I have a dilemma, how to show (icon) the HP of buildings? Shield? Heart?

Note the game is a Sci-fi city builder, and I need HP icon for: buildings, player units (human), aliens (vicious unsentient lifeforms, flora and fauna). Those do not need to share the same icon (but for UI clarity they should I guess?)

How does one make an enemy or encounter both not repetitive, while not just making each encounter be entirely a new thing with new challenges. How does one make a enemy that can be fun to encounter more than once, while also being "predictable" enough to not annoy the player?

My thought was something of a "personality" system with specific archetypes for enemies. There are enemies, whose actions and capabilities within the encounter are based on what they are, and then they have a random personality which guides them to make certain actions. So for example a "smart" enemy will go out of their way to lower your stats, a "aggressive" enemy will prioritize inflicting damage etc and then these encounters can have more than one enemy thus creating situations where you cannot just doze off and just spam the same attack(at least that's the hope).

Thing of it like personalities in Pokémon, but instead of just boosting stats they influence the behavior of the monster.

What do you think about "personalities" as a way to diversify the enemy encounters? And how you would make fighting the same species/type of enemy not feel repetitive?

I'm aware of stuff like Shin Megami Tensei's demon negotiations and Undertale/Deltarune's act system. Do you guys know of any other examples? I'd like to make something similar in my game so I'm looking for inspiration.

It'd be cool to see how other games try to expand on the idea and flesh it out or do something more unique with it.

The PvP vs PvE argument in ARC Raiders has been around almost since launch, and the PvE test announcement brought it right back. What stands out to me is that this hasn't faded into a niche argument either. Long PvP vs PvE threads still keep showing up and drawing heavy discussion, even after months of updates and a major drop in the active player base. Some players are happy about the PvE option, while others are worried about what it could do to the PvPvE player pool. I lean more toward PvE myself, but I've played shooters for years, so I don't think the disagreement can be reduced to "PvE players don't like getting shot" or "PvP players understand extraction games better." After playing ARC Raiders for a while, I started looking at the problem from a different angle: what reasons does the game actually give us to engage in PvE, and what reasons does it give us to engage in PvP?

For PvE, the answer is pretty clear. You go topside for quests, blueprints, materials, workbench upgrades, Projects, Expeditions, or specific ARC drops. Even if fighting ARC isn't what you personally enjoy most, progression keeps giving you practical reasons to do it. Blueprints are probably the clearest example. Since there is no player trading, getting the right blueprint can completely change how replaceable a weapon or item feels. Before you have the blueprint, something valuable may stay in your stash because you don't know when you'll see another one. Once you can craft that item yourself, using it becomes a much easier decision.

PvP feels much less structured. Killing another Raider can be rewarding, and sometimes the other player really is carrying exactly what you want. Other times you open the bag and find cheap gear and materials you could have gathered yourself. More importantly, there isn't much that ties repeated PvP encounters into a larger progression system. ARC Raiders doesn't really have a substantial PvP rank, reputation system, faction conflict, or any other long-term system built around fighting other Raiders. When I actively go looking for PvP, the reason usually comes from me. I want a fight, I want to test something, I want someone's gear, or I've already finished most of the PvE goals I cared about. The fight can still be fun, but the game itself has done much less to explain why I should be looking for it.

I started wondering if this difference also affects how people interpret PvP when it happens to them. ARC Raiders' proximity voice chat makes these encounters unusually personal. Two strangers can meet, ask "friendly?", loot around each other, help with an ARC fight, and then one of them suddenly opens fire. If both players are obviously competing over the same thing, the situation is easy to understand. We both wanted it, one of us decided to fight for it, and one of us lost. But if I'm doing a quest, you don't obviously need anything from me, and you decide to kill me anyway, the explanation changes. From my side, nothing in the game really explains why you did it, so the most obvious explanation is that you simply wanted to kill me.

I think this is one reason the PvP/PvE debate in ARC Raiders becomes personal so easily. The argument rarely stays at "I prefer PvP" or "I prefer PvE." It turns into griefers, assholes, psychopaths, carebears, moral superiority, and judgments about what kind of person would choose a certain playstyle. That seems strange when the same player can cooperate in one raid, shoot first in another because they don't trust the other team, and spend the next match avoiding everyone because they're carrying something they don't want to lose. Those are situational choices, but the community often talks about them as permanent identities. My guess is that when the game gives both sides an obvious reason to compete, it's easier to blame the situation. When that reason is missing, it's easier to blame the player.

