By mini-games / puzzles during combat, I mean winning encounters requires the completion of a mini-game of sort. The best and most recent example being PRAGMATA, where, instead of simply shooting at enemies, you must complete hacking mini-games to reduce their defences and inflict various effects, doing so with the face buttons. To my knowledge, there's no game that attempted having a shooting mechanic as complex than that, generally you "just" have to accurately shoot at the enemy weak-points, with Dead Space pushing this mechanic a bit deeper by making body shoots and head shots less effective than strategic dismemberment. In Cursed III, you can cast spells by drawing the correct sigils using a hexagonal connect-the-dots puzzle. There's games that require "priming" enemies before attempting to damage them, like in Alan Wake where you must remove the darkness shrouding enemies, but even then, it's either a passive method by directing the flash-light or igniting an AOE flare, either with flare guns and flash bangs that act as regular weapons. Fatal Frame has its camera who's shots inflict more damage depending on their quality and risky timing, but the execution from the player boils down to pressing the trigger at the right moment, as if wielding a capricious shotgun.

I myself want to create a combat system where damaging the enemy would be more complex than simply aiming and pressing. Enemies would be much less numerous per encounter, and adopting a hit-and-run tactic instead of blindly charging at the player, resulting in an overall slower-paced combat. However I'm not sure if I should push this idea or simplify it like the aforementioned examples.

I would like to know the reasons why, apart from PRAGMATA, shooters haven't really tried a combat system where shooting (or preparing the enemy for a shot) is mechanically more complex than staring at the target and/or pressing the trigger at the right time. Is it because it risks slowing down the gameplay? It would be too complex in the heat of the moment? It would require an awkward control scheme, with strong contrast between controller and keyboard set-ups? How would you design such a mechanic, if you had to?

I loved the system in Children of Morta where you could level up the various characters and each of them would have passive global stat buffs or unlockable abilities that would only activate when that character wasn't the one chosen for the run. Has anybody seen any other versions of mechanics like that where non-active player characters can affect the current active character's gameplay?

Context: I'm working with a team that is designing a rebellion roguelite, so you choose one rebel to attempt a run with, but some or all of the other rebels can aid you in some way during the run, without having them as fully programmed AI.

Hello everyone!

Me and my best friend have been working on House of Echoes for almost a year now, a puzzle psychological horror game. As we’re nearing release, we still have some concerns over difficulty and general balancing of a puzzle game.

Let me start by saying that we want this to be a hard game, something more geared towards enthusiast of the puzzle genre. However, it goes without saying that we don’t want it to be so hard and so cryptic that almost nobody gets it and is put off by it. A lot of puzzles feel very hard to balance because they’re either the kind of thing that you instantly get or the kind of thing that no matter how much time you spend on it you probably won’t ever understand. For example, this is why we decided during development at some point that we won’t do math puzzles. They’re just too... “binary” (‘scuse the pun). Either you’re good enough at math to get how to solve the equation or you’re not, in which case you probably won’t know how to do it.

As such, we’ve focused more on perception-based challenges, riddles, more logic-based puzzles which hopefully have you think and try out things a bit before you get the answer. But it still feels a bit up in the air. We’ll have a playtest with some of our friends and acquaintances to test the waters once we get things a bit more fleshed out, but we’re worried at least some of the puzzles may fall into either too easy or too difficult category.

We’d love to hear from anybody who has more experience with these types of games (either playing or creating them) on how they expect the difficulty of these puzzles to be balanced.

Anyway, don’t want to make the post too long, hope I have described the game and the dilemma well enough. If you want to take a closer look at the game I’ll leave a link here for our Steam page as well: House of Echoes on Steam

One thing I like in tactical space games is when taking damage changes your decisions instead of just reducing a health bar.

A weapon goes offline. Engines get damaged. Crew gets pulled away to deal with a problem. Suddenly your original plan doesn't work anymore.

But that can also turn into a death spiral, where the player who's already losing just gets fewer meaningful options.

Which games handle this well? What makes battle damage create an interesting new problem instead of just making a losing position worse?

Hi all,

I'm designing an asymmetric board game.

Setup:
- 8x8 grid
- 1 Runner (Bandit): must collect 4 objectives (banks) scattered on board + exit
- 2-3 Chasers (Police): place permanent barriers (walls) to block paths. Movement by dice.

