Lucas WintherandClaude Opus 5.5
0700cac492
Re-verify Teikari article quotes and GDC speaker, soften unsourced claims (lessons 01, 06, 07, 10), add course-simplification bullets to lesson 07's differs box, qualify OPEN obstruction wording in research, and add tools/check-links.mjs (report-only) with npm run check:links. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Systemic Design Course
A free, hands-on course on systemic game design. You learn by rebuilding the rules machinery of two games, then extending it:
- Part I: Hearthstone (cards, zones, triggers, death phases, auras, text assembly)
- Part II: Baba Is You (rules as pushable text, parsing, movement, win/lose)
- Part III: SpellGrid, a small original game that combines both systems
Every module follows the same beats: Observe, Predict, Spec, Build, Name it, Expansion Drop, Further reading. The Expansion Drop is the test of your design: you add new content without touching the engine.
Two paths
- Designer path: read the lessons and scenarios, predict outcomes, and reason about the design.
- Builder path: also make the tests pass in your own engine.
Mentor path
Prefer a Socratic partner? Install the mentor skill and let your AI agent guide you without writing your code.
Two tracks
Builder path exercises exist in Rust and TypeScript. Both tracks have identical test names, matching the scenarios in each module's scenarios.md.
Quick start
node --version # Node 24 for the course tooling
npm run test:tools # tooling tests
npm run check # test names agree across Rust, TS and scenarios
node tools/start-module.mjs 01 path/to/your/workspace
start-module copies a module's tests for your track (from your workspace's .course.json) and refuses to start a module if you have not yet taken the previous one. Module 00 uses the naive-engine/ project and is not started this way.
Other tools: tools/coupling-audit.mjs <workspace> (engine code must not name specific cards or nouns), tools/expansion-check.mjs <workspace> <baseRef> (an Expansion Drop must change content only), tools/verify-references.mjs [NN] (reference solutions pass the tests).
Licence
MIT, for both prose and code. See LICENSE. The course is and stays free.
Disclaimer
Not affiliated with Blizzard or Hempuli. See the disclaimer.