillars, each written so it can say no to a feature. “If a feature doesn’t make the player feel like a legendary stunt driver, it’s out of scope.” (Stunt Driver). “If information could be a UI element, it’s an object first.” (Airbourne).
DESIGN HOUSE
2. Find the fun in days
A greybox core loop, playable fast, with every tuning value in a data asset and a register, never buried in a graph. Change one thing, play it, log the decision. The 42K had a playable race in 3 days; Haunting reached 66 logged decisions and 460 registered values in 15.
RAPID PROTOTYPING
3. Let players write the brief
Playtests decide what gets built next. Airbourne’s first test failed on how to jump, not on combat, so the next pass taught in-world. Haunting’s testers said “the scare is what sells,” so the next pass made every scare say what it did.
PLAYTESTS
4. Prove it with data
Live: A/B tests and retention curves (D1 13% → 20%, D3 19% → 31%). In prototype: balance simulations (~90,000 Haunting matches), AI-vs-AI difficulty sweeps (The 42K) and frame budgets treated as gates (Airbourne on Quest 2).
EVIDENCE
5. Pitch it so the room can say yes
The pitch is a design problem too. I’ve pitched licensed-IP concepts at Amazon Games and original games and an enterprise product at Noctua. What I build for a pitch: a payoff the room sees in ten seconds, a demo a fumbled input can’t derail, and one clear line on why it’s worth the money.
PITCHING
| Dev logs
Dynamic Stunt Camera
Seven camera effects driven by physics, not input: speed FOV, G-force pull-in, drift roll from lateral velocity, look-ahead, landing dip, launch punch, speed shake.
STUNT DRIVER · 5/23/26
Drift Works
Why I stopped fighting Chaos tire physics and went hybrid: a gated drift state with grip and torque modulated in Blueprint. “Pride was costing me weeks.”
STUNT DRIVER
Coming next
The 90,000-match balance pass (Haunting) and Guardrails for an LLM race announcer (The 42K).
IN PROGRESS