Problem:
Runner win rate ∼70% in my playtests. Once runner gets 2 banks, police can't catch up because barriers are too slow to place (1 per turn). But if I give police 2 barriers/turn, they can lock board turn 4 and it's not fun for runner.

Solutions I'm considering:
1.  Pollution mechanic: each barrier costs police -1 movement next turn
2.  Banks give police a free barrier when collected (rubber band)
3.  Smaller dice for runner (d4 vs d6 for police)

Has anyone solved this kind of runner vs builder balance? What worked for you?

Thanks

Here's the game, if you want to go in blind: https://untitleddraftinggame.vercel.app/ (server might take a little bit to startup if it's been inactive)

I've been discussing recently about the wonders of drafting systems; being particularly fond of the drafting in Magic the Gathering. Some may think that drafting is just a means to play another game; but something that people who play these formats will tell you, is that drafting can be incredibly complex and engaging in it's own right.

When I started this project, I wanted to find out what made MTG drafting so fun in comparison to other systems. Most non-tcg systems (e.g boardgames) that use drafting normally do open-drafting or what I'd call pseudo-closed drafting.

Variants of drafting

Open drafting (i.e CLANK!, Dune Imperium, Everdell): These are systems where all options are visible to all players and all choices are also visible.

Pseudo-closed drafting (Sushi Go!, 7 Wonders): These are systems where not all options are visible to all players, but all choices are made visible.

Closed drafting (Magic the Gathering: draft): These are systems where not all options are visible to all players and choices are not made visible.

Open drafting introduces us to how drafting provides a limited pool of options to evaluate from, the concept of "pushing your luck" (by taking card A first, hoping no one will take card B) and "hate drafting" (taking cards that aren't great for you in order to prevent someone else from taking it).

Pseudo-closed drafting introduces asymmetric knowledge into the game. Which brings implied knowledge and increases the decision making complexity. Good decisions become increasingly influenced by other players at the table.

Closed drafting is finally a place where implied knowledge takes a meaningful step up. Not directly knowing what your opponents choose, means you don't know what strategy they are going for. This amplifies all the existing mechanics and rewards/punishes those who imply information correctly or incorrectly. The value of cards becomes dynamic, shifting depending on what strategies are popular during this particular game (thereby effecting the push-your luck mechanic). Hidden choices means hate-drafting becomes more difficult. Ultimately, all decisions become more difficult and much less "solvable".

Supporting a draft system
You've probably already realized that some of these mechanics are relatively meaningless on their own. When and how do they become interesting? There are 3 aspects that I'd like to suggest lead to a system where drafting can become interesting.

1. Synergies

Firstly, the game requires the value of cards to be heavily influenced by other cards. If cards are all independently valuable, regardless of context, then players will just pick the "best" card each time.

1. Strategy contention

Synergies need to exist in a system where they get stronger/weaker depending on the other players. In a draft system, it should be difficult to always go for a particular strategy (generally because other players will go for it).

1. Flexibility

Many draft systems require you to use every card you choose. The downside to this is that players are punished for being experimental or taking risks. A good draft system encourages you to try and find the best strategy for that game. To do this, you often need to take "bets", making less cohesive decisions early on, in order to be rewarded later in the game.

How I support them in my game

1. Hidden and obvious synergies

Sushi Go! is an excellent example of the drafting system being simplified in an effective way. One thing that you might have noticed from games like it, is that synergies are very obvious (with only a few less obvious ones). Collect all the nigiri, collect all the hand-rolls, etc. I think obvious synergy is very good to have in any game, as it makes it much easier to pick up. However, I think hidden synergy is also very important in order to make the game more interesting. To do this, I have synergies that exist outside of "colors"/classes - that might not be obvious at first.

1. Limited and overlapping strategies

My game is built for 4 players, I have 3 classes/strategies to go for and 3 dual-classes between them. This ensures that at least one color will always be contested each game, preventing boring situations where everyone just picks their favorite color. The dual-classes also increase the space for cards to be good in multiple (but not all) strategies.

1. Card pack, pool and deck sizes

Players draft 3 packs of 6 cards (18) and build a deck of 8 cards. Not every card they draft has to be used in their deck. This also adds another decision point later on, of constructing a deck.

