Hi, Gahlammon here! Today, I’d like to share with you some thoughts and tips about the creation process of unusual, truly unique games. I’ll be doing it based on my case study of Welder Skelter, our Stork’Studios entry for the Global Game Jam 2026. So take a cup of tea, a comfy seat, and let’s get to it!

What’s the issue?

If you have played some of our games, you have probably noticed that we often like to create… let’s call it unusual games. We take some wild ideas and try to create a gameplay loop around them in 48h or something like that. Resulting games are often something you have never seen before. There are many examples, like Death Bell, My Summer Internship at Local Nuclear Reactor or Don’t Wallover. Welder Skelter was no different. After we submitted it, one of our friends wrote this adorable little comment:

And do I agree? Totally.

Welder Skelter truly feels like several different genres mashed together. There’s a little of roguelike, a chaotic, physics-based gameplay, some drops of a job simulator and abilities that make the game do 180’s. It may sound weird, but it results in something really unique and extraordinary, which I believe to be the main strength of Stork’Studios’ games.

Unfortunatelly, at the moment the game jam ended I was the only person able to play Welder Skelter. Despite the game being pretty fun when you knew what you were doing (with right amount of luck and patience), it was really hard to explain to others how to even complete the first level.

It was then that I realized we once again fell into the trap of making a game that was too weird for others to understand. And so I stopped and thought about how we should approach creating such unusual games to make them more accessible yet still very unique. And here is what came out of it.

The unusual games problem

You see, there are many recognizable game genres that you can use as a foundation for your projects. Shooters, platformers, racing games, visual novels, you name it. If you decide to create a game that is based on a well known template, you can safely assume that players will understand the basics. They will know how to move, interact with the world, complete the objectives and so on. To understand what I mean, look at this screenshot of our latest game, Lost Signal: Network Warfare:

You can easily see that this is a first person shooter - there is a player’s weapon, a crosshair in a middle of a screen and an ammo count. If you were placed in this situation, you would probably try to move using W, A, S and D buttons, while aiming with your mouse. Any moving creature-like thing would probably be classified by you as a target and shot upon using left mouse button, and you could even figure out yourself that this box with a green plus sign visible on the screenshot is actually a healthpack. If you ever played any first person shooter in your life it’s all known territory

Of course, we wouldn’t be ourselves if we just made a shooter. That’s why, on top of all that, we added the signal weapons mechanic. It would probably be weird for you at the start because it’s something new that you’d never encoutered. But since there is a solid first person shooter foundation, it’s not like you’re completely lost. You just have to follow the rules of this genre and experiment with that one mechanic, and because we took care to tutorialize it step-by-step using level design, it shouldn’t be that big of an obstacle.

With that being said, let’s now jump to the Welder Skelter’s screenshot:

If you have never played Welder Skelter, you probably have no idea what’s going on and what the gameplay is like. It doesn’t look like anything else, and at the very start makes players completly confused before they can even start playing. They press some buttons, but there are too many unknowns, so they don’t even know how to proceed forward. There is no familiar basis to rely on, get a grasp on the game and start learning. So after a few moments of pressing random buttons and discovering one or two mechanics, but still lacking a grasp of the game as a whole, players gave up and quit. This inability to understand what they are dealing with eventually caused them to give up and cease playing our game.

And that’s a key factor - if you are a designer, you will always understand your game because you have the full picture. But someone who’s never played it will have to discover your game first, and they’ll require your help. I want to underline it here: it’s not bad to create games that are not based on any known template. You will just have to make some extra effort to ensure that the Path of Discovery in your game is clean, understandable and fun.

Path of Discovery

What is the “Path of Discovery”, you ask?

Let me explain. You see, when a player launches your game, they have almost no knowledge about it. Yeah, they might’ve got some idea from the cover, trailer or description, but you shouldn’t count on it. Many players will just drop in lured by one random thing they saw. Then they’ll have to proceed through the game using just their intuition, discovering the mechanics on the run. If you designed the game correctly, they will slowly learn mechanics one after another, eventually getting a full understanding of the game. And this process is what I call the “Path of Discovery”.

However, if you’re not making a game based on a well-known foundation, the most important part of that path is the first step. You have to give player enough space and time to understand the very basics of your game before jumping to the more complex stuff. And then, after they finally feel that they know what they are doing, you can proceed to the next step. And the next. But to keep the player’s attention, every part of the game, every step, must be fun and understandable on its own. If your basic mechanics are boring, then it’s unlikely the player will give you a chance to show them anything else - they will just quit.

