Chapter 35 Exercises: Genre Analysis

These exercises ask you to do the work of genre thinking. Do not treat them as trivia. The goal is to build your ability to locate games — including your own — on the map of the medium.

Analysis Exercises

Exercise 35.1: Deep Genre Analysis — Three Games Across Three Genres

Pick three games you have personally played for at least ten hours each. The three must be from meaningfully different genres — not three Metroidvanias, not three roguelites, not three shooters.

A good spread: one real-time genre (shooter, action, RTS), one turn-based or slow genre (turn-based RPG, 4X, visual novel), and one systemic / sandbox genre (immersive sim, survival, colony sim). For example: DOOM Eternal + Baldur's Gate 3 + RimWorld.

For each game, write a 500-word analysis covering:

  1. The core loop. What does the player do in the first 30 seconds of a typical play session? In the first five minutes? In the first hour? Name the verbs explicitly. ("In DOOM Eternal the first 30 seconds are: aim, shoot, dash, glory kill, refill ammo.") Observe how the loop scales — what is added to it at later hours that was not in it at minute one?

  2. Progression model. Is there leveling? Unlocks? Item acquisition? Skill growth in the player rather than the character? Is progression permanent across sessions, or per-run? Is it primarily numerical (higher stats) or categorical (new abilities)? What is the shape of the progression curve — linear, stepped, exponential, choose-your-own?

  3. Feedback cadence. How often does the game tell you that you are doing well? Every second (a DOOM combat encounter), every 10 seconds (a Civ turn), every few minutes (a RimWorld colonist completing a task), every hour (a quest milestone)? What does positive feedback look like — numbers going up, new areas opening, dialogue praise, mechanical power increase? What does negative feedback look like, and how painful is it?

  4. Accessibility demands. What skills does the game require of a new player? Dexterity, patience, reading, system literacy, numerical intuition, improvisation, rote memorization? How steep is the learning curve in the first 30 minutes? Does the game have accessibility features that soften the demands (difficulty options, assist modes, tutorials, in-game encyclopedias)?

  5. Session length. What is the comfortable minimum session — how little time can you sit down with this game and feel like you played? What is the comfortable maximum — after how long does the game's rhythm start to fatigue? Is the game designed for short bursts, medium sessions, or marathon sittings?

  6. Audience expectations. What does the genre-literate player expect when they pick this game up? What conventions does the game honor? What conventions does it break or reinterpret? Would a player who has never played a game in this genre bounce off hard?

After analyzing all three games, write a 300-word comparison. Which genre asks the most of its players in terms of literacy? Which is most beginner-friendly? Which has the fastest feedback cadence, which has the slowest, and what does that cadence serve? Which game has the clearest genre identity, and which is the most cross-genre? Do not merely describe — compare. Articulate the difference the genre makes.

This exercise is the longest in the chapter because it is the most important. Designers who cannot articulate how genre shapes a game's moment-to-moment feel will design their own games by accident. Do not skip it.

Exercise 35.2: The Onboarding Ramp

Pick three games from your library. They must span at least two different genres. Write a one-page analysis of how each game treats its difficulty curve — specifically, how the game ramps challenge in the first two hours of play.

For each game, note:

  • What is the first genuinely hard moment?
  • What has the game taught the player before that moment?
  • How does the game respond to failure — is the penalty punitive (death, progress loss), neutral (retry with nothing lost), or generative (you learn something)?
  • How does the ramp compare to its genre's conventions? Is it gentler or harsher than the genre norm, and why?
  • Is the first hour representative of the rest of the game, or is it a honeymoon before the actual game begins?

Then write a one-paragraph reflection: what did you learn about how genres handle the onboarding-to-challenge transition? Which genres assume a literate player and which assume a beginner? Which of those assumptions is correct for their actual audience?

Exercise 35.2.5: The Wrong-Audience Test

Pick a game you love and hand it — metaphorically, on paper — to a player who belongs to a completely different genre's audience. Imagine a Dark Souls fan sitting down with Stardew Valley. Imagine a Candy Crush player picking up Europa Universalis IV. Imagine a Rocket League competitor opening Disco Elysium.

Write a 300-word prediction of what that player's first hour looks like. Where do they get frustrated? What conventions of your chosen game confuse them? What conventions of their native genre do they expect that your game fails to provide?

This exercise teaches empathy across audiences. Designers who only know their own audience build games that only their audience can love. That is sometimes the correct strategy, but it is always a strategy — not a default.

Comparative Exercises

Exercise 35.3: Stamina Across Genres

Stamina bars appear in many genres, but they do very different work in each. Pick five genres from the list below and for each, find a specific game that uses stamina. Analyze how stamina functions in that game and what design problem it solves.

