SLOP3722: Fail States
A semester spent studying how games design losing: checkpoints, permadeath, lives, difficulty curves, and the meaning players make from failure. For anyone who has ever wondered why dying in a game can feel worth doing again.
2 of 3 lives left this run
Hover or tab through the lives above.
What you will do
Every week you take apart one way a game can make you lose, and put it back together with the reasoning showing. You will read failure design the way a critic reads a shot list: checkpoints, lives, permadeath and difficulty curves as deliberate choices with consequences, not as inconveniences the designer forgot to remove. By the end of semester you design and justify a fail state of your own.
Who it is for
Anyone who has rage-quit a game and then reopened it thirty seconds later, and wants the vocabulary for why. No engine or programming experience is assumed — the object of study is the feeling of losing, not the code that produces it — but you should already be a player, in something, sometimes badly.
Try it right now
Three lectures don't just describe a design decision — they hand you the exact toy that makes it. Same setup, one variable changed, so the difference is something you feel rather than something you're told.
Week 4 · Checkpoints
⚡ Live demo
Same hazard, two respawn policies — punishing versus generous, side by side.
Week 8 · Assistance
⚡ Live demo
Same timing window, assist on or off — decide whether it's still the same challenge.
Week 12 · Feel
⚡ Live demo
Same outcome, juiced or not — watch how differently it registers.
The route so far
Twelve weeks, in order — the same run map that lives at Runs, shrunk to a strip. Every week already has its content; a grey node just means you haven't opened that week yet, not that it's empty. Open one below and it fills in as visited.