Games That Push Back with Bennett Foddy

What It Covers

Game designer Bennett Foddy, creator of QWOP, Getting Over It, and Baby Steps, discusses his physics-driven design process with host Joe Nash. Topics include how gameplay emerges from discovered systems rather than planned mechanics, why "difficulty" is an imprecise concept, how streaming reshaped player experience, and the five-year development arc of Baby Steps.

Key Questions Answered

• •Physics-first prototyping: Rather than designing a complete game concept upfront, Foddy builds physics rigs with constraints and observes what gameplay emerges. QWOP, for example, was intended as a competent running simulator but became something absurd through discovery. This approach requires making and discarding significantly more prototypes than conventional design, but yields richer, less predictable mechanical depth.
• •Human bodies as design shorthand: Using humanoid avatars eliminates the need for tutorials by leveraging players' pre-existing physical intuitions. A human figure in athletic gear instantly communicates weight, fragility, stride length, and fatigue expectations. This allows designers to skip onboarding entirely and deliver friction-forward experiences immediately, since players already carry a dense bundle of embodied assumptions into the game.
• •Difficulty as expectation mismatch: Foddy argues "difficulty" is too blunt a concept because it is entirely relative to player expectations. QWOP is only hard if you expect to reach the finish line. Games like Europa Universalis carry enormous friction through complexity but are never labeled difficult. Designers should interrogate what specific emotional friction they are engineering rather than defaulting to difficulty as a catch-all descriptor.
• •Progress loss creates stakes: Checkpointing and quick-saving eliminate fear, stress, and the sensation of being on a high wire. Games like the FromSoftware catalog and TrackMania's DeepDip community maps — a checkpointless tower with a $30,000 community prize — demonstrate that removing safety nets produces passionately engaged audiences. Foddy notes this cycles in roughly generational waves as players and designers alternate between safety and stakes.
• •Design for spectators simultaneously: Baby Steps was deliberately designed so both player and spectator have a coherent experience. This dual orientation also makes games work well for living-room hot-seat play, with multiple people passing a single controller. Foddy reports playtesters frequently described five-person sessions as a highlight, an outcome that emerged directly from treating streaming audiences as a legitimate second audience during development.
• •Assume all boundaries are compromised: Baby Steps ships with virtually no invisible walls in its open world, treating every cliff and rock face as already exploited — similar to a network admin assuming every password is breached. This approach supports speed runners by preventing crashes on unexpected paths and produces cleaner design overall. The glitchless Baby Steps record currently sits around 45 minutes; the glitched run reaches approximately 8 minutes.