Candidate genres:

  • Action-RPG / soulslike (e.g., Dark Souls, Elden Ring)
  • Open-world adventure (e.g., Breath of the Wild)
  • Survival (e.g., Valheim, DayZ)
  • Fighting (e.g., Guilty Gear Strive's burst meter, Street Fighter 6's Drive Gauge as stamina-adjacent)
  • Extraction shooter (e.g., Escape from Tarkov)
  • Sports / racing (e.g., FIFA's player stamina, Gran Turismo's fuel/tire as stamina-adjacent)
  • Stealth (e.g., Dishonored, Shadow Tactics)

For each of your five, write 200-300 words covering:

  1. What does the stamina bar drain on? (Attacks, sprinting, jumping, dodging, blocking, combos?)
  2. How does it recover? (Time, input, consumable, rest?)
  3. What player behavior does it incentivize? (Patience, commitment windows, resource management, style?)
  4. What happens if you run out? (You die, you lose the round, you become vulnerable, nothing?)
  5. Would the game work without it? What would replace its function?

After the five individual analyses, write 400-500 words comparing them. What is the same job the stamina bar is doing across genres? What is different? Why do soulslike stamina bars feel punitive while BotW's climbing stamina feels expansive? Why does a fighting game's meter feel like a reward while a survival game's hunger meter feels like a chore? Same mechanical primitive — radically different emotional impact. That difference is the genre.

Deliverable: A single document, ~2,500 words total, titled "Stamina, Across Five Genres." This is the kind of analytical writing that clarifies your own design thinking even when nobody else reads it.

Design Exercises

Exercise 35.4: Genre Translation

Take your own progressive project — the 2D action-adventure you have been building since Chapter 3 — and re-imagine it in a different genre. Pick one of the following translations and write a 600-word design document sketching how the game would need to change:

  • Translation to roguelite. Your game becomes a run-based experience. Permadeath. Procedurally generated levels. Meta-progression between runs. What do you keep? What do you throw away? What do you add? Does the story structure survive, or does it get chopped into per-run narrative fragments (as in Hades)?

  • Translation to turn-based tactical. Your game becomes an Into the Breach-shaped grid-tactics experience. No real-time combat — discrete tiles and turns. What do enemies, weapons, and movement become? Can the exploration still exist, or does the game become mission-based?

  • Translation to cozy life sim. Your game becomes Stardew Valley-adjacent. Combat becomes a minigame, not the core loop. The core loop becomes relationships, crafting, seasonal rhythms. What NPCs does the world need? What is the player's long-term goal?

  • Translation to immersive sim. Your game becomes multi-solution, system-driven. Every problem has at least three approaches (violence, stealth, social, environmental). What systems do you need to add? Where does your tight authored design become open-ended?

  • Translation to narrative walking sim. Your game becomes Firewatch-adjacent. Combat is removed. Movement, observation, and dialogue are the only verbs. What story do you tell? What environments do you build?

Do not try to do two translations. Pick one. Do it thoroughly. The exercise is not about which translation is best; it is about what genre does to a game. By the end of the document you will have learned what the current genre of your project is quietly contributing that you had stopped noticing.

Exercise 35.5: The Steam Tag Exercise

Open Steam. Find the store page of three games that are in the same genre as your own (or closest to it). Look at the full tag list each game carries. Write them down.

Then imagine your game's Steam page. What tags will you apply? Which tags are required by the genre? Which tags are differentiation tags that highlight what is specific about your game? Are there any tags that would be dishonest (tags that would attract players who would not enjoy your game)?

Write a 300-word "Steam Tag Strategy" document listing:

  • Primary genre tag (1)
  • Secondary genre tags (2-3)
  • Aesthetic / tonal tags (2-3)
  • Audience / playstyle tags (2-3)
  • Any tags you are deliberately avoiding, and why

This document goes into your marketing plan (we return to it in Chapter 38). Revisit it every six months as genre trends on Steam shift.

Exercise 35.5.5: Genre Stress Test

Take any game you have played for 20+ hours. Write a one-page answer to the following question: if this game failed as a release, what genre-positioning mistake would have been most responsible?

This is a hypothetical. Imagine the game flopped — only sold 2,000 copies despite real development investment. Which of these failures is most plausibly the cause?

  • It picked the wrong primary genre tag (mislabeled itself in a way that pulled the wrong audience).
  • It claimed a genre without delivering its load-bearing conventions.
  • It fused two genres whose emotional registers conflict.
  • It entered a saturated genre without enough differentiation.
  • It entered a dying genre past the point of recovery.
  • It entered a nascent genre too early, before audience had formed.
  • It had identity but no genre (too weird for any audience to find).
  • It had genre but no identity (too generic to be remembered).

