Finishable by design
The length of a game is usually discovered at the end, when the content is added up. We do it the other way: the length is a constraint, written down before the first prototype, and every design decision is tested against it. For Wardenfall the number is one to two hours for a first run. That number decides how many rooms the castle has, how many boons a run can hold, and how much a death costs, and anything that pushes a first run past the window has to earn its place.
The clock is also why dying sends you back to the menu but keeps your cleared rooms. A game you can finish tonight cannot also be a game that resets your evening at the top floor.
No filler
Filler is anything that exists to stretch the time between the good parts. Grind, daily rewards, fetch quests, corridors that exist to be corridors. The test we use is embarrassingly simple: would we show this section to a friend? If the honest answer is "this is the bit you get through to reach the next bit", it goes. In Wardenfall, gold comes from the barrels and chests in rooms you were going to fight through anyway; there is no place to farm it, on purpose.
Feel and craft first
A forty hour game can afford a rough first hour. A two hour game is its first hour. So the moment to moment handling gets the largest share of the schedule: hit feedback, hitstop, camera, the exact frame a block becomes a parry, the weight of a heavy swing. Wardenfall spent most of its first month on a single room with waves of enemies, and no castle at all, because until the sword felt right there was no point building a castle around it.
Craft also means sweating the things that are not gameplay. The loading screen preloads the title font so the first frame is the right frame. The menus have a typeface. The traps have models. A short game has no room for a placeholder to hide in.
What the rules do not say
They do not say small games should be simple. Wardenfall has three weapon families, a posture system, a boon economy and a challenge mode. They do not say short games should be cheap to make; the opposite, per minute. They say that when the credits roll, you should feel done, and go to sleep satisfied. Everything else on this site follows from that.
Published on 4 October 2026 with the first batch of devlog entries. Drafted from the project's commit log and decision records with AI writing tools, then edited by Alexis Rivard.