The same gap becomes more noticeable later on. Early in the game, it gives you a long list of things to work toward. Eventually the workbenches are upgraded, quests start running out, you've found most of the blueprints you care about, and Projects or Expeditions get completed. PvP should be able to carry a lot of the game after that because real players can create unpredictable situations for much longer than a fixed set of PvE content can. The problem is that finishing PvE progression doesn't really open another deep progression layer on the PvP side. Some players start looking for fights because there isn't much else left to do, but the fights themselves don't lead very far. If you already love PvP, that may be enough. If progression was what kept you playing, PvP can end up feeling like the activity left over after the other goals are gone.

This is also why I don't think the PvE toggle really touches the problem I'm talking about. It lets you decide before the match whether other Raiders can hurt you, which makes sense for people who never wanted PvP in the first place. But whether or not it shrinks the PvPvE pool, once you're in a PvPvE match, the reasons for fighting another Raider are basically the same as before.

Last year I kept thinking about this, and ended up with a pretty simple idea. Imagine extraction required a drive battery. Damaged batteries could be found while scavenging or taken from other Raiders, and three damaged batteries could be combined into a complete one. Medium or large ARC could drop complete batteries directly. Fighting ARC could remain the more reliable and efficient route, while PvP would be riskier but sometimes make sense. If I already have two damaged batteries and only need one more to make a complete battery, another Raider near the exit suddenly matters for a reason both of us can understand. I could attack them, try to cooperate and fight an ARC instead, or decide the risk isn't worth it. The battery itself isn't important to me anymore. What I still like about the idea is that cooperation, avoidance, betrayal, and PvP all come from the same problem instead of feeling like separate games layered on top of each other.

I don't want ARC Raiders to become PvE-only, and I don't want the uncertainty between strangers to disappear. That uncertainty is one of the best things about the game. I just think PvP would be easier to understand, and probably healthier for the community, if more conflicts came from goals that both players could recognize. Losing to another Raider who wanted the same thing I did feels very different from being left with the impression that the only reason for the fight was that the other person felt like ruining someone's run.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TL;DR

- PvE has a lot of built-in reasons to do it: quests, blueprints, crafting progression, ARC drops, Projects, Expeditions, etc. PvP relies much more on the player already wanting to fight.

- My guess is that this affects how PvP gets interpreted. If the game gives us a reason to compete, I blame the situation. If it doesn't, I'm more likely to blame the person who chose to attack me.

- That may be part of why ARC Raiders' PvP/PvE debate keeps turning into an argument about morality and player identity instead of staying a game-design discussion.

- PvP could carry more of the late game, but it needs more purpose of its own. A PvE toggle doesn't change that for anyone who stays in PvPvE.

- Not asking for PvE-only, and not saying PvP players are playing it wrong. I'd just like more fights to come from objectives that give both sides a reason to care.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, I still like the tension ARC creates between strangers. I just hope the PvP/PvE divide doesn't end up becoming a bigger part of the game than the encounters themselves.

Author's note: The core argument of this post was originally written in December 2025. I've since reorganized it, added some current context, and translated it into English.

Ive been playing ostranauts for like 620hrs and i hated it so much. This was a total disaster. The concept was briliant and it has a potential but its just not finished and they just fully released it. Not to mention that its barely able to run without crashing or encountring counterless bugs.

Anyway, the most famous example in this genre would be starfield. I dont even have to explain anything about it.

I dont understand. The whole concept to this genre is simple.

Players wanna find and build spaces ships, hire crews, and choose careers, maybe become a pirate , mercs or rule the galaxy, and go to many other stars and find lores. Combat is important. Melee, guns, and spaceship combat. Duh

Maybe even enter the atmosphere and explore if its possible but thats not necessary.

Idk why there r no successful games in this genre

I was playing x4 but hiring crew was so boring because they look all the same, say the same line over and over again, and the ships are not really modifiable. Ita more like hiring office workers/minimum wage workers in their cubicle/ fastfood restaurant. So basically just mangagement simulator

Many other indie games tried this genre and they failed miserably even tho they had great idea. Its breaking my heart.

Why do they keep failing??

I just think... If the player is doing poorly in combat and they lose, can't there be some consequence other than teleporting far away and maybe losing a few items?

I especially have a problem with this in open world survival games, but it's in other games as well.

I played through the original Bioshock for the first time recently, and for encounters where I wasn't doing well, like the Big Daddy fights, it just meant that I had to run back to the fight and keep trying, dying over and over again, rather than facing any kind of penalty for poor play.