1. Asymmetrical and dynamic value of cards

I didn't really touch on this much earlier, but somewhat alluded to it. In order for drafting to be interesting, the best choice needs to be difficult to make. We've touched on how hidden/implied knowledge, synergies and strategy contention play into this, but it's worthwhile to expand on that a bit more. If a card is universally good, then it should maybe be removed from the game. If a card is universally bad, then it should maybe be removed from the game. It's something like this. The strongest card should be great in a specific context, and weaker outside of those contexts. Similarly, it's interesting to have cards that are normally "bad", but in some situations they become playable. Not every card during a draft needs to be flashy or strong, bad cards that are situationally strong (or even just playable) are good to have. One of the most interesting things that a draft system can do is make it correct to choose a "bad" card over a "good" card.

Disclaimers about my game: currently "borrowing" art from MTG for card illustrations (as I prefer that over gen AI) - until I find an artist or/if the game goes anywhere (mainly just a portfolio piece for now). Whilst I do have bots that you can play and test the game with, it's ideally played with 4 real players. Also, server hasn't been battle tested; sorry if it dies on you.

This may be a niche topic ultimately, but wanting to ask regardless. Essentially, it's where despite the size of the hub; there's actually alot of stuff to find/do. One exmaple I have is Mario Galaxy's 2 hub, which have a good amount of stuff to do. However, I do wanna know some others exmaple, mostly for inspiration.

Hey !

I just announced Floraison my cozy narrative game about language of flowers where you create bouquet and chose what flowers you put inside to shape the story around you.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4649990/Floraison/

People like the game but still confused about the main mecanic : crafting bouquet, depending on which flower you put inside the bouquet, the message and meaning you'll have is different and impact the story.

I mainly think that it's because my game trailer is a bit confusing, what do you think about that ?

The idea of having not only a permadeath character but also a character who will inevitably age and die is surprisingly compelling and very rare.

One Hour One Life pulled off this concept in a cult classic indie experience. The game allows players to be born into a cooperative, massively multiplayer world where they work together to build societies despite only living for one hour each.

There’s also a family aspect. When players spawn in, they are only babies and need to be raised by player built communities in order to reach adulthood.

That game is incredibly rough around the edges with about every problem in the book, from rough graphics, unintuitive gameplay, and largely abandoned development. Despite this, it retains an active playerbase to this day.

This tells me that the concept is so unique and appealing that since One Hour One Life is the only game to do this, it remains relevant.

A game with this mechanic is a lot more engaging, as you know your time with your character is fleeting. This encourages players to think about their legacy rather than just levelling up or completing a predetermined story. It encourages players to make connections with each other.

So, could this idea be applied to more multiplayer games? I think the concept could be underutilised.

This is nothing I’ve been doing in the immediate future, but I always loved the SNES Sim city game because of how stupid simple and fun it was.

And I was thinking something like that for civilization could be really popular.

One of the things that I was thinking would be interesting is to have population be a major currency.

And I would have every single unit and every single worker, and every single occupied tile count as a person.

Like just one person.

Every turn your population grows and you distribute where the new population goes.

This is how you claim territory.

Or if you need troops you drop that population into training.

Or make them a spy. Or a trader. Or a governor. Or whatever.

Every single unit is a single population represented as one person.

How would you make a game about building a CPU genuinely fun?

I'm working on an educational game where players gradually build their own computer from scratch. The audience for this game can be anyone from class 6-10 students.

The player would start with basic electrical and logic components and eventually build things such as logic gates, registers, an ALU, memory and finally a functioning CPU. After building the computer, the player would also program their own custom machine and solve challenges such as calculating Fibonacci numbers, prime numbers and other programs.

I originally built and programmed a simple CPU myself using breadboards because I wanted to understand what was happening inside a computer rather than treating it as a black box. Now I'm trying to turn that learning experience into a game.

My biggest question is about game design:

How do I make building and programming a computer feel like a game rather than an interactive textbook?

Would progression, puzzles, debugging challenges, limited components, optimization challenges or something else make this interesting?

I'd really appreciate feedback from people interested in game design.

I posted here a few months ago about a group prediction game where players guess the margin of sports games. The problem then was relative scoring (closest guess in the group gets the most points) letting early leaders build an uncatchable lead. Worth reporting back: I later back-tested six scoring systems against real player data, and determined it was an attrition problem. I lessened the starting round points and it seems to have fixed it.

