This is basically how I always work.
Before the arcade got built, I went and did the research. My favorite games, the ones my kids keep coming back to, what is popular on the App Store, and how each of them actually does it.
I have to, have to, have to understand the problem first and look at how other people have solved the problem.
What came out of the breakdown was smaller than I expected. Simple art styles. Single mechanics. One room. Prototypes that focus on getting one thing right. Controls that reveal themselves in nearly the same order in every game that works.
Reward mechanics without the hooks.
The category has a nasty toolbox: streaks, timers, pressure loops tuned to keep kids playing past the point of fun. The research kept surfacing the same counterexample. The best titles in the category removed scores, timers, and win states, and kids played more. Parents can smell a pressure mechanic instantly, and in kids’ software the parent is the buyer. Building rewards ethically turned out to be the strong commercial play as well as the obvious right one.
That one thread alone is pages and pages of writing I still owe.
The step most people skip is compression.
Doing research is common. Then it sits in a folder while the build happens from memory. So I compressed everything I learned into the system itself: five playbooks that live inside the arcade project, one for design principles, one for age-banded UI limits, one for teaching interactions, one for competitor teardowns, one for the business rules.
When I sit down to code, it is already there.
It helps guide me, it reminds me about choices that we made, it reminds me about things that we discussed, and it makes every build better.
The playbooks load before a game gets designed. Every build starts smarter than the one before it.
The same move runs through everything.
The arcade corpus is one instance of a habit that shows up in everything I build. Understand the problem, break down how other people solved it, then keep what you learned somewhere the next build actually reads. BrainOS is that habit given a permanent home.