And that’s why the next parts of your game should be introduced at a specific pace, ensuring that your player has a basic grasp on the gameplay before you hit them with someting new. There are multiple ways to do it: using level design, character development, difficulty levels, tutorial, and so on. What you choose should really depend on the type of a game you are making. In Welder Skelter, where the main gameplay loop required all of the mechanics to be active from the start to make the rouglike experience enjoyably replayable, we decided to focus on creating a tutorial. It’s a short separate mode, introducing the game to the player in a reduced version, and then adding more and more things as it continues. The entire improvement process took us about one month to complete. During that time we also used some other solutions to support the tutorial, but I’ll speak about them later.

In the process of creating this tutorial we have restructured the gameplay to make it splittable into small packages. Then, we slowly introduced these packages to the player, making sure that each step on itself offers enough to be interesting, but doesn’t overwhelm the player. This breakdown was also a lesson for us, as it turned out some basic mechanics were not fun at all when stripped of everything else. And after they were the only thing left in a specific gameplay stage, we finally had a clean sight of them. It enabled us to understand them better and make some improvements.

That’s why I recommend that you always check if your game has a clean Path of Discovery. If you fail to do that, your player will not be able to get to the fun parts of your game - and that’s a lose-lose situation.

Re-welding the Welder

Let’s now jump to the details of that month-long Welder Skelter fixing process, shall we? I’ll start with the description of the tutorial breakdown:

At the begining of the tutorial, we introduce the player to a very simple experience: no quests, no mandatory objectives, no skills. Just objects dropping from a conveyor (this one in a top right corner) to the welding area below and floating in there. Players are told in a short message how to move them, make them hover over one another, weld them together and then sell for profit. They can have fun with it for a while, as this mechanic alone is physics based and requires some skill to be performed efficiently. We actually updated it a lot after realizing how flawed it was, adding a possiblity to move objects around (earlier you had to wait for them to hover over each other), making selling items much simpler and replacing high ejection speed with a subtle gravity, so that the items would still have some default movement but not bounce around like crazy.

After a minute of such sandbox, we move the player forward to the second phase of the tutorial, allowing them to pick one out of three items from the conveyor and instructing them to weld together only the identical items. This way we expand the previously introduced welding minigame with an additional condition, and add possibility to better control it. Instead of mindlessly welding everything together, the player can now do it more deliberately for a higher profit. While making this tutorial, we also increased reward for selling objects welded together. It helped this mechanic to still remain a valid option after adding the ones introduced next.

After the player manages to go through this part and realizes how much more money they earn by welding together identical items, we proceed to the last part. It introduces quests: specific combinations of items welded together that grant the player even higher reward. Some of them also allow the player to buy abilities, which modify large aspects of the game, for example removing gravity from the welding area, inverting items velocity upon pressing a button or slowing time upon welding. We had many of these ready on the game jam, but some of them were enjoyable only when combined with others or straightforwardly made the gameplay harder instead of easier. After the adjustements, it was no longer the case - every single upgrade could now be a good starter for a potentially powerful build.

And then, the tutorial ended. The player could go try the actual game, using the abilities they’ve just learned, or replay the tutorial if they didn’t feel confident enough. The game still had a key aspect to explore - combining abilities to perform welding in a more efficient and more fancy way, which allowed player to meet the increasing income goals over all seven rounds of welding. But we knew that after this step by step guide through the game mechanics our player was much more likely to understand what’s going on, now prepared to enter the main game mode and have fun crafting their own master welder instead of worrying about what is even happening.

There were also some additional helpers. The input tips were incorporated in the game space, so that the player could always check them if they forgot or got confused. The entire game got polished so that the player understood the impact of their decisions and felt their inputs. And so on. But these were mostly for the quality of life. The most important part was definetely the tutorial and the adjustements done while making it, which opened the game for someone other than just our team. Like you, probably.

Do you think we succeded in introducing the Welder Skelter to you? Or do you think it’s still kinda messy and hard to learn? Please let us know on our Discord server.

Wrapping it up

Well, I’ll be ending this post in a few sentences, but before I do: I think the most important thing I want you to take away from this text is to remember about the “Path of Discovery”. Make sure that the pace at which your player encounters new mechanics is not overwhelming, and that every stage of that journey is fun on its own. Don’t make games that are fun only with all of the mechanics combined, make sure that even the very core of your game is good, and other things just make it better. You don’t necessairly have to go the tutorial way described in this post - if your game has multiple levels, you can just slowly indroduce new things as player progresses through them. Or create a character development system that allows player to unlock one skill at a time, making them slowly discover all aspect of your game. No matter how you decide to do it, it will help both you and your players: they will have a better grasp of the game concept, and you’ll be able to realize if separate mechanics really are entertaining enough or if they need some extra love.

Okay, I think that’s all for today. I’m glad I finally wrote something for this blog after such a long time and writing down these thoughts really helped me to organize the ideas I had in my head. I’ll try to come back to you with something new soon, but for now - don’t forget to play Welder Skelter and try some new, crazy build!