Game Design Tips
How to plan, prompt, iterate, and publish games people actually play and share.
Plan Before You Prompt
Answer three questions before typing anything: What does the player do? What happens in the first 10 seconds? How does it end? If you can't explain your game in one sentence, it's too big for a first version.
Start With One Mechanic
Don't generate everything at once. Start with movement, one core mechanic, and a score. Once that works, iterate. Add polish, difficulty, and personality one prompt at a time.
Prompt With Precision
Before every edit, know exactly what you're changing and why. Specific prompts get better results and cost the same credits.
Design for Sharing
The best Star games spread because someone sends the link and says "beat my score." Add a score. Make it end. Keep rounds short. 30 seconds to 2 minutes is the sweet spot.
Use the right model
Fast
Your workhorse. Use it for creating games, fixing bugs, tweaking mechanics, adjusting visuals, and iterating on your idea. Quick and affordable, perfect for the rapid back-and-forth that makes great games.
Subscribers also get access to the Pro model for more complex changes.
Starter prompts
Copy any of these, create a game, then make it yours.
Wave Shooter
Top-down arena shooter. WASD to move, mouse to aim and shoot. Enemies spawn in waves. Some fast, some tanky. Killed enemies drop health packs and weapon upgrades. Score = total kills before you die.
Tower Stacker
A block swings back and forth at the top of the screen. Tap to drop it onto the stack. Any part that overhangs gets sliced off, making the next block smaller. Game ends when the block is too small. Score = blocks stacked.
Boss Fight
Side-view boss battle. The boss cycles through 3 attack patterns: bullet spread, charge attack, and ground slam. Dodge and shoot back during openings. Win by depleting the boss health bar. Score = time to win (lower is better).
Typing Survival
Words fall from the sky. Type them to destroy them before they hit the ground. Words get longer and fall faster over time. Three lives. Lose one each time a word lands. Score = words destroyed.
Reaction Test
Show a circle that turns green at a random time. Measure how fast the player taps it. Best of 5 rounds, lowest average wins.
Build in layers
The best games on Star aren't built in one prompt. They're built in layers. Get the skeleton working first, then add polish. Trying to nail everything at once usually ends in a tangled mess.
Get the bones working
Just the core mechanic with placeholder shapes. A red square for the player, blue squares for enemies. No art, no sound, no menus. Make sure the game is actually fun before you make it pretty.
"Top-down shooter. WASD to move, click to shoot. Red square is the player, blue squares are enemies. Score = enemies killed."
Make it feel right
Tune the difficulty, speed, and feel. Add lives, win conditions, difficulty ramps. This is where you find out if your game is actually fun. Iterate until it is.
"Enemies are too slow. Make them faster and spawn more over time. Player should have 3 lives."
Add the visuals
Now make it pretty. Generate sprites for the player and enemies. Add a background. Style the UI. The game already plays well, so polish makes it shine instead of hiding broken mechanics.
"Replace the red square with a pixel art spaceship. Replace the blue squares with alien sprites. Add a starfield background."
Make it pop
The little things that make a game feel alive. Screen shake on impact. Particle explosions. Sound effects. A score that pops up when you kill something. Each of these is small, but together they turn a good game into one people share.
"Add screen shake when an enemy hits the player. Add a particle explosion when an enemy dies. Add a satisfying laser sound when shooting."
Why layers work: if you ask for a polished, juiced game in one prompt, you get a beautiful broken game. By the time you find the bug, the polish is already baked in and harder to fix. Skeleton first means you can throw it away cheap if it doesn't work.
One thing per prompt
Within each layer, change one thing at a time. Test it. Then change the next thing. Bundling too many changes into one prompt makes it impossible to tell what worked and what broke.
Example: 4 prompts to add juice
Add screen shake when the player gets hit.
Add a particle explosion when an enemy dies.
Add a laser sound effect when shooting.
Make the score pop up and fade out when killing enemies.
The loop that works
The strongest games on Star all follow this pattern.
Player starts instantly
No menus, no tutorials
Player does the thing
The core mechanic
Game gets harder
Difficulty ramp
Game ends
Score or win condition
Player wants to retry
And share their score
Publish early
Publishing doesn't mean perfect. It means playable, scoreable, and shareable.
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