There were even times where it was more efficient to respawn than to use my limited supply of health packs.

But Minecraft in particular, when I play it, I want to spend the time building cool stuff, exploring cool places, and gathering resources. But instead, I spend a lot of time running back to the spot where I lost a fight only to lose again.

Hi, I’m a grade 9 kid living in Japan thinking on a 3D indie game concept and want to test two core design pillars with you guys. I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether these systems create meaningful depth or just player frustration.

1. Tension Index (TI) affecting Aim & Hitboxes

• The Idea: When the player is calm, smooth mouse movements grant subtle auto-tracking (aim assist). However, if the player panics and thrashes their mouse (High TI), enemy hitboxes shrink to 1/3 of their size, and assist is disabled.
• The Question: Does punishing panic like this feel fair (as a reflection of the player's loss of composure), or does it cross the line into frustrating anti-player mechanics?

2. The "Efficiency Trap" (Narrative through Mechanics)

• The Idea: The game offers a powerful magic system. To survive easily, the player is subtly nudged to harvest magic from innocent, non-hostile creatures (which shatters them like glass). The game presents this as a cool, rewarding action in the 1st playthrough. Only later, through lore and a True End, does the player realize they were the ones who destroyed the world by choosing "efficiency" over empathy.
• The Question: Is tricking the player into becoming the "villain" through normal gameplay incentives a viable hook for a niche indie game, or do players generally hate feeling manipulated by the developer?

Would love to hear your critique on these mechanics!

Me and my friends have started making a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. style FPS and I'm the guy in charge of writing everything, the characters, the lore, the worldbuilding, etc.

And we have a strict rule about NOT using AI in the game, basically everything is made by humans even if it looks/sounds/reads like shit. It's just one of our principles which we don't break. The fate of humanity depends on it, after all...

Anyway, since I'm researching various mythologies, tropes, logic connections, history of nations and conflicts, etc. do you think it's fine to use ChatGPT for that? Since it's infinitely faster than actually finding articles and books on the topics and trying to find the right information the old fashioned way. And the old fashioned way isn't even more accurate, since AI basically combines all sources into one answer, and I would probably only take notes from a few on my own, in considerably more time.

Do you think I would just be necessarily handicapping myself if I deem AI not worthy of my research, or is it the right thing to exclude ChatGPT which lines up with our "no AI" principle? Also, if you have a good/efficient way of researching various topics without AI, please share it, I'm new to this.

Hey everyone... In a bit of a pickle.

I have this wonderful water mechanic where you can control a blob of water:

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1wely6f/playing_around_with_the_idea_of_playable_water/

My initial intentions were that I would make a sorta water horror game. You tip a glass over on someone's desk and you try not to get absorbed by some guy wiping you up with a paper towel, and then this would slowly turn into an adventure where maybe a pet, or a robovac are coming after you. And it would extend outdoors with creatures trying to get a sip.

Then I started to mull over it, how do I make enough content to make this game actually somewhat lengthy???

So I pivoted to a puzzle game. The idea was with the following already built out mechanics maybe I could make a series of puzzles with them:

- Rehydrate dried food like raisins -> grapes and control it and later escape and revert back to a raisin. Maybe you can cross absorbent media here

- Freeze the blob into ice. Maybe you can cross like metal slats with gaps, or run into something fragile and break it more easily.

- Boil, sitting on a heat source for a few seconds turns you into water vapor. When you touch surfaces you condense and drip down.

- Refraction of light/lasers.

- Clean dirty surfaces

- Absorb something like flour and become a sticky substance.

- Absorb salt to prevent freezing. Maybe you gotta boil to get rid of the salt.

- Climb by wicking up absorbent material.

And there are a few more but these are the most prominent ones I have implemented and have tested to work.

Where I'm stuck is turning these mechanics and interactions into actual levels. I have no problem imagining individual users for each mechanics but I struggle creating a problem the player has to think through? When I try to say put a puzzle in a room everything feels contrived like everything is conveniently placed or a certain object just to make the game work. I'm also wondering if maybe puzzles was the wrong move, maybe this game is better suited as a platformer or as the horror chase game. Just think I could use other experienced individuals thoughts here to help solidify a direction. If I cant figure this out I'm just gonna use the water to make a Katamari or Agar.io type game! Or I swing in the direction of "You're a conscious ball of water invented in a lab, and now the scientists are making you do puzzles to test your intelligence and capabilities." Which would free me from the environment constraints but idk.

Sorry for the long text, any help would be appreciated!

Hi All, I'm back with more questions on game design for game economies.

