hook started as a little story: a cabin in the mountains, a dog, a bark in the night, an empty bed in the morning. And underneath it, instead of mechanics, a wish list of moments. Moments that let you pause. Moments that make you hurry. Moments that make you think. Moments that make you dream. And music that makes you feel the whole journey: the exploring, the scenery you don’t want to leave yet, the danger, the mystical, the hollow, the rush, the escape, the belonging, and finally the coming home.

That isn’t a list of levels. It’s a list of feelings, in order, and each one leads into the next. Exploring makes you curious, curiosity pulls you into danger, danger into the strange and the hollow, and the hollow makes you want to run. And all of it only makes sense because of where it ends: coming home.

That’s what this article is about. A good game is a chain of feelings, and everything else - rules, levels, numbers - is only there to hand you from one link to the next.

The Games on the Page

Over the past few weeks, games.0x17.de has slowly filled up. hook is a pixel platformer about a rope, a hook and a dog who ran into the mountain one night. click of life looks like a silly clicker that starts with a pencil drawing of a pram, but it’s really a game about progress addiction, with jokes about growing old and about purpose, and a story you can feel. Afterlight is a co-op shooter about little porcelain creatures and a dying sun. And One Button Spaceship, Monster Factory and Definitely Safe Laboratory are party games for a big screen and everyone’s phone.

They look nothing alike. But every one of them started as a love letter of feelings, long before there was a single rule, and every one of them got better the moment I played it and noticed I was feeling the wrong thing.

Falling in Love

The very first version of hook you could actually play was an empty cave room with a little figure and a rope. Flat walls, no decoration, nothing to look at - just you, the rope and a lot of empty space. And the funny thing is, the swing already felt good. Firing the hook, the little auto-aim, the marker showing where it would land - all of that was fun from day one. But the level around it was boring and somehow impossible at the same time, and the character was a few pixels with no soul.

What it needed was a character with enough shape that you could fall in love with it. And props. Lots of props. Things that break when your hook slams into them. Pure visual nonsense: a poster, a rubber duck, crates and barrels, a mine shaft, a shovel stuck in a pile of dirt, bottles on a table, a lonely stool.

What came out of that was a tiny chibi character with a red bobble hat, rosy cheeks and big eyes, in a cave full of warm lanterns and junk that splinters and squeaks. I loved it. Then came the dog, and I loved him even more.

And then the game lets you design both of them yourself and give them names. That turned out to be the most important feeling of all, because from that moment on it isn’t a dog that’s missing. It’s yours. Everything that comes later - the worry, the searching, the relief - only works because you fell in love first.

Curiosity: What Happens If I Click?

click of life opens on almost nothing. White paper, a pencil drawing of a pram, a baby inside. No buttons, no menu, no explanation. If you wait, a little pencil hint appears: click. So you click, because what else are you going to do? Something happens. And now you want to know what happens next.

The screen fills up very slowly, one new thing at a time, and each one feels like it was waiting for you. The trick is to give you less than you expect, so you reach for the rest yourself.

And just when you think you know what the game wants from you, it changes the rules. I won’t say how, or when - only that it isn’t an endless clicker. It has an ending, and a purpose.

Delight: The World Noticed You

In hook, your knitted scarf flutters behind you as you speed up. You squish a bit when you land. The rope creaks as you swing. Snow puffs up under your boots, a lantern sways because you brushed past it, and a crate explodes because you didn’t look where you were going. None of it is “the game”. All of it is the feeling of the game. Everything you do gets an answer, and every answer says: I saw that.

The props are where this gets fun. Almost everything in hook’s caves can be broken, and everything you touch makes a sound - a bottle clinks, a barrel thuds, a crate cracks apart, and every impact lands with weight. But the real secret is that no sound is ever quite the same twice. Smash a whole row of bottles and each one sounds a little different, so it feels like glass breaking and not like a loop playing. click of life does the same with every single click: each one is a tiny bit higher or lower than the last, the clicks get deeper as your little person grows older, and a lucky click rings out with a random soft note. You’d only notice it if it were gone: the same sound again and again makes a world feel like a machine.

Afterlight taught me this the hard way. Enemies took hits and nothing happened, so every hit got something you can see and something you can hear. The bullets were the same story: every projectile looked alike, just in a different colour. In a bullet hell you stare at bullets for an hour, so they had better be beautiful. Crisp, easy to read, a little impressive, and simply fun to look at.

Laughter, With a Little Stress

Put delight in a room full of people, add a bit of pressure, and you get the best sound a game can make: laughter.

The party games all started from the same wish. They had to be fun and just a little stressful, so you end up stressed and laughing at the same time. In One Button Spaceship, everyone has one button on the same ship and nobody knows what it does until they press it. In Definitely Safe Laboratory, you’re running a machine you have no manual for, because the manual is on someone else’s phone across the room. The rules are almost nothing. The game is the shouting.

