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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 11h

You ever come across your game on the cover of a library book?

Me holding a copy of Writing Game Histories by Esther Wright with Syphilisation on the cover

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Snow Flow by John Topielski and After Wes at GAAF, Tampere

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Indonesian statue of unclear origin. It’s speculated to be a depiction of a European.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This is an excellent point on secret design from Run and Jump

Achieving that uncanny effect is not about the rewards the player discovers but the process of hiding.
The placement of secrets needs to establish new rules, and the level designer must follow them consistently.
Moreover, those rules must differ from the stated goals of play while remaining within the scope of a player's imagination.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Congrats on your launch and thanks for hosting #TurnBasedThursday Hoop Dungeon is a basketball turn-basket-tactics roguelike game!

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

New Hoop Dungeon update is live - store.steampowered.com/app/4250030/...

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I'm always reminded of Orwell on Kipling

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Thanks for hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday. I just put alleys into Hoop Dungeon!

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I just put alleys into Hoop Dungeon!

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Thanks for hosting this #TurnBasedThursday! Hoop Dungeon is a basketball turn-based-tactics game. Here's a gif of people getting their ankles broken in it.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Here's another Syphilisation screenshot that both knocks Kipling and map-painting mechanics.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

This legitimately sounds like a great game.

The production of psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as
more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying
certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination
to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repug-
nant as sports or buying on credit).
A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany
while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only
a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that
will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of
partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration
from the locations where we are used to seeing them.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

I'm clearing out some old Syphilisation screenshots and here's a good one of how British racism hurt the Allied war effort in WW2.

Syphilisation screenshot titled Linlithgow's Racist Opposal to Indian Defense Ministers reading "morale in sense of willingness to suffer for a national cause is a non-existent quality in India and could not be evoked by any political concessions. Among Indians and especially Hindus who preponderate in threatened areas the ruling instinct is self-preservation and the preservation of family and property."

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I really don’t think this is true. There are counter examples everywhere but most saliently, game design has very little theory and much less creativity than I would like and I think the two are linked. Theory lets you communicate and lets you think and lets you build the house for your experiments.

Peter Saville has a wonderful theory that musicians stop writing great music when they learn about the formal process of making music.
Why? Because then they won't take any chances. When you're young, you go, G, B. On yeah, man, that fucking takes your head off that!
Weird but sounds great!'
Then, when you get older and you know a lot more about how music is supposed to sound, you go, 'Oh, that G, B, that jars a little doesn't it? Oh no, try E flat. That's better, and the edge is gone. I agree with him. The more proficient you become at writing music the less chances you take because you become aware of all the rules and theories that may well be the proper way to do things but end up constricting you, throttling all the creativity out of what you've got. No more risk-taking.

From Unknown Pleasures by Peter Hook

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Thanks for hosting #TurnBasedThursday! Hoop Dungeon is a basketball turn-based-tactics game.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

I'm really liking how these frozen narrative moments work. They started more introspective and reworking them into more conversation and more trash talk in particular has really made them pop.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Thanks for hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday! I'm working on the story for four more ballers in Hoop Dungeon, my basketball turn-based-tactics game.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Thanks for hosting #TurnBasedThursday this week! Hoop Dungeon now has even more trash talk than before!

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

It's time for #PitchYaGame. Hoop Dungeon is a basketball turn-based-tactics roguelike game. store.steampowered.com/app/4250030/...

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Congratulations on the recent launch and happy #TurnBasedThursday. I'm still working on the storytelling of Hoop Dungeon.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

This from the Krafton director doesn't hold up. I agree that roguelikes can be anything, but you can't then say that roguelike deckbuilders are a narrow genre. Both of these statements cannot simultaneously be true and it's trivial to see which of them is wrong.

"I feel like the trend cycle in gaming is just getting shorter and shorter," Lee began, when asked how pitching developers should choose between pursuing a popular fad, or striking out afresh. "I remember when survival crafting was a big thing, and then it was, you know, deckbuilding roguelikes, right? I've had maybe 250 roguelike deckbuilders in the last 12 months. I don't know how to choose. Would you? Like, they're all Balatros with different cards. I don't know how to choose one.