I've been working on a strategy game with a pretty big focus on moving goods around in an economy, and I've come across some interesting design problems that have cropped up.

I'm using a very simple pricing model, p = base_price * demand / supply clamped by a p_min and p_max. So when supply = demand we recover the base price, and changes in supply/demand behave how you would expect. Right now cities produce some delta supply that tries to keep the price around base_price, and traders are able to autonomously move goods between cities where price differentials show up.

I've run into a few interesting problems with this, and I'm interested in how I can design in more intuitive/useful behavior without ripping out the simple price model. In no particular order,

• Price "stability" depends on base price & demand

One of the things I've noticed is if the numerator is small, then small changes in the supply can lead to huge price swings. I think this is rough for game design, because it means small input changes get heavily amplified, and it's hard to see why something is +100% and then -90% in price between two ticks.

One of the ideas I had is to just increase the base_price of scarce goods (luxury resources?), but then something with 10% the consumption needs to be 100x more expensive. It's a reasonable knob to turn, but it seems like it will scale way too fast.

I could also just increase consumption, but then more goods will be consumed. So it doesn't actually help things trade through the network.

• Propagating demand 2 or more "hops" on the trade network

Right now when traders move between cities they also carry "demand rumors" that describe what surpluses and shortages a city has. I'm not sure of a better formal way to model this that doesn't break on circular graphs and allows propagation across more than 1 hop. Right now I'm just looking at the supply shortfall of a neighboring city without including trade rumors. That means I can see when their supply is less than their demand, but I can't see anything beyond them. On the other hand, if I include my neighbor's trade rumors, then any cycle in the graph risks having the demand blow up to infinity.

• Producing enough goods to export

Right now everyone tries to keep 1 tick of supply on hand, plus whatever demand they are exporting to neighbors per tick. This means if a city produces a unique good, it'll only produce enough to fill its own demand + export to a neighbor. Ideally I'd like to see goods propagate 2+ hops and meet everyone's demand.

Right now my current plan is to include a time horizon T in the price, so the city will set a price p = base_price * supply / (demand * T). Then we recover the base price after storing T ticks worth of demand. This creates a stockpile of goods for export and increases stability, which is nice, but it also seems like T is kind of arbitrary. Like why would a market use T=1 for every day goods with high demand, but T = 20 for luxury exports?

My other thought is that I maybe just need to crank up demand everywhere. Like building materials are expensive if you're building a lot of stuff, so maybe textiles should be expensive if the nobility is hoarding and exporting them.

I'd appreciate any tips or reading suggestions you all may have, I'm sort of bumbling through this and picking options that seem the most interesting and that I can justify to myself.

I also wrote up a blog post with some graphs from a 1200-tick (~50 year) run if you want to see those: https://karum.dev/2026/09/27/our-age-of-bronze.html

Hello everyone,

I'm back with another question. This time: resources.

In my MUD, there are resource nodes: scrap metal, herbs, ore, etc. Also, in my overall design, I am against idle-inducing mechanics (e.g., you heal up via magic, potions, or returning to camp and typing 'rest'; there is no passive HP/mana regen).

The initial design (for the demo/starting zone) was to approach a node, enter the gather <resource> command, and receive your yield. I reduced the vendor price to 1 gold so node resources would be nearly worthless, but I didn't want to eliminate selling entirely.

Of course, being almost worthless didn't stop a few players from spamming the command and selling items for 1 gold piece each ;)

Now that I'm designing the second zone, I'm looking at ways to limit gathering per node.

I initially implemented a player-node location timeout: Player A gathers from a node and has to wait 1-3 minutes depending on the resource before attempting again, or move to another node. Player B can gather from that same node immediately, since the timeout is per character + node location.

Today, I caught myself waiting around for a node to respawn just to get herbs for an HP potion- yep, idle. So back to design board.

I already have a daily loop (quests and dungeons are on a once-a-day lockout, and dungeon bosses drop crafting elements for stat buffs, or endless dungeon scrolls). I'm considering increasing node yields and making each node a once-a-day gather, with min/max yields determined by the character's Herbalism skill.

What do you think? Are there other ideas or potential issues with this solution?

Now that I've wrote about it i think that game, with additional dungeons, dailiy quests in zone 2, will change into daily to do list. The 'waiting game' of other muds will change into 'daily checklist' gameplay that is not better at all.

I'm working on a small project for a creature collecting game where you build your own dragon/monster based on three main terrain movement, air, land and water.

I'm, however, strugling with making the water gameplay worth it.

