We were watching a cinematic sequence that wasn’t hitting. Everyone in the room understood what it was trying to communicate — the intent was clear, the performances were there, the edit was technically fine. But something was off. It didn’t feel right. It felt like it was moving too fast, too sharp, cutting through moments that deserved more weight. Someone said it out loud. The group agreed — we all felt it. Cutting something out of the sequence felt like the wrong direction. Adding something felt like adding scope we didn’t have.
Then someone who had been listening to that conversation had an idea. What if we added crossfades between the shots instead of the hard cuts that were there? Not slower shots. Just softer transitions. A visual breath between moments.
We tried it. Something clicked. The sequence slowed down just enough to match the emotion it was trying to carry. Then another person took it further, “what if we fade to black and hold on black for just a moment before fading back up?” Black screens don’t add scope. The feeling in the room shifted — that particular kind of quiet that happens when something works. That was a vibe. Not a metric. Not a pillar. A shared instinctual recognition that something had gone from not quite right to right.
And none of it would have happened if someone hadn’t said it out loud first.
What Is A Vibe Anyway
A vibe is the instinctual reaction to something you experience. It’s the step that happens after “I wonder if X” — you run the scenario in your head, or you watch something, or you hear something, and before you’ve consciously processed it your gut has already filed a reaction. Something feels right or it doesn’t. Something feels true to the game or it doesn’t. Something feels like it’s missing or it feels complete.
This isn’t guesswork. It isn’t preference. It’s a trained response to accumulated experience — every game you’ve played, every film you’ve watched, every piece of music you’ve absorbed, every project you’ve shipped or watched fail. Vibes are experience compressed into instinct. The more experience you have, the more calibrated your instincts become, and the more you can trust the feeling when it arrives.
Vibes are also, I’d argue, the crux of creativity. Before you have a design, before you have pillars, before you have anything to test or measure, you have a feeling about what something could be. That feeling is where it starts. The crossfade didn’t come from a design document. It came from someone listening to a vibe and having an idea.
Where Vibes Matter Most
Early. Before there’s a playable build, before there’s a single playtest result, before there’s anything to measure at all — vibes are often the only thing you have to go on. In pre-production and early concepting, instinct is doing the heavy lifting. What does this game feel like? What’s the tone? What does it feel like to play? What makes it different from everything else?
These aren’t questions you can answer with data that doesn’t exist yet. You answer them with taste, instinct, and experience. And in my experience, vibes are what help you discover your pillars — the high level rules that will eventually guide every decision on the project. The pillars don’t arrive fully formed from a whiteboard session. They emerge from people feeling their way toward what the game is trying to be, articulating those feelings, and finding the language that makes them testable.
The ability to tune into vibes grows with experience. A developer early in their career might feel that something is off without being able to say why. A more experienced one has seen enough to recognize the pattern and name it. Both are valuable — the instinct and the language for it develop together over time.
As the project goes on and things solidify, vibes don’t stop mattering. They become more specific, more refined. And ultimately they’re what makes the game feel like it belongs to the people who made it. The fingerprints that data alone can’t account for.
Where Vibes Add Static
There’s a point in every project where the vibe in the room and the numbers from the playtest start to diverge. Someone feels strongly that a feature is working. The data says something different. This is where vibes become dangerous if they’re not held correctly.
Late in production, when decisions carry significant cost and timeline implications, instinct needs to earn its place at the table. A vibe that contradicts clear metric data isn’t automatically wrong — sometimes the instinct is catching something the metric isn’t measuring yet. But it needs to be interrogated, communicated, and tested rather than simply asserted. “It feels right to me” is not enough when the line is telling you something different.
Knowing when to trust the feeling and when to trust the number is one of the harder skills in game development. The best developers I’ve worked with hold both — they don’t dismiss their instincts when the data pushes back, but they also don’t use instinct as a shield against evidence. They use the vibe to ask better questions of the data.
Vibes Without Communication Are Useless
Here’s the thing about the crossfade story: the vibe existed in everyone who watched that cinematic. We all felt something was off before anyone said so. But feeling it privately and saying it out loud are completely different things. Without the person who named it — who gave the group a shared language for what they were experiencing — the crossfade is never attempted. The sequence ships as it was. The vibe dies with the people who had it.
A vibe without the ability to communicate it leads to frustration and resentment. You know something isn’t right. You can’t make anyone else see it. Or you don’t feel safe trying. The work continues in a direction that feels wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Communicating vibes is a skill, and it has three layers.
The first is personal vocabulary — and building it requires more than just showing up to work. The more games you’ve played, the more films you’ve watched, the more music you’ve absorbed, the more books you’ve read, the richer your reference library becomes — and reference is how you translate feeling into language. “This feels like the opening of a Tarkovsky film” is communicable. “It just feels off” is not, or at least not without more. The work of developing taste is also the work of developing the vocabulary to share it. Experience builds both simultaneously.
Side note: The reference library you draw on when communicating a vibe is only as rich as what you’ve put into it. Fill your life with art and creativity on purpose, not just when a convenient opportunity presents itself. The vocabulary doesn’t build itself — and that’s worth its own future post.
The second is relational trust. Vibes require safety to share. A room where instinct gets dismissed — where “I have a feeling about this” is treated as a nuisance rather than information — produces silence. And silence produces games where the vibe that could have made something special never makes it out of anyone’s head. This connects to something I’ve written about before — you have to be both the student and the teacher. Creating an environment where people feel safe enough to voice an instinct, even an inarticulate one, is as much a skill as having the instinct in the first place.
The third is timing. A vibe about a cinematic sequence means something different in pre-production than it does two weeks before ship. Knowing when to voice an instinct, when to hold it, and when to push past the discomfort of not yet having the language for it — that’s its own discipline. The more you practice communicating vibes, the better you get at reading the room for when they’ll be heard.
The Thing Underneath Everything
Pillars are crystallized vibes. They’re what happens when instinct gets refined, tested, argued over, and eventually codified into something testable. Success metrics prove whether the vibe was right — whether the thing that felt true to the game actually landed with the people playing it. But without the vibe in the first place, you’re building by committee. You’re optimizing for measurements without a feeling underneath them, and the result tends to be something that passes every gate and moves nobody.
The crossfade worked because someone felt something, said it out loud, and someone else heard it and had an idea. That chain — feeling, language, reception, action — is how vibes become games.
Trust them. Develop the vocabulary to share them. Create the space for others to share theirs.
Just vibes.