This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
When I start conceptualising a new game or feature, I prefer to focus on feelings rather than on a feature count. For me, thinking about the impressions a game leaves behind after you’ve played it is a great way to start identifying the systems you’ll need to build it.
- What emotional promise are we making to the player?
- What should they feel during and after a session?
Case study: F-Zero (SNES, 1990)
The first step is to name the dominant feeling. For F-Zero, you might say “speed”. But I like to push a bit further: the feeling of barely holding on to something too powerful for you.
There’s a constant tension in the game between the machine you’re trying to tame and the track slipping away from you. The emotional promise is: you’re on a knife’s edge — prove you’re good enough.
How does this feeling register, in body and mind?
The emotional texture of F-Zero is: cold, metallic, tense but not anxious, solitary, futuristic, unforgiving.
Mapping the emotional field — adjacencies and antagonists
Around the target feeling there are emotions that support it and emotions that undercut it.
Adjacent to F-Zero: intense focus, controlled adrenaline, perceptible growth in skill, a dignified kind of loneliness, the future as aesthetic.
Antagonists to F-Zero: comfort, humour, nostalgia, warmth, perceived randomness. If the player feels they lost because of the game rather than themselves, the promise breaks.
How does this feeling translate into concrete choices?
Let’s try to identify all the elements F-Zero puts to work — the emotional palette the designers had available when they were building the game.
Visuals: saturated neon colours on dark backgrounds. The track is readable in a single frame. The horizon rushes towards you at the speed of light. Mode 7 gave them the visual language of speed itself on that platform.
Audio: Mute City, Big Blue, Silence — aggressive synth-wave, high BPM, strong melodic hooks. The game’s heartbeat. Crash sounds are metallic and final.
Environment: tracks suspended in the void. No living world beneath you — just an abyss or a landscape impossibly far away. Space is wide open vertically and razor-thin laterally. The track is the world.
Characters: they don’t exist during the race. The driver disappears inside the machine. Captain Falcon, Samurai Goroh, Dr. Stewart, Pico — their profiles live only in the manual. I don’t know whether that was a deliberate choice; maybe it’s partly why it was one of Miyamoto’s least favourite games. No narrative during play, just racing.
What would break the mood?
It’s worth pinning down what we don’t want in our game. In F-Zero’s case:
- Slow or soft music would break the rhythmic tension
- Warm or pastel colours would contradict the “metallic future” promise
- Humorous elements would introduce warmth, which is the exact opposite of F-Zero’s cold, clinical feel
- Any narrative during the race (even a single line of text) would interrupt the flow
- Results that feel random — if I lose because of the game, the fantasy of control collapses
The design heuristics
From this canvas you can extract short, reusable principles to return to during review:
- Speed over comfort
- Readability over visual detail
- Tension without anxiety: the game can be hard, but it’s always your fault
- The future as aesthetic: don’t explain it, show it
- The machine is the character: any feature that adds humanity to the driver during the race is an anti-pattern
Why did F-Zero stick in people’s minds?
Because every single choice — visual, audio, mechanical — serves the same emotional promise. Nothing is superfluous, but more importantly, nothing contradicts it.
And that’s the whole point of this post, the reason I’m sharing this emotional canvas with you. Games are getting more and more expensive to make, and I think from a design standpoint it’s worth thinking carefully about these things before you even start counting up all the components you’ll need.
The best design does the right thing with everything it’s got.