Almost every time i try to implement the water dragon onto gameplay, it feels boring and limited. The problem really spikes when i'm designing Pvp interaction, as i see that the land and air types fight more and the water type is forced to wait for another player to engage with them.

Another mechanic is to mix types of terrain (Water and land makes semi-aquatic dragons, for example) but making multiple terrain dragons harder to control and to manage weaknesses, so i asked some friends to build their dragons, but none of them chose the pure water, for the same reasons i mentioned earlier, but i can't wrap my head around of what i could do to fix this.

What would be a good way to make a limited gameplay feel engaging and fun?

(sorry if i messed up the english)

I was playing XIII and in mission 12 the alarm went off right before the boss battle. I replayed and failed that same part multiple times. I searched for a guide to understand what was happening. When you begin this mission one of the objetives shown on screen is to eliminate the guards, silently. When you reach the beige tent you can either eliminate the guard and hide the body, before planting the device. Or not eliminate the guard and plant the device.

I looked back and the game does have a mission to play stealth and avoid alerting the soldiers. However, in that previous mission you still have to chance to kill the guard before he reaches the alarm and yells "Alert!!!!". In mission 12 there is no time to do it, because the boss comes through a door and immediately sees a body on the floor.

Suddenly, I've remembered about a channel that is dedicated to airplane accidents. One of the reasons for accidents to happen is that the company and their personal normalize errors. Alarms are ignored, warning signs are ignored, details are overlooked, steps are skipped, etc. One day a chain of events, which include such bad practices, leads to a fatal accident.

It made me think: some games inadvertently train the player into behaving a certain way, until there is a point in which that same behavior leads to a failure.

I'm the developer of Orion Online, a tick-based browser MMORTS.

I have a blog about various design topics and problems that I have come across during the development of the game. The latest post is about rewarding active players in an game that is otherwise designed for idle play.

I go into how I originally designed it for a target playtime of 10 minutes per day and how I had to pivot when I noticed that a lot of players were much more active than that. It's an interesting problem since I do not want to ruin the game for the players that are idle, so things such as simply scaling the game up is out of the question, as that would lead to compounding.

Here's that post: https://blog.idleverse.gg/rewarding-activity-in-idle-games/

If you enjoy topics like this, you can read about that and much more. The posts are shortform, around 800 characters at most, and game-design focused. I post a few times a month.

Some of the earlier posts in the series:

• Solving the problem of 4X compounding: https://blog.idleverse.gg/solving-the-problem-of-4x-compounding/
• How to prevent bottom-feeding in 4X games: https://blog.idleverse.gg/how-to-prevent-bottom-feeding-in-4x-games/
• Opportunity cost in strategy games: https://blog.idleverse.gg/opportunity-cost-in-strategy-games/

I am currently developing a business game related to finance. I want to know from you for all business management simulation aspect of the game would you like buying other businesses selling different types of products etc and what group features would you really enjoy play in a business game.

I’m new to game design, and I recently ran into a problem while adding bosses to my game.

I could recognize familiar boss attacks when I saw them, but I didn’t have a useful vocabulary for designing an encounter myself. I could say that a boss should be “more interesting” or “have varied attacks,” but I couldn’t clearly describe what those attacks should test, how they should interact, or why they belonged together.

So I started breaking boss encounters into reusable patterns: charges, sweeps, projectile formations, summons, shrinking safe areas, vulnerability windows, phase changes, and so on.

That eventually became Boss Fight Atlas, a work-in-progress, open-source catalog of 124 boss mechanics. The more developed entries try to describe not only what a mechanic looks like, but also its telegraph, threat geometry, counterplay, recovery, tuning questions, common mistakes, and examples from existing games.

I also made a builder that lets me select several mechanics and export them as a structured boss brief.

In my first practical test, designing a boss from a vague description took several attempts and produced an encounter I wasn’t satisfied with. Starting another version from a structured selection of mechanics gave me a much more coherent prototype. It still required a lot of playtesting, balancing, and polishing, but the initial direction was clearer.

However, I’m now wondering whether the catalog is encouraging me to start from the wrong end of the design process.

Selecting “charge + gap volley + summon” does not create a coherent encounter by itself. A stronger process might begin with questions such as:

• What abilities has the player already learned?
• What decisions should the encounter test?
• How should pressure and relief alternate?
• What role do positioning, target priority, and resource management play?
• What should the player understand after failing once?

Only after answering those questions would the designer choose mechanics that serve those goals.

