Resource management for autistic players · 2025
Wish it Away
A single-player fantasy game built for autistic children, and the first game Matthew hand-coded end to end on his own. You get three wishes for the entire game, three hard rules about what a wish can't do, and resources that only ever arrive once — all of it designed to make a player stop and think twice before spending anything.
Design pillars
Three wishes, three rules
You are granted three wishes for the whole game, and a wish cannot give you more lives, cannot kill an opponent, and cannot produce more wishes. The rules are what make a wish a real decision instead of an escape hatch — and every wish still carries a consequence of its own.
Every resource arrives once
Nothing replenishes. Spells can be upgraded but only cast a set number of times, and each spell is strongest against a particular kind of enemy. Scarcity is the whole teacher: spending without thinking is felt immediately rather than explained afterwards.
Straightforward on purpose
The story is plain and the mechanics are plain, deliberately. For this audience clarity isn't a simplification, it's the requirement — a rule you can't parse is a rule you can't weigh, and weighing the rules is the entire point of the game.
Process
How it actually went
Designing around how the players actually think
Autistic children often act on the first impulse — whatever is most appealing right now — without much regard for what follows. In a classroom or at home that's usually fine, because the environment absorbs it. Outside one it isn't, because every decision carries some consequence. I wanted a game where that link between choice and consequence was the mechanic rather than the moral. It was my first project in Unity, and I wrote every system in it myself rather than assembling one out of tutorials.
Taking the wish from Slay the Spire
The wish system is modelled on how Slay the Spire makes you commit: a powerful option you can reach at any moment, priced so that reaching for it is never automatic. Wishes are granted by an AI shown as a hooded figure, summoned with W, so the decision has a face attached to it.
Building the bestiary by mixing species
I lean towards Monster Hunter-style creatures, so I designed enemies by combining elements that don't belong together — a snake samurai, a stump hydra, an ice golem. For the final boss I referenced Fatalis, both its silhouette and the way its attacks are patterned.
Using colour as a warning
The world is bright and saturated, closer to Tears of the Kingdom; the enemies are much darker and more desaturated. Putting those two palettes next to each other does the work a tutorial would otherwise have to do — the contrast itself tells the player when to slow down and choose carefully.
Gallery
Click any image to see it full size.
Outcome
- Going into use at the autism clinic, to be linked from their website
- First game hand-coded end to end, solo, in Unity
- Designed for players aged 7+, specifically autistic children