Show Less Than You Know

The screenshot that changed the game came from my own phone. I had been playing a run, the board had filled with enemies and treasure, and I sent it over with one question: how come the screen gets so busy like this?

Looking at it cold, the answer was obvious. Each system had added its own sign. Tiles announced their contents, and every icon had a caption under it in case the icon was unclear. Each mark had been added for a good reason, by a careful builder, on a day when that one system was the only one on screen. Together they buried the painting along with the one thing the player needed to see.

This is the second of three dev diaries on the new game. The first was about reading your novel as a level map. This one is about the screen, and about the page.

The Author Always Knows Too Much

The busy board is an author’s failure, and writers will recognize it instantly. You know your world: what every faction wants and what the magic costs. The temptation is to put all of it on the page early so the reader cannot possibly be confused, and the result is the opening chapter that reads like an encyclopedia entry with a protagonist standing in front of it.

A game screen has the same temptation with less room. A phone in one hand gives you a few square inches, and every mark you place there spends a little of the player’s attention. Spend it on things they cannot use yet, and you have nothing left for the thing that matters.

My board had become an info dump, accurate and unreadable.

Every mark on the screen spends a little of the player’s attention, and nobody gets a refund.

Earn the Mark

The rule that came out of the cut is short: a mark appears when it changes a decision the player is making right now. Everything else waits.

That rule removed more than I expected.

Captions went first. An icon that needs a caption every time is a bad icon, and a good one needs its caption only the first time.

Counts waited until they mattered. Numbers the player could not act on yet stayed hidden, and each reveal became a small event.

Distant information waited to be asked. The far side of the board stopped shouting and let the player look when they wanted to.

The painting came back. More surprising, the game got easier to play: with fewer things competing, the important ones stood out, and I stopped wondering where to look.

A reader works the same way. A detail introduced when the character needs it hits harder, because the reader feels the need too. Parked in the opening pages, the same detail is one more fact to remember, and readers forget facts they have no reason to keep.

The Opposite Failure

Cutting has its own trap, and I walked into it. A later screenshot from my phone came with a different complaint: something I had placed on the board for the player to find was too hard to see. I had made it subtle because subtle felt tasteful. On a small screen in a dark scene, subtle meant invisible.

The fix was contrast. I left it unlabeled and made it brighter, with a faint pulse the eye could catch, and on the next run I found it without being told where to look.

That is the balance writers chase too. Withholding is a tool, and a clue the reader cannot notice is a cheat. The detail that matters should be understated enough to feel discovered and distinct enough to be found.

A clue the reader cannot see might as well have been cut.

Who Checks the Screen

A model building screens has no tired eyes, so it never feels the clutter it creates. Each addition looked correct in isolation, and the builder that added it had no reason to look at the whole board. The fix for that was a standing rule written into the project’s design principles, so every later feature arrives obeying it, and a check that counts the marks on a board at rest and fails the build when they creep back. I wrote about why taste has to become a written rule in The Look Is a Law; this was the same lesson, applied this time to information.

The final judge is still a person with the phone in hand, because a tool can count marks but cannot tell you the page went silent in the wrong place.

What This Means on the Page

If you write dark fiction, run the same audit on your opening chapters.

Highlight every fact the reader learns. Beside each one, note the first moment that fact changes what a character does or what the reader fears. Any fact with a long gap between the two is a mark on the board that has not earned its place yet. Move it closer to the moment it matters, or cut it and trust the scene to imply it.

Then do the opposite pass. Find the clue your ending depends on and ask whether a reader moving at speed would notice it. If the answer is maybe, give it contrast, such as a sensory detail no other object in the room has, or a line of dialogue that sounds slightly wrong. Leave it unlabeled, but make it visible.

You know more about your world than the reader ever will. The craft is in choosing what to show, and when.