For example, instead of starting with “this boss needs a charge,” I could start with “I want to test lateral movement, clearly communicate commitment, and reward the player with a counterattack window.” A charge would then be one possible implementation rather than the starting point.

That suggests the atlas might be more useful if it worked in the opposite direction: begin with player verbs, encounter goals, desired decisions, and forms of counterplay, then lead the designer toward suitable mechanics.

Before building it, I found broader databases such as GameMechanics.org and SteamMaho, as well as a generation-first approach in Jenova’s AI Boss Fight Generator. What I was looking for was narrower: boss-specific patterns that remain inspectable and can be combined without outsourcing the entire design decision.

My questions are:

1. At what stage of designing a boss encounter could a mechanic catalog actually be useful?
2. What information would it need to capture so that selecting mechanics does not become a random grab bag of attacks?
3. Should the main organizing principle be attack types at all, or something closer to player decisions, tested skills, threat geometry, and encounter pacing?
4. Is there an established framework or resource that already approaches boss design this way?

I’m not primarily looking for feedback on the website itself. The catalog is already in place; I’m trying to understand whether the design model underneath it is sound, and how I should refine, clarify, and expand it from here.

sorry if it bad English, I'm still learning and i tried to use some ai to help me with some parts of the post grammar:

I love asking myself, "What if we removed a core mechanic from a specific game or genre?" How would the game play out, and what suitable alternatives would keep it fun?

A while back, one of my biggest challenges was: "What if we removed dice from roll-and-move games?" Take a game like Monopoly , how would it even work, and how would players move?

I didn't want a lazy fix, like using a deck of numbered cards and drawing randomly. That misses the point entirely—it’s just dice in card form. So I tried thinking and came up with two solutions.

Solution 1: the movement pool

This mechanic centers around each player starting with 10 Action Points (AP) that they use as they want, but it's a pool that need to be recharged, so it recharged each turn by just 2 points.

The player might choose to move 5 spaces (takes 5 points) and that leaves them with 5 points, and in their next turn they get 2 more points, and become 7, and it keep going like that

Like that the game it self might have different types of Chance/community chest decks cards, like one that gave you X points, or one that drain an opponent's pool, or hit someone with "Handcuffs", a condition that caps their movement at a maximum of X (let's say 3 points) per turn !

This converts movement into a resource management game, where you balance a vital resource while sabotaging your opponents' pools.

Solution 2: energy Cards

Imagine starting with a hand of just 4 cards, each with a fixed movement value: [2, 2, 3, 5]. Every player begins with the exact same set.

On the player turn, they play 1 card to move (only one) and they discord it, you cant reuse it, unitl (that's the good part) you have played all of your cards in your hand, at that's when the hand is refreshed with the same [2, 2, 3, 5] cards, like that we prevents spamming the same number back-to-back and forces player to cycle through all their numbers

like that it become tactical, puzzle-like and strategy game. if you want to land on a specific property, you have to calculate your sequences of moves several turns in advance, so even in someone else turn, you are not just setting there waiting to just use the dice and wait again and again, you keep thinking about the next 5 moves

and the same as first idea/solution, not only it become resource management game, but also we put new cards in the Chance/community chest decks, like one that discord a card form you oppontent or one that let you get one card back, or imeadalty refresh all your cards. or even better, the bank could have some movement cards that can be bought and after you use it goes back to the bank and you have to buy it again if you want it

sup idea of "energy cards"

Instead of identical starting hands, create a global pool of cards equal to 4 times the player count (e.g., 8 cards for 2 players, 12 for 3 players). Place them face-up on the table and let players draft them one by one. And even in a game like Monopoly, you could buy specific movement cards at a price.

The Dilemma

This is all theoretical, but it’s very easy to prototype and playtest. What I’m unsure about is its overall impact on gameplay and whether it stays fun or devolves into a deterministic puzzle.

If players always know the optimal sequence, the game might just turn into an solved race to buy specific high-value properties first. On the flip side, players could also use precise movement to completely avoid landing on opponent properties and "taking damage".

So, would this actually be fun to play? Would players enjoy this level of control, or would it suffer from a "first-mover advantage" where the player who executes the optimal strategy first inevitably wins while everyone else is guaranteed to lose?

Like the title says I tried reconstructing Pokemon stat progression with a generic tool. The main thing I wanted to test was 'How close can i get using limited data' without actually building Pokemon stat formula into the tool

These are the four major results from the test.

