How a battery-hungry pocket Sega console taught a generation of makers to think small, color boldly, and design games that fit in a single glance. An essay on the Game Gear’s aesthetic and mechanical fingerprints in today’s indie scene, with developer vignettes and practical design advice.
How do you make a brand-new game for a 40-year-old platform without resorting to nostalgia karaoke? This guide walks developers through blending MSX-era constraints with modern mechanics and storytelling-practical workflows, technical budgets, UX trade-offs, and concrete design recipes that actually ship.
Learn practical, safe, and creative ways to give your Game Boy Color games a modern sheen - HD-friendly scaling, richer audio, and custom controls - while keeping the soul of the original cartridge intact.
The SNES era trained designers to do more with less. From tonal EarthBound echoes in Undertale to Chrono Trigger–style JRPGs like Sea of Stars, modern indies pick up the SNES playbook-its palettes, pacing, and mechanics-and remix them into new experiences. This article traces how those classics survive, evolve, and teach today's creators.
The Neo Geo Pocket was a brief, brilliant whisper in the handheld era. Its art and mechanics - bold sprites, limited palettes, crisp animations, and compact systems - are quietly reshaping how indie developers design games today. Conversations with three indie creators reveal how constraint breeds creativity and why a forgotten console keeps returning in modern game design.
A deep dive into how SNES-era mechanics, narratives, and aesthetics seeded design habits that define modern games - with anonymized developer interviews, concrete case studies, and practical takeaways for designers.
From System Shock's claustrophobic emergent systems to Elite's infinite horizons, cult classic sci‑fi games left design fingerprints that are obvious-and subtle-across today's titles. This article unpacks those threads with developer interviews, case studies, and practical takeaways for designers and players.
How a modest 1987 home computer - its custom chipset, Deluxe Paint, and a scrappy demoscene - remade what it means to make images with a machine, and why artists still court its limitations today.