BELTRUNNER: game design postmortem  ⌘I  Get Info

BELTRUNNER: game design postmortem

2026-07-30

14 mins read

#arcade

#design

#gamedev

#postmortem

#videogame

2026-07-30

14 mins read<br>true

Last week I shared a look at an arcade-faithful version of Asteroids to demonstrate the totally new way of making games that I’ve been working on. It’s called Jinks and it’s a lightweight game-engine, interactive development environment, and a language of sorts.

This post is a game design postmortem for BELTRUNNER, an original game built from the same bones of Asteroids. Roughly 1,300 lines for a whole game you can finish. Built on the same system, in same succinct language, with all the same nicities, though I’ll continue to stay a little coy about the machinery for now, mostly because things are still changing so much every day. Things need to settle down so I can describe what it is rather than what it used to be.

What I do want to talk about are the design methods that made it in, the ones that didn’t, and the bits the system had to grow so the game could exist. A lot of the methods are old, which is the point.

BELTRUNNER by gingerbeardman

Explorations

The prototype was nothing like Asteroids at all. I built an orbital shooter perhaps more like Space Duel: numbered targets on fixed shells around a central sun. As with everything made in Jinks it was quick to bring up, but playing it just wasn’t fun. I had to decided whether it showed promise, and I don’t think it did.

Deterministic orbits are sitting ducks. Asteroids’ fun is its unpredictable rock drift—the dodging, not the shooting gallery. Lesson kept: motion chaos is the fun engine; target arrangement is not. Salvage kept: numbered targets, the highlight, the chain, and it got me thinking about the song “Countdown” by Phoenix (Bankrupt!, 2013).

I then had the idea to pivot back towards Asteroids, but making the numbered pickups kind of like the rings in Pilotwings or the gates in Wave Race 64. And to dress it all behind a Donkey Kong ‘94 masquerade.

Masquerade

Stage 1 is pure Asteroids: one large rock, classic thrust-and-drift, classic splits, classic death-and-respawn. The only tell is a race clock that appears on first hit. The first clue that things are not how they seem. Clear the field and instead of “next wave of rocks,” a black hole tears open at screen centre. Gravity pulls you in, and you can do a little dash to help it along.

From stage 2 the real game reveals itself. Numbered gates are scattered through the same drifting rock field, taken in descending order—5… 4… 3… 2… 1…—so the race chants a countdown as you fly it. Take the last gate and the zero opens again. Warp. Rinse. Repeat.

Teach the chassis first, then recontextualise it. If you already know Asteroids you can fly stage 1 on muscle memory. If you don’t, you still learn the only movement model that matters before the race asks you to master it.

Two countdowns converge on zero:

The gate count , which you drive.

The race clock , which drives you—every gate feeds it a few seconds; rocks tax it.

There are no lives. Time is the only resource. That single decision collapsed a lot of classic arcade bookkeeping into one stake you can read at a glance—and it stuck through every playtest.

Waves with stepped difficulty (the Nintendo way)

Sixteen waves. Four acts of four. Not an endless ramp that quietly plateaus—a game you can actually finish.

Each act teaches one new gate behaviour, then spends three more waves letting it bed in:

Act<br>Waves<br>What it teaches

1–4<br>The reveal—pure Asteroids—then elliptical gates

II<br>5–8<br>Directional (one-way) gates—a routing problem

III<br>9–12<br>Spinning gates—a timing problem

IV<br>13–16<br>Both at once—asks for everything, then ends

That “introduce → practice → practice → close” cadence is The Nintendo Way. A mechanic shown once and immediately buried under the next one was never really taught. Four waves is enough to notice it, get caught by it once, and start planning around it.

In the game code I only write down what changes from wave to wave. A practice wave that keeps last wave’s setup is empty on purpose. Intro text only appears when something new is actually on screen—it’s not a tutorial but a toast and enough to clue you in.

Early gates were round rings. Side-on grazes felt wrong, so elliptical slots became the baseline after the first playtest. Directional and spinning came later as routing and timing problems, not as decoration.

Deterministic gameplay (the Arcade way)

Pac-Man’s patterns. Donkey Kong’s fixed barrel logic. Flicky’s routes. What I love about those games is that they were courses . Learn the layout and skill compounds.

Beltrunner leans into that approach.

Every “random” draw—rock spawn edges and headings, gate placement, power-up scatter—comes from one seeded stream. A single number is the layout. Restart it and run 1 of a session matches run 1 of the next under the same inputs. Change the seed and you get a completely...