But there’s a thin line. In my first rounds of the laboratory I wasn’t stressed, I was confused. I couldn’t tell which page of the handbook belonged to which machine, and when an emergency hit, I didn’t even know if it was on my screen. Then there were so many emergencies that I was just overwhelmed. Stress that makes you laugh is fun. Confusion that makes you feel stupid isn’t. So the machines got signs and little sketches you can match with the handbook, the emergencies calmed down, and every repair got a reason that belongs to the machine - a bean stuck in the coffee grinder, a batch that set in the mixer’s lines - instead of an arbitrary “press here to fix”.

Freedom, and Questioning Every Frustration

hook is about something simple: the joy of swinging. Freedom. Agility. Flying through a cave on a rope and feeling light. And once you know that’s the feeling, a lot of decisions make themselves.

Take the rope. What should happen when it scrapes along a rock? A realistic game might let it snap. But that would be a frustration with no meaning - it doesn’t make the game more exciting, it just takes away the one thing that’s fun. So in hook, the rope simply wraps around the corner and you keep swinging. Some players might notice. What matters is that it never pulls them out of the swing.

That became my rule: question every frustration. Is it meant to be there? Does it make the game better, or does it just stop you from having fun? Most of the time, the honest answer is that it isn’t meant to be there at all.

And I found plenty while playtesting. Rings hung so close to the lava that hitting them felt like luck. Hooks placed so badly that a climb was a chore instead of fun. One section I simply hated. A room transition you could only survive by flying in at exactly the right angle, without seeing where you’d land. In the rising-water levels you could dash up into the next room and fall right back down into the last one. Every one of them got the same question, and every one of them went.

Some difficulty is meant to be, of course, because pride needs something to push against. You let go at exactly the right moment, the mountain throws you across the room, and you land on a ledge you were sure was too far. I did that. But a hard moment and an unfair one feel completely different. Afterlight had huge laser beams sweeping across the room, and they just felt weird. Big spiked rollers coming down a lane feel so much better, because you can see them coming. The danger is the same. But now when you get hit, it was on you, and next time you’ll make it. And in hook, falling costs almost nothing - a little pop and you’re back at the start of the room, the music still playing as if nothing happened. You’re always just one more try away.

A Little Fear

Afterlight’s first dungeons were too friendly. Happy little rooms, happy little maps, and no fear, no clutter, no danger anywhere. The fights looked like glowing balls doing things - a puppet theatre rather than a city around a dying sun. So it got darker, heavier and more dangerous. Later, when people told me so much was glowing that they couldn’t see the enemies on the floor, it got clearer again, without losing its charm. Fear only works if you can still see what’s scaring you.

And fear needs stakes. At one point dying in Afterlight didn’t seem to matter at all. That sounds friendly, but a fight where nothing can go wrong is a fight where nothing feels like anything. Now going down hurts a little again. Not enough to leave you sitting on the bench, just enough that your heart beats faster when the bullets close in, and that the whole crew cheers when you pull through.

The smallest version of this: the story intro let you run around and shoot while it was talking, and the mood was gone instantly. Now the world holds still while it speaks to you. Immersion is fragile, and it’s always the small things that break it.

Hunger: Just One More

The feeling that keeps you up late is a gentle hunger: just one more.

For that to work, every step has to leave something in your hands. In hook, every single level ends with a find - a note, a little object, a piece of a song, or a photo. The photos were the part I cared about most, and the first ones weren’t right. They had to be moments of pure joy with the dog: playing ball, building a snowman, Christmas with presents, watching TV together, sledding downhill. A little album of happy days you slowly get back, one level at a time.

click of life taught me the other side. You live a life, grow old, let go, and start over, keeping a little something each time. And there must never be a life that felt useless. One wasted life feels like a wasted evening, and that’s how you lose someone. So every life now leaves you something new to reach for, and the next thing is always close enough to want.

Belonging: One Theme

Belonging is the feeling that a game is one thing, and that you’re part of it. For me, that comes from music. Not from a soundtrack, from a theme. One melody that is the heart of the game, and that you hear again and again, in different clothes, until it belongs to you.

hook’s theme is a lullaby. You first hear it in the cabin, from an old music box on a shelf, while your dog falls asleep. Soft, warm, a little sad. It sounds like home. And then it follows you through the whole mountain. In the icy caves it comes back cold and glassy. In the dark it’s a music box that sounds a little broken. When things get dangerous, it turns brave. It’s never a new song. It’s always that song. After a while you recognise it everywhere, and every time you do, you think of the dog.

Afterlight’s theme is called The Vow, and it’s my favourite thing to come out of all of this. Everything in Afterlight’s score grows from that one melody. On the title screen it’s a music box and a choir. At home on the platform it’s calm and warm. In the dark districts you only hear pieces of it in the distance. In a fight it turns into a pumping beat, against a guardian it gets chants, and when you win it comes back bright, as if the sun just rose.

When I first heard the fight version, I already loved it, and I wanted more. More power, more energy, a beat you can’t sit still to. The next version had me really dancing to it. That’s what a theme does. It stops being background and becomes something you feel in your body.

It even got its own extended mix on YouTube, if you want to hear where it goes.

