Pixel art on a budget
Sixteen colours, one grid, and everything you can do with less.
I keep a small notebook of what a game asks of me in the first ten minutes. It predicts, almost perfectly, whether I will still be playing in ten days.
Difficulty is not a number. It is how a game responds when you fail, and whether that response feels like a conversation.
Pay attention, then count.
What I would tell my past self
The best loops are tiny: try, fail, notice one thing, try again. Everything else is decoration.
I would rather finish a small game than admire a large one.
Related notes: Forty hours in one roguelike, A year of one lens.