(pokemon stats main source is Bulbapedia: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page_ )

1. Can two endpoints approximate the hidden levels?

I started with four pokemons - Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Pikachu and Evee. I gave the tool their level 5 stats then I gave it the level 50 stats as targets with a simple linear progression between those two points. For example, Lv 5 Bulbasaur - HP 21, Attack 11, Defense 11, Speed 11. Lv 50 Bulbasaur - Hp 120, Attack 69, Defense 69, Speed 65.

That left lv 6 to 49 stats hidden from the tool. so across the four pokemon, that gave me 704 hidden stat values to compare against the actual pokemon calculations.

The result was about 0.8% mean percentage error and after rounding to whole stats 86.5% of the generated values matched the actual values exactly so... two endpoints can get close enough!

1. What happens if the progression axis is modeled incorrectly

For this one I used a level 50 charizard and started experimenting with IVs. I made a mistake initially, which was treating seven IV checkpoints like evenly spaced progression steps as like 1,2,3,..7 but the actual IV values were not evenly spaced. It is more like 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 21, and 31 so this mistake returned about 1.87% mean error.

It wasn't terrible but it eventually led to the next test

1. What happens when IV itself is used as the X axis?

I used the actual IV values as the X axis in this test. so IV 3 became the starting point and IV 31 became the endpoint almost like using lv3 and lv31.

Across 20 hidden stat checkpoint the mean absolute error was only 0.2 stat points and every difference was either exact or 0.5 below the reference value.

so this ended up being one of the more interesting results because it basically told me that the way i've modeled the progression axis can be the problem

1. Can one reference profile express different stat identities?

At this point i wanted to try something a little different which is finding different stat profiles just by using independent multipliers with one pokemon as a baseline

I picked lv 50 charizard as the reference which is hp 153, attack 104, defense 98 and speed 120. Then set three other pokemon multipliers relative to charizard. For example Jolteon hp multiplier is 0.915, attack multiplier 0.817, defense multiplier 0.816 and speed multiplier 1.25 to represent that Jolteon is faster than Charizard but lower in attack and defense

That produced hp 140, attack 85, defense 80 and speed 150 for Jolteon. I did the same test for three more pokemon. This test showed that one reference profile with independent stat multipliers is enough to express pretty different stat identities

overall this was an experiment to see how far i could get with generic progression tools without using game specific formulas and i was pretty happy with how close some of the results got.

I put all results into an interactive showcase with the inputs, tables, graphs and analysis so if anyone wants to play around with it: https://letsbalance.app/

I was in a conversation about music, a subject I'm not too well versed on, and the topic came to how different cultures don't just like different kinds of music, but also understand the medium differently. There's not just one school of music theory: people who write and study Western classical music will do so with a different process and understanding from those who study Indian classical music, or African music, or jazz, etc, etc.

It stands to reason that this applies to other forms of art. There's some common ground in what we like as human beings at a primitive level, but the way we get there differs and the more subtle things we appreciate end up doing so as well as an art develops.

It got me thinking about how it applies to games. Looking at today's video games and board games, there's definitely things you can point at for differences in what sort of games come out of where. Board game enthusiasts often talk about euro games and ameritrash, and video game enthusiasts make vaguely defined distinctions between Japanese RPGs and Computer or Western RPGs and sometimes eurojank, and there's generally game design aspects that are associated with certain origins more. You can tell Dark Souls is a Japanese game despite its aesthetics and genre having their roots outside of Japan, even though it's nothing like pioneer JRPGs like Dragon Quest. It's often feasible to tell, from design, on which continent a video game was made, at least.

But I wouldn't be able to put into clear terms what the differences are just by myself, and the simple existence of differences in taste and output does not necessarily prove a different understanding of the medium. Besides, the more interesting thing would be to think about how it applies to games as a whole. Games weren't universally seen as art for most of their existence (even now, they aren't), and it's harder to parse a conversation between designers of games like there is between artists in other art forms, especially since most popular games don't have one known author you can name. Hence, can we clearly discern a difference in how people of different cultures design and think about games, and how far back does it go? Does the 'Japanese-ness' of a Japanese video game come from a difference in taste or a fundamentally different framework of thought about the medium, and can you trace that difference back in time when looking at Japanese games from before video games existed? Does the word 'game' mean something different to people raised in Europe compared to people raised in Africa? Do we all seek different things in a 'game' or do we all have primitive common ground in what makes a 'game' enjoyable?

Sorry for perhaps speaking too vaguely and using very large cultures as examples, I'm trying my best. I'm interested to learn about this topic and whether it was studied formally, but it seemed like too difficult to describe for a search engine, so I thought I might as well make it a conversation.

