Posted August 24, 2026 by Per10dev
After DIV was finished, I kept thinking about games built around recording.
The first idea was simple: record a path, then replay it. That naturally suggested a few possibilities — connecting map pieces, drawing routes, rotating terrain. But the further I followed them, the more I found they already had well-developed forms: pipe-connection puzzles, route planning, or spatial assembly like Blue Prince.
So I simplified the idea one step further. If you break a path apart, isn’t the most basic unit of information a direction?
And that’s where the real question began: how do I represent direction?
I came across a game on Twitter: black and white dots spawning randomly on a board, which had to be connected according to certain rules before they could be cleared.
That gave Direction its first concrete form — obstacles spawn randomly on the board; when the player moves into an empty cell, that movement’s direction is kept, and the stored direction can then be spent to clear an obstacle.
From there it grew into a 2048-style turn-based movement game. Obstacles became enemies, taking up the player’s space. The fuller the board, the fewer positions remained to move through and generate new directions.
The loop closed:
space → movement → vector → enemies → space
The player’s goal was to keep moving to produce vectors, then spend those vectors to destroy enemies and win the space back.
The system worked. But a more fundamental problem surfaced: I had answers, but the enemy types and level formats weren’t producing problems that needed them.
I first tried adding enemies with directional shields and double health bars, then introduced separate characters with directional skills, hoping to create more gameplay possibilities. It wasn’t until I began experimenting with fixed-board puzzles — complete information and planning ahead — that the design actually turned. The survival loop fell away, and what survived was the character system’s directional skills, which became the foundation of the next version’s puzzle system.
The second version was a puzzle game closer to a turn-based tactics game. Here direction represented a spatial relationship, which came from movement and attacks. The player combined acquired directions into skills, then ordered those skills to clear the board of enemies.
I built a skill table based on combinations of direction and movement/attack, and designed a progression of levels around it, so players would gradually learn skill execution, vector resource management, and board reading.
But this structure produced a new problem. The levels were designed backwards from the skill table, so every ability I added required a new batch of situations for it to matter in.
I ended up building problems that needed my answers, so that the answers I’d already designed could be answers. Each level worked on its own — but remove the corresponding skill and the problem had no reason to exist.
I started to wonder: is this really a puzzle game?
The problems with 2.0 made me doubt the whole approach to level design. Rather than keep adding skills and adjusting levels, I set the system aside and went back to the definition of direction itself.
Force, momentum, path — from physics I got the idea that direction could be something left behind by an action in the world. It has a source, and it can be stored, transferred, and released.
So I made blocks the carriers of direction, and pushing its source.
From these starting points, more advanced mechanics — combination, redirection, collision — followed naturally.
But I had no interest in turning DIR into a physics simulator, so I simplified the rules.
What remained were three actions: push, install, trigger.
Looking back, DIR’s three versions were three ways of understanding direction. The first treated it as a resource. The second treated it as a set of skills. Only in the third did I treat it as a state in the world.
For two versions I designed answers the player could use, then went looking for problems that could use them. The third reversed it: build a set of rules that work on their own, then look between those rules for problems worth solving.
Direction was finally founded.