Building Bushido: Designing Tension with Only Two Buttons
(7 Games in 7 Weeks – Week 3)
I’m currently running a personal challenge: building and shipping 7 small games in 7 weeks. Each game is intentionally scoped to explore one specific design or technical idea.
Week 3’s game is Bushido — a minimalist, timing-based samurai duel built around a single question:
How much tension can you create with almost no mechanics at all?
Bushido is a two-player duel with only two actions:
- Attack
- Block
There’s no movement, no health bars, and no combos. A successful hit scores a point unless the opponent blocks at the correct moment. First to five points wins.
Designing Around Commitment
One of the core design decisions was removing cancellation entirely.
Once a player commits to an action, they’re locked into it until the animation finishes. You can’t react halfway through. You can only predict.
That single rule turns very simple inputs into a psychological game. Every attack is a risk. Every block is a read.
Under the hood, the game is driven by a small, explicit state machine:
- Idle
- Attacking
- Blocking
Keeping the states clear and deterministic helped avoid edge cases and made the outcome of each interaction feel fair — even when it was brutal.
Timing Over Reflexes
Attacks aren’t instant. They play out over a short window, and blocks only succeed if they overlap the attack within a narrow timing range.
Each attack is marked as a pending hit. When the animation ends, the game checks whether a valid block occurred during the correct window. If not, the attacker scores.
This structure made the outcome feel earned rather than random, especially in close matches.
Solo Play and Multiplayer
Although Bushido is designed as a multiplayer duel, it’s fully playable solo.
If only one player joins, the game spawns an AI opponent that follows the same rules — no cheating, no hidden advantages. If a second real player joins mid-session, the AI cleanly drops out and the match restarts.
What This Game Taught Me
- Simple mechanics don’t mean simple design
- Commitment creates tension faster than speed
- Clear state machines make timing-based games feel fair
- Constraint is a design tool, not a limitation
🎮 Want to Play?
Think you’ve got the timing?
You can play Bushido right now on Rune — solo against the AI or in a tense two-player duel:
👉 https://join.rune.ai/game/cBxaHQpQ-FAI
If you’re interested in building small multiplayer games like this, I’m using Forge by Rune to prototype and ship these weekly builds:
👉 https://forge.rune.ai
I’ll be continuing the 7 Games in 7 Weeks challenge and sharing breakdowns as the series goes on.
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