"And that's a roguelike deckbuilder problem," he went on. "I'm sorry if anybody here is making a roguelike deckbuilder. But that genre is is too narrow for you to differentiate far enough from anything else, right? Genre is a misnomer. Roguelike isn't a genre. Roguelike can be anything. It can be an FPS or a deckbuilder, anything. If you tell me, you have a roguelike game, I have no idea what you're making."

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Thanks for hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday! I've been working on storytelling in Hoop Dungeon.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Working on storytelling in Hoop Dungeon

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Excellent recontextualization of advertising photos by Richard Prince

Three photos, one of two men in suits, the second with two women in suits and the third a wedding photo of a man and a woman

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

This would go hard in a taekwondo gym.

Colorful painting of two people in white robes meeting with a kick.

Twin Sunset - Andras Koncz

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose from Crawford's Art of Computer Game Design (1984)

CHOOSE A GOAL AND A TOPIC

This vitally important step seems obvious, yet is ignored time and time again by game designers who set out with no clear intent. In my conversations with designers, I have often noticed indifference to the need for clear goals. Game designers sometimes admit trying to produce a "fun" game or an "exciting" game, but that is usually the extent of their thinking about goals.

A game must have a clearly defined goal, and it must be expressed in terms of the effect it will have on the player. It is not enough to declare that a game will be enjoyable, fun, exciting, or good; the goal must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will engender in its audience. Since many games are in some way educational, the goal in these cases should establish what the player will learn. It is entirely appropriate for the game designer to ask how the game will enlighten its audience.

The importance of a goal does not become obvious until later in the design cycle. The crucial problems in game development with microcomputers are always problems of trade-offs. Everything that the game designer wants to do costs memory, and microcomputer memory is always in short supply. Thus, the designer must make trade-offs. Some game features can be included; some must be rejected. At two o'clock in the morning, when you face the awful decision of rejecting one of two highly desirable features, the only criterion for making this painful choice is the goal you have established for the game. If your goals are clear, your decision will be painful but obvious. If they are murky, you may well make the wrong choice, and whatever you choose, you will never know if your decision was correct.

How does one select a proper goal? There is no objective answer to this question. The selection of a goal is undeniably the most subjective process in the art of computer game design. This is your opportunity to express yourself; choose a goal in which you…

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

The playoffs are now live in Hoop Dungeon store.steampowered.com/app/4250030/...

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Thanks for hosting this week! I'm doing some final Hoop Dungeon playtesting now in anticipation of a big feature release tomorrow, including this new baller who is definitely not a reference to any famous basketball player and just so happens to be the only baller who cannot pass.

Menu screen for Hoop Dungeon showing a baller named Korey.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Crawford here talks about dirt, which partly anticipates #killGameplay but I think more anticipates the elegance in game design debates. I don't buy code as game reification now but here you can see how, for Crawford, hardware constraints made every byte important and how that impacted design

Thus a game that stores huge quantities of static data is not making best use of the strengths of the computer. A game that emphasizes processing and treats information dynamically is more in tune with the machine. Relegate all static information to a rules book; paper and ink are still a better technology than personal computers for storing static information. Information that lies around and that must be dusted off before using has no place inside the microcomputer. As you look over your program listing, inspect each byte and ask yourself, "Am I getting my money's worth from this byte? Is it working hard for me, doing useful things frequently? Or is this a lazy byte that sits idle for hours and is used only rarely?" Fill your program with active bytes that do things, not with lazy bytes.

Lazy bytes are often associated with dirty rules. (They like to hang out together in sleazy pool halls.) Dirty rules are special cases that occur rarely. The bytes associated with them are seldom used, lazy bytes.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

But why does Chris Crawford take a paragraph to describe famous party game Twister like some kind of alien anthropologist?

An obvious example of such a social lubricant game utilizes a large plastic gameboard about four feet square marked with colored spots. During each player's turn, a random process determines which of four appendages (arms or legs) is to be placed on which spot on the board.
As the players contort to fulfill the requirements, they inevitably make physical contact with each other in innocent and foolishly humorous ways. This game, a true icebreaker, promotes social lubrication. - Chris Crawford, the Art of Computer Game Design

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Thanks for hosting! Hoop Dungeon just got set plays! You can now change your opening configuration to best use your unlocks and best defeat the defense.

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Nikhil Murthy @murthynikhil.bsky.social · 26/03/2026