Real difficulty doesn't kill the player — it makes them certain, the instant after they die, that the next attempt can win. Twelve design workshops dissect how a Souls-like builds that belief, through geography, combat and boss staging, each producing an artefact rather than an argument about one.
What you will do
Every week produces a workshop artefact, not an essay about one: a hand-drawn shortcut loop, three item descriptions written in an unreliable voice, a frame-by-frame attack-tells cheatsheet, a two-phase boss blueprint with its transition justified in one sentence. By Week 12 you assemble four semesters' worth of these into a single opening-level one-pager — the course's argument, applied to a level you designed.
Who it is for
Students who already play (or have watched enough footage to argue about) Souls-likes and similar punishing games, and want to learn to name what makes their difficulty feel earned rather than cheap — as a design skill, not a genre appreciation exercise. No engine or programming experience is assumed; every brief is answerable in prose, sketches, or short design documents.
The story the semester tells
- Week 1
Welcome to the masochism club
Why players choose punishment their wallet would refuse, and how to tell a punishing design from a cheating one before the semester needs the distinction
- Week 2
The corpse writes back
Why the Undead Curse makes respawn the plot instead of a mechanic to excuse, and what that licenses in item description
- Week 3
Shortcuts, not signposts
Interconnected shortcuts and soft visual guidance as the same argument — the geography teaches without a minimap or a quest arrow
- Week 4
The rhetoric of combat
Why the fight is a reading test, not a reflex test — telegraphs, stamina and animation commitment as one grammar
- Week 5
The boss as dramatic climax
Why a phase transition has to earn its narrative justification before its mechanical one, staged with Malenia's Waterfowl Dance as the test case
- Week 6
Midpoint review and Final Project launch
No new subsystem — a recap of the map, combat and narrative triangle so far, peer review of Boss Blueprints, and the Final Project brief released
- Week 7
Fifty points, no dead ones
Why an attribute allocation reads as a persona, not just a stat sheet, and what "no dead points" requires of the system underneath it
- Week 8
The economy — souls, runes, and the stake
Why the fusion of death, currency and risk into one system is the invention, and why the levelling cost curve is the most tuned number in the game
- Week 9
Say it in ten words
How messages, bloodstains and phantoms build empathy between strangers who never share a server tick
- Week 10
Delete the quest log
Why the genre deletes the quest log and the marker, and what that subtraction forces the player to remember instead
- Week 11
Write the bad ending first
Why ambiguous NPC dialogue functions as navigation, and why a tragic ending can outlast a happy one
- Week 12
Final showcase — the bonfire crit
Presenting and peer-reviewing the Final Project one-pager, and the semester's closing address