Pick the one most likely cause. Defend your answer in 300 words. Then propose a specific reframing — a different Steam tag strategy, a different competitor set, a different fusion — that would have repositioned the game for commercial survival.

This exercise trains you to diagnose genre failure before it is your own game failing. It is much cheaper to fix a positioning problem in pre-production than after launch.

Research Exercises

Exercise 35.6: The Emerging Genre Hunt

Identify an emerging or recently-established genre — something that did not exist as a recognized category five years ago but clearly exists now. Candidates include:

  • Bullet heaven / survivors-likes (post-Vampire Survivors, 2022)
  • Poker roguelites / Balatro-likes (post-Balatro, 2024)
  • Cozy simulation / cozy games (emerging as a recognized category since 2020)
  • Extraction shooters as a genre (cemented post-Hunt: Showdown, expanded by Tarkov, now featuring Marathon)
  • "Type racer" subgenre of speed-based retro platformers
  • Souls-like metroidvania (Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Lies of P, Nine Sols)
  • Dragon Ball FighterZ-style 3v3 team anime fighters
  • AI-narrator or AI-content games (emerging 2024-2025)

Pick one. Then trace its founding:

  1. What were the 2-3 games that established the genre? When did they release? Who made them? What was the commercial / critical response?
  2. What distinguishes this genre from its parent(s)? Every emerging genre is a recombination or evolution of existing genres. Name the parents and the specific mutations that justify a new label.
  3. What are the current representative games? Find 3-5 currently-released or upcoming games that represent the state of the genre.
  4. What is the current debate about the genre? Is there disagreement about what counts? Is the label growing stale? Is the trend peaking?
  5. If you were going to make a game in this genre, what would be the biggest design challenge?

Write a 1,000-word "Genre Dossier" covering the above. Cite sources — Steam pages, developer interviews, sales data, podcast discussions, Reddit threads, YouTube essays. This is research work. Do it rigorously.

The goal is to practice the skill of seeing genre emergence in real time. Most designers notice a genre only after it has peaked. The designer who can spot an emerging genre when it is still forming — six months into the first wave — has a competitive window. This exercise is the muscle you will use to catch the next one.

Exercise 35.7: Dead Genre Autopsy

Pick a genre that was commercially dominant 15-25 years ago and is now largely dead or deeply reduced. Candidates:

  • Classic point-and-click adventure (LucasArts era)
  • Plastic-instrument music game (Guitar Hero, Rock Band era)
  • The AAA 3D platformer (post-Banjo-Kazooie, pre-Astro Bot revival)
  • WWII-setting military FPS (Medal of Honor, early Call of Duty era)
  • Real-time strategy (StarCraft, Warcraft, Command & Conquer era)
  • Space combat sim (Wing Commander, Freespace)
  • Movie tie-in games

Write a 500-word autopsy. Why did the genre decline? What replaced it? Did it die, or did it migrate (e.g., modern RTS DNA is alive inside MOBAs; modern point-and-click DNA is alive inside walking sims)? Is there a path back?

Extend your autopsy with a second 300-word section: the revival plan. If you were given a $2M budget and twenty months to bring this dead genre back, what would you change? What conventions would you keep as identity features? What conventions would you gut as aged-badly structural features? What audience would you target — nostalgic former fans, genre-adjacent players willing to cross over, or brand-new players who have never heard of the genre? Name three released games in adjacent genres whose audience overlap you would chase.

This is genre archaeology combined with genre forecasting. Together they are the two halves of knowing the medium's movement.

Exercise 35.8: Compare Three Chapter Anchors

Our anchor examples throughout the book are Celeste, Dark Souls, and Breath of the Wild. For this exercise, write a 600-word comparative analysis of where each of these games sits in its genre.

For each, address:

  1. Which genre does the game belong to? Which subgenre within that genre? Which emerging or established category does its Steam page occupy?
  2. Which genre conventions does it honor? (At least three specific ones.)
  3. Which genre conventions does it reinterpret or break? (At least two specific ones.)
  4. How did the game affect its genre after release? Did it spawn imitators, shift the conversation, redefine audience expectations?

Then write 200 words of reflection: what does comparing these three reveal about how different kinds of games relate to their genres? Celeste is a near-perfect expression of precision platformer conventions. Dark Souls is the founder of its own subgenre. Breath of the Wild is a genre-redefining deviation from a decades-old action-adventure lineage. Three different postures, three different successes. Your own game will fit one of these postures. Which?