So my next question...

Now I'm building a season-long leaderboard mode, up to 100 players, and I've dropped relative scoring in favor of "proximity points" (how close you are to the real outcome). Your score doesn't depend on who else entered. It's closer to being awarded a letter grade than beating the field.

Untested so far. Three things I'm unsure about:

1. Does removing interdependence remove the competition? The board still ranks everyone, but you're playing the outcome rather than the other players.
2. How many bandwidths should there be? And how wide? Wide bands and everyone scores every week, so the board flattens. Narrow and most weeks are zeroes.

Thanks in advance!

I'm thinking about a small detective/horror game set in a quarantined town, where the player investigates a missing person.

The main gameplay would revolve around NPCs, investigation, information and a bit of immersive-sim design. The idea is inspired by Werewolf/Mafia, Prey, Call of Cthulhu, Pathologic and Shadows of Doubt.

There would be around 15–20 NPCs with personalities, routines, relationships, knowledge and secrets. The player would investigate by talking to people, observing their routines and gathering information.

For example, an NPC might claim they were home all night, but their routine suggests otherwise. You could confront them, investigate their house, ask someone else about them, or use another piece of information to expose the contradiction.

The immersive-sim aspect would come from having multiple ways to approach situations. If you need to enter a locked room, you might find a key, steal it, convince someone to let you in, follow someone inside, or find another way. NPCs would react to your actions and those reactions could affect later events.

There could also be a very basic combat system, mainly as a way to deal with problematic NPCs rather than as a combat-focused game.

I have a lot more in mind but i don't want to make post any longer.

The main thing I'm trying to validate is whether these mechanics are enough to carry an entire game. Does a game focused on NPCs, information, routines, investigation and player choice sound engaging enough?

I'm also unsure about how the NPCs should work.

Would it be better for their personalities to persist between playthroughs while their professions, relationships and roles change?

For example, Carlos could always be friendly but cowardly. In one playthrough he might be a hotel receptionist who knows something about a missing guest; in another, a police officer who knows something about the investigation.

Or would completely randomized personalities make the game more interesting and replayable?

I'd especially like to hear from people who enjoy detective games, immersive sims or horror.

Hey folks, I'm working on Grazed, an Action/Incremental hybrid. The core loop is simple: you start out super weak, die fast, buy upgrades, and eventually break the game.

Because I’ve played it many times, my difficulty radar is completely broken. I want the start to be tough, but I don't want players bouncing before they realize the upgrades are the whole point of the game.

I'd love your take on two things:

1. Does the early game feel intentionally hard, or just unfair/frustrating?
2. Does the Steam Page actually communicate this weird hybrid genre properly?

You don't need to download anything, it runs right in the browser: https://luciano-bercini.itch.io/grazed-incremental-arcade

Appreciate any honest feedback!

First, a little context: the vision with this project is to build a space management game as realistic as possible while at the same time making sure it is entertaining enough to actually be fun. That is a challenge!

In the game, you will be able to launch from your earth spaceport, sending satellites, telescopes, vessels into orbits or to other moons or planets.

But getting to that point requires knowledge which you must learn throughout the game. First goal will be a successful LEO (Low Earth Orbit) insertion.

Building a solar system - The beginning

If we were to present the solar system in true scale we would end up with a very dull game canvas, that would require a lot of zooming and panning to navigate it. It wouldn’t really present the actual solar system in a useful way, and would essentially end up looking empty.

So one of the first challenges was to figure out how we can present our solar system in a way that makes it navigable while at the same time giving a correct impression of the distances and planet sizes - but most important of all, staying as true to real as we can..

One approach to fix this would be to scale up the radius of each planet thus making them bigger so they are visible at all zoom ranges.

However, while this technically makes sense, we would need to scale each planet significantly, which would cause the sun to consume Mercury and Venus, just to have the rest of the planets slightly visible.

Scaling individually would not make sense either since we want to show the solar system as real as we can, and that would make it difficult to see the actual size difference on planets.

Furthermore since we will be using real trajectory and orbital mechanics, scaling would cause moons to cross into other planet systems making them slip their orbits effectively killing the goal of staying true to physics.