One theme makes the whole game feel like one piece, not ten songs glued together - and it’s the thing you’ll still be humming a week later.

Comfort: Sounds You Can Live With

Sound is where I was the strictest. I let the first version just happen, and then I listened. hook’s first music was harsh. Sharp and buzzy, the kind of sound that wears you down, with a wind noise that never stopped and a high, thin bird song still chirping deep inside the cave, where no bird would ever be. click of life’s first sounds were little bells and chimes, awfully high pitched, the kind of high that makes you reach for the mute button.

It was clear right away: I wouldn’t put up with that myself, so I couldn’t ask anyone else to. Getting the sound right became the highest priority of all.

What I wanted was the feeling of a good idle game. Short, soft, low, satisfying sounds you can leave running all evening without ever being annoyed. So everything came down. Lower, rounder, gentler. A harp, a soft piano, warm strings, a music box. The sounds you hear most often became the quietest ones.

Then came the burst problem. In click of life, sometimes a whole pile of things unlocks at once, and twenty happy chimes at the same moment aren’t a reward, they’re an attack on your ears. Now a big moment sounds big, not loud.

Losing Control

Losing control sounds like the opposite of fun. Games are supposed to be about being in control, right? But the moment a game slips out of your hands - on purpose, at the right time - can be one of the most exciting feelings there is. You lean forward. You stop playing on autopilot. You want to know what’s going on.

One of the games on the page has a moment like that. I won’t tell you which one, or where. But the first time I played through it, I loved it. I sat there wondering what on earth was going on - and that was exactly the feeling I had wanted. A minute later I was laughing out loud.

That’s two feelings in one breath. First a strange, slightly lost wonder, the feeling that something just changed and you’re not sure what your part in it is any more. Then a laugh, because the game knows exactly what it just did to you. That’s what makes a story pop. Not a twist for its own sake, but a moment where the game turns around and looks at you.

Mystery: Something You Don’t Understand Yet

Mystery is what keeps you thinking about a game after you’ve stopped playing.

Somewhere in hook, a small pale light shaped like a dog starts appearing at the edges of rooms. It waits for you, then runs off. Later it waits a little longer. Later still, it doesn’t run any more. It just waits, as if it knows the way. As if it knows you. The game never tells you what it is, and I’m not going to either.

At a campfire you find a picture book in your bag, with little notes scribbled in the margins - your dog’s name, and which part he likes best. Who wrote them is something I’d rather you find out yourself. Deeper down there are strangers sitting with their faces to the wall, and words scratched into the stone about someone who waited. It doesn’t say for whom.

Mystery is also about what you don’t show. In click of life, one upgrade stays a secret until very late, because otherwise people believe they’ve already unlocked everything - and the moment you think you’ve seen it all, you stop looking. And in hook there was once a miner with a name. Just a name, nothing else. But a name makes a character feel important, like someone who will come back later. He wouldn’t, so he became “the miner” again. Every detail is a promise, and a game shouldn’t make promises it doesn’t keep.

The Hard Parts

You can’t unit-test a feeling. I can test that every level in hook can be finished, that no life in click of life ends with nothing, that the music doesn’t turn sharp again. None of that tells me whether the ending gets to you. Every feeling in this article was found by playing and noticing: the section I hated, the beat I danced to, the moment I sat there wondering what was going on. With click of life, it was the moment after a full playthrough when I knew: this one is strong. Really strong.

Charm is expensive. An empty room with a rope in it is built in no time. The cave you fall in love with is a different story: it needs props in every room, and every prop needs a sound and a little reaction. When time runs short, the visual nonsense is the first thing you want to cut. It’s the last thing you should.

Every feeling has a neighbour that ruins it. Stress sits right next to confusion. Challenge next to unfairness. Realism next to fun. Reward next to noise. Knowing which feeling you want is the easy part. The real work is getting there: finding the way to make the feeling make sense, so the player actually arrives at the one it’s supposed to be - and noticing every time you’ve slid one step over into its evil twin instead.

So, What Makes a Game Good?

For me it’s this. Know what you want the player to feel before you know what they’ll do. Let them fall in love first, so the rest matters. Answer everything they do. Let stress make them laugh, never feel stupid. Question every frustration, and keep only the ones that are meant to be. Give them one theme to carry, until it feels like home. Keep the sounds soft. Take the wheel once, at the right moment. Leave a few things unexplained. And at the end, let them rest.

Peace: Coming Home

And at the very end, I want you to feel peace.

For hook’s credits I didn’t want a list of names. I wanted a view and the music, and nothing else. A gift. A moment. So that’s what it is. After all the swinging and falling and trying again, the game stops asking you for anything. You sit. The view is wide. The lullaby plays. And that moment works only because of everything before it: the love, the curiosity, the pride, the fear, the long way back.

The belonging. The coming home.

If you want to feel it yourself, games.0x17.de has all of them. click of life takes about two hours, and it’s worth playing past the pram.

And start hook with the sound on, and listen to the music box in the cabin. Then listen for that same tune much later, when it sounds completely different and still exactly the same.

That moment is the one I build every one of these for.