Exercise 35.8: Genre Fusion Design Brief

Cross-genre fusion is one of the richest veins of innovation in modern design. This exercise asks you to deliberately design a fusion — not as a grad-thesis exercise, but as a producer's design brief that could plausibly greenlight a real game.

Pick two genres from the chapter that you do not see frequently fused. Some candidate pairings:

  • Immersive sim + rhythm game
  • Farming sim + extraction shooter
  • Turn-based tactics + horror
  • Visual novel + roguelite
  • 4X strategy + platformer
  • Fighting game + card game (not Yu-Gi-Oh! — a fusion, not a VN-with-duels)
  • Colony sim + narrative walking sim
  • Racing + survival horror

Write a one-page brief answering:

  1. What is the core loop? What does the player do in the first two minutes? How do the two genres' loops interleave? Does one genre dominate and the other serve as a layer, or do they alternate?
  2. Which genre provides the emotional register? Fusion only works if the emotional registers cohere. If you fuse cozy with punishing, you need a plan. What tone wins?
  3. What does progression look like? Progression in each genre is usually different (deck-builder card acquisition vs. RPG leveling vs. roguelite meta). How are you harmonizing them?
  4. Who is the audience? Which fans of which genre will love this? Which will bounce? What Steam tags will you apply?
  5. What reference game — in either genre — is this closest to? Name the relative you are acknowledging.

Do not over-polish. The exercise is about practicing fusion thinking, not producing a shipping design document. But if the brief is genuinely exciting, you now have a pitch you could bring to a game jam.

Exercise 35.9: Pitch Dissection

Find three game pitches in the wild — Kickstarter campaigns, Steam "Coming Soon" pages, or trade-press previews. For each, identify:

  1. Which genre tag(s) the pitch is claiming.
  2. Which conventions of those genres the pitch is promising to honor.
  3. Which conventions the pitch is promising to subvert, break, or reinterpret.
  4. Whether the pitch is coherent — does the honor / break ratio feel earned, or is the game trying to break too many conventions at once?
  5. Whether you would buy this game. Why or why not?

This exercise builds your diagnostic muscle. You are learning to read genre claims critically — a skill that will serve you both as a designer evaluating your own work and as a critic of others'.

Exercise 35.10: The Five-Minute Elevator Pitch

The ultimate test of genre clarity is whether you can pitch your game in one minute to a publisher, a fellow developer, or a potential team member and have them form an accurate picture of what you are making.

Write a 90-second elevator pitch for your progressive project. Time yourself reading it aloud. It should cover:

  • The genre and closest three comparisons ("it's a 2D Metroidvania in the lineage of Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, and Nine Sols").
  • The hook — the single specific feature that distinguishes it from that lineage ("but every enemy is a puzzle with a specific defeat condition rather than a damage sponge").
  • The tone or aesthetic signature ("the whole game is set inside the stomach of a dying god; the palette is blood and amber").
  • The target audience ("players who finished Hollow Knight and wanted more environmental narrative").
  • The approximate scope ("twelve hours, solo developer, Steam release Q4").

Then rehearse it. Deliver it to three different people (a designer, a non-gamer, a gamer who does not play your genre). Note where they get confused, where they get interested, and where they start asking follow-up questions. The pitch that works across all three audiences is the pitch ready for a Steam capsule description, a publisher meeting, or a trailer voiceover.

The elevator pitch is the compression test of genre clarity. A game you can pitch in 90 seconds is a game you understand. A game you cannot pitch in 90 seconds is a game whose genre position you have not yet finished thinking through.

Reflection

After completing the exercises above, write a one-page reflection on your own project. Has your understanding of your game's genre position changed? Did any of the translation or comparative exercises reveal conventions you had been carrying without noticing, or conventions you were breaking without knowing? Did any of the research exercises surface an emerging genre that overlaps with your project in ways you had not considered? Are your three competitors still the right three, or do you now see a different trio?

File this reflection in your Game Design Document under "Genre Position — revised." We will reference it in Chapter 38 when we build the Steam page copy that sells this game to the people most likely to love it. The clearer your genre thinking at the end of Chapter 35, the sharper every marketing decision you make in Chapters 37 through 40 will be.

One final note: do not treat genre analysis as a one-time exercise. The position of your game changes as the genre moves around it. A Metroidvania released in 2022 faces a different market than one released in 2026 — competitors have shipped, audience tastes have shifted, adjacent genres have borrowed Metroidvania conventions into their own tags. Revisit your genre-position document every few months during development. Let the map update as the territory changes.