So we need a different approach to get to a good compromise between the actual solar system and one that can work on a game canvas - and by now, there's no doubt that it's going to have to be a compromise.

We could scale and normalize the distances between planet orbits, which would bring everything closer together, but by doing that we would end up with a solar system that does not present the differences in orbit distances. For example Earth is fairly close to Mars, but Mars is very far from its other neighboring planet, Jupiter. 

We have to make sure that these differences are visually shown.

Enter logarithmic scaling

So to scale down the solar system, while making sure we keep good visual distance differences, a logarithmic scaling approach could be the solution. This way we dense everything up, and keep a good visual presentation.

And with that, we now have a decent compromise that gives us a fairly correct view of the solar system while at the same time making it easy to navigate.

It does however spawn some new problems, such as visualizing space travel to outer planets.

Since orbits are log scaled, the outer most planets will appear closer while actually not being closer, so a ship travelling from Earth to Neptune will start its journey going fast (visually) and as it progresses it will appear to go slower and slower - but in reality it is maintaining the exact same speed (or close too).

How would you have approached this? Have you faced a similar challenge of scale?

I'm working on a horror-themed FPS where the main character use a screen of water to exorcise malevolent ghosts. The main principle of the combat system is that each successful attack toward a ghost taints the water with miasma, a spiritual pollution that curses whoever is contaminated, but that is treated as a currency to buy items and upgrades.

The base water reserve would be 100 units, and an attack would consume (and taint) 5 units of water, resulting in a tainting percentage of 5%. Damage inflicted by the attack and the resulting miasma points would depend on how well executed is the attack, naturally.

For the effects of having tarnished water, I have three contradictory choices :

1. The non-tainted water remains as regular, usable ammunition. So at 90% tainting, you'll have proportionally only a few attacks left before being out of "bullets". Very similar to how firearms work in shooters. It's a binary state of either working perfectly, or not working at all.
2. The effectiveness of the exorcism drops proportionally as it looses its purity. So at 90% tainting, the damage it inflicts is strongly reduced : 100% - 90%/2 = 55% effectiveness.
3. Being tainted increases attack strength and miasma absorption, but also increases the number of random battles and the amount of damage taken. Inspired by Darkest Dungeon light mechanic, and Fatal Frame 5 wetness mechanic. So a risk-and-reward mechanic, where as contamination rises, you'll essentially get more and more harassed by glass canons piñatas.

The water reserve would be capped at a certain value, but could be raised with specific upgrades.

Drinking fresh water adds to the total reserve, and thus dilute the miasma. So by drinking 100 water units, the tainting percentage would be 2.5%. However, the reserve is capped and the player couldn't simply drink every bottle available.

Drinking holy water removes tainted water and makes the remainder pure, if enough was consumed. The miasma is collected in phials, and becomes usable currency. This act frees space for regular water to fill the reserve, since attacking doesn't really removes water unlike firing bullets.

There's more to this combat system, such as the equivalent of a magic bar, the way exorcism inflicts damage, the status effects, but here I wanted to focus on the ammunition aspect of it. I tried to do something different than traditional firearms, but since I tread on unknown grounds, I need criticism and suggestions to make it functional and remove glaring issues.

I’m coming from electronic dance production and I’m trying to integrate sound effect to events. One thing I’m considering is what are some standard levels game developers use as standards.

In the case for dance music there’s a pretty standard -6db for the kick drum+bass. Is there anything similar for games?

its a 2D platforming game where you play as 3 characters, but not in the traditional sense where you can see them running around side by side at all times, instead, you press a buttom, and your current playable character transform into one of the 3. The problem is that i dont really want to come up with a story explanation for why the party system feels more like transformations than an actual party on a journey together

Would it create a dissonance between the story and the gameplay? or would it not be a big deal ?

thanks in advance! Also you're looking good today👈👈

I'm playtesting a small exploration game. The first area is deliberately constrained and can be walked around completely in under two minutes.

Players are taught what they're looking for and how the core interaction works. However, I've noticed an unexpected pattern across several playthroughs: some players repeatedly circle between a few established points of interest, while leaving large portions of the accessible area unexplored.

What's particularly interesting is that they may later describe themselves as having "searched everywhere."

I'm less interested in solutions like objective markers, since unguided observation is part of the design. I'm more interested in why this behaviour happens.

