At GDC 2026, Room 2005, West Hall. Talk starts at 11:50.
CorgiSpace: What I Learned from Making 15 Games This Year
Presented by Adam Saltsman

Notes:

• The art of making games with short legs on purpose
• Conventional wisdom is surprisingly unhelpful. "fail fast", "kill your darlings", "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater", etc
• Tools can be frustrating
• Rules:
  • Time is very limited
  • There has to be no stress
• We need to find out how to have fun while working
• Corgispace manifesto (writing a manifesto is a normal and healthy to do)
• easy and not obvious
  • Against the dogma, and the solutions of the wealthy. Don't throw people and money at the solution
  • easy, Go with the grain, work with the existing structure of tools.
  • Tools all have defaults that are easy to set up and use
  • Notice what is easy and reliable to do with a tool
  • Your brain has a grain too. Your taste will reach beyond your brain. Notice what comes naturally to you
  • Games also have grains, default behaviors, things thay are easy for it to do. This is not always what your gdd says the game should do. what does the game notice about itself?
  • Easy things tend to not be obvious.
  • Experiment with changes that are easy to implement
• Ideas and formulas
  • Separate your ideas from your formulas
  • your implementation (formula) tries to capture the idea
  • ideas are usually good and formulas are usually bad
  • Be open to changing the formula to better capture the idea
  • Modifying the formula can make the idea mature and gain some nuance
  • There are many formulas for a single idea.
  • Formulas tend to be complex
  • Formulas are plans
  • Formulas are plagued by dogma and bugs, in danger of being hard to change, often masquerade as ideas even though they are not.
  • ideas are hard to describe, often have formula baggage, ideas are noticed more than invented
  • Every game starts with a jumble of ideas and formula
  • Formulas are like chisels to learn more about your idea
• Game design is about noticing things
  • "The Reveal"
  • reveals are better than twists
  • A reveal is a way to create a condition under which things can be noticed.
  • artists can react to the art they are painting, musicians can react to the music they are writing, game designers play the game they are making, etc. There's an art loop.
  • Accumulation of noticings are how you can build a game
  • FAFO?

Questions:

• Blank editor has become more intimidating, hiw do i get over that?
  • I often go to the art tab first instead of the code page first in PICO 8
  • Draw what the game might look like
• When I make jam games, my friends like it, but how do i get the game to be more? Can i make it more financially viable?
  • No easy answers
  • we are in an era where players are amenable to games that have an unconventional amount of polish and duration, in return for a fresh idea. Like friendslop.
  • Mostly see this as a way to become a better game designer.
  • Try to be thoughtful about the level of fidelity in your work, there's what dogma says you should have and what the player actually cares about
  • it's a hard problem, might be at odds with making a stable income.