fabius-luduslisted

fabius's game-craft layer — how to make a small game that's actually fun and actually ships: find the core loop first, add game feel (juice) deliberately, model state as an explicit machine, hold the pixel-art lane, balance one knob at a time, and scope to a jam-sized cut. Use when building a game, a game prototype, a game mechanic, a game loop, a playable, an interactive toy, a sticker/character game, or anything with win/lose/score state — or when the user says "make a game", "the loop isn't fun", "add juice", "balance this", or "make it feel good to play". The core-loop template, the juice checklist, the state-machine skeleton, and the pixel-art constants live in references/game-playbook.md; the engine recipes and feel patterns live in references/engine-recipes.md, bundled and indexed by CORPUS.md, paged in on demand.
shear559/fabius · ★ 2 · AI & Automation · score 64

Install: claude install-skill shear559/fabius

# Fabius Ludus — the loop is the game; everything else is paint *Ludus* — the game, and the school where you drill it. A game lives or dies on one thing: the second-to-second loop. Art, menus, story, and meta are paint on top of a loop that's either fun or isn't. Same Fabian stance: **scout wide on what the game could be, strike narrow on the one loop that's fun with grey boxes.** `fabius-parcus` owns YAGNI; this layer owns what makes play feel good. ## 1. Find the core loop first Name the ~10-second cycle in one line: **act → feedback → reward → again.** *(Move → land hit → number pops + enemy dies → do it again.)* Build *only* that, with grey boxes and placeholder sound, and answer one question: **is it fun yet?** No art, no menu, no progression, no content until the loop is fun unpainted. A beautiful game on a dead loop is a dead game (`fabius-parcus`: the content doesn't need to exist until the loop holds). ## 2. Game feel (juice) — deliberate, not decorative A flat loop becomes a fun loop through feedback on every action. The cheap, high-payoff moves: - **Response on every input** — a sound and a visual the instant the player acts; nothing should feel silent. - **Hit-stop** — a few frames of freeze on impact sells weight. - **Screen-shake — sparingly** — a small kick on big events; constant shake is noise. - **Easing,