Is there established terminology/research around players preferring previously validated areas of interest over unexplored space? What environmental factors tend to create this kind of perceived boundary?

I’ve seen some indie games that utilize gameplay systems that are so unique that they come off as a gimmick yet they are not so taboo that they actually work to enhance immersion. Examples:

Moments where the player’s view/buttons are distorted due to some in-game cause like drinking alcohol, excessive damage.

A weapon is taken away that the player had access to the whole game.

Areas where movement speed/control is temporarily affected like poison swamps

A game that has no mini-map

Just wanted some thoughts on gimmicks and on how and when they work. I understand the subject could be subjective but I wasn’t sure if there were some gimmicks that could be objectively well designed. Thanks!

What if in They Are Billions, you weren't the commander, but just one of the many survivors? That's the idea I started from with this game. Right now, what I'm mainly working through is how to actually blend these two things together well.

Survivor NPCs have pretty complex logic, and recruiting them would need some solid design behind it, you can't just hit "F" and have someone agree to join your team. And honestly, I don't have the bandwidth to build something like that right now. So to make this gameplay work, for now I went with zombies as the player's labor force, while also giving players more gameplay options. Yeah, zombies. You can put a control device on a weakened zombie and have it work, fight, go out exploring, whatever you need. Meanwhile, you also have to build defenses strong enough to hold off an endless horde, until you eventually get overwhelmed by it.

Basically, on top of the usual survival loop, I've layered in a whole base-building and defense loop. I've also been thinking about adding a system where the bigger your base gets, the fiercer the zombie waves get too, and if the horde destroys your base but you happen to survive, the next waves would be weaker. But I'd need to come up with a setting that actually justifies this system, and make sure players can see it happening and have some control over it, like choosing to keep expanding and go head-to-head with bigger hordes, or slow down and stockpile resources first.

...okay, kinda went off track there. Basically what I need is to find the right balance between immersive survival and base defense/resource management, so the two systems actually connect and affect each other, instead of feeling like two separate things just bolted together.

Hi game devs! I'm a software engineering student and I was thinking about an idea that could help a few of you, particularly RPG makers. It's a platform in which you could assess the balancing of your game easily by transcribing the gameplay configuration of your game (level scaling, progression parameters, stats curves, passives, equipment, skills, resource allocation, unlocking trees, requirement trees, etc) into it and testing multiple encounters of party VS enemy (very simplified though for generalization) with player-simulated behaviour. I'm even thinking about simulating the entire game journey with checkpoints, planned encounters, and more. It would all be very generalized to accommodate as many as possible, but I recognize there's a lot of uncertainty that won’t be implementable like unique gameplay mechanics or randomness that could skew the math and bias the balancing. For now, I got the framework for RPG games mostly figured out, but in the future I plan to extend that platform's reach into other types of games like shooting games (with simulated gun ttk, maybe even simplified map modeling) or sims like city skylines etc. If such a tool interests you, what would you expect in it? What are the things you would avoid or recommend? What insights could you give me if I fully commit to the project?

Thanks in advance, I love you all 🥰

I think drafting in Magic the Gathering is exceptional and the best implementation of a closed-drafting game I have come across. Inspired by this, I built a card game last year on these mechanics (currently turning it into a web-app). Here are some of the games I looked at for inspiration during that process

• Magic the gathering (draft/sealed)
• Hearthstone (arena)
• Sushi Go!
• Dominion
• 7 wonders
• CLANK!

Of these, aside from MTG, I find Sushi Go! to be a very well designed drafting game. Whilst it doesn't capture all the benefits/joys of MTG drafting, the way it streamlines and simplifies a lot of the mechanics, whilst still being fun, is really commendable.

Some other games I've played, but didn't actively consider:

• Millennium Blades (GOAT of a game btw)
• Star Wars Unlimited
• Bonanza
• Point Salad
• Everdell
• Race for the Galaxy

Are there any other games that are good examples of drafting/limited?

I was thinking of expanding on this post, highlighting what some of these games do right/wrong (in my subjective opinion) and what Magic specifically does right - would anyone find that interesting?

p.s shout-out to millennium blades. And also mtg draft (particularly if you enjoy hearthstone arena - I'd encourage you to give it a go)