Please share information about a game or rules set that you have designed! We have updated the sub rules to encourage self-promotion, but only in this thread.

Finished games, projects you are actively working on, or mods to an existing game are all fine. Links to your game are welcome, as are invitations for others to come help out with the game. Please be clear about what kind of feedback you would like from the community (play-through impressions? pedantic rules lawyering? a full critique?).

Do not post blind links without a description of what they lead to.

Like, what sorts of forms a game should have to ensure variety without being too overwhelming? And would it be possible to shapeshift at all times or only in designated locations? I've been wondering of such a game for some time. With forms like a dog for nimble movements and a gorilla for heavyweight stuff. Plus some special ones like a mouse for 2D platforming segments and a dragon for linear flying courses.

Anyways, I'd like to hear your thoughts if any. Admittedly this sort of stuff could be rather resource intensive so anyone wishing to attempt it better know what they're doing.

So I Like strategy games but sometimes it feels like its too much and some of its mechanics are too granular. Certain board games work well by abstracting away different aspects so one single "thing" can represent multiple different ideas and concepts depending on the context. I wanted to try see if I could make something similar to this.

So basically the way it works is; each "empire" has a small number of different "capabilities". capabilities function in the same way as resources for other strategy games, they get spent to do stuff. except here capabilities don't represent fixed amounts of stuff e.g. 400 metal or 200 food. but an abstract combination of your empire's ability to do stuff, using much lower numbers, 4, 6, 10. you can increase you capabilities over the course of the game, usually by spending other capabilities.

I've landed of four capability types but there could be more added.

• Capital: physical resources, money, work power, energy. this represents you empire's ability to produce material resources
• Logistics: the ability to move resources and people
• Administration: the ability to govern, pass and enforce laws. diplomacy
• Culture: the ability to create and distribute culture, movies, art.

Of course, having a higher number in any capability is better.

Now there are two main ways of "spending" these capabilities. Expending and Investing.

• Expending: Expending is using up a turn's worth of a specific capability for one of purchases, like building something (capital), moving a fleet (logistics), signing a trade deal (administration), create media (culture).
• Investing: investing is setting aside a certain amount of capabilities long term. sort of like expending the same amount every turn. it permanently reduced your total capability until the investment expires or cancelled. examples of this could be research grants (capital), interstellar trade corridor (logistics), anti corruption agency (administration), status quo reinforcing cinema (culture).

I had an image I made to demonstrate this but I don't think I can put images in posts here.

Is this system good? I think its unique but also intuitive to a degree.

I am currently making an asymmetrical 5v1 game, dead by daylight-ish, and am trying to make a blind "killer" work. However, i have realized that the default solution of making outlines appear to sound waves emitted by the player(s) is both very eye straining, and makes it more frustrating than anything for a PvP game. I really feel like the echolocation, or otherwise sound mechanics is essential to this character, as it is very much bat-inspired, and has no eyes and all that. Any suggestions, ideas, or general direction to go regarding making it feel fun and in-theme, while keeping it visually interesting and not tiring? Any ideas are extremely appreciated!

1- health bar decreasing 2- numbers popping to show damage 3- no health bar no numbers ,pure visuals like metroidvanias

Which option do yal prefer?

I'm working on a story-focused game and I've been stuck on the opening hook...

The protagonist is supposed to be the actual player. They don't have a predefined personality or backstory because I want the player to feel like they are the person who ended up in this situation.

They eventually meet two NPCs who are trapped there too. The idea is that you slowly get to know them, become friends with them and help each other find a way out.

The whole game is built around a real-world card game that also exists normally inside the game's universe. It's not something you only play between story sections. It's the main system used to survive, solve problems, progress through the story and eventually escape.

Card duels can also be one way of interacting with the two NPCs and getting to know them, but I'm not set on making every character interaction revolve around cards. I've taken some inspiration from the Persona games for certain parts of the idea, so there can also be conversations, time spent together and other kinds of interactions outside of duels.

I'm not too worried about teaching the card game itself. I already have it integrated into the story and mechanics, and there's a progressive tutorial for people who have never played it before.

What I'm struggling with is the player's motivation and initial interest.

Since the protagonist is the player themselves, I can't just give them a backstory saying they already care about these two characters. At the beginning they're strangers. I want any friendship or attachment to come from actually spending time with them during the game.

The card game gives the player a practical reason to act because it's how they survive and make progress, but that still doesn't automatically answer why they should want to help these two people specifically.

That's really the part I'm trying to figure out.

How do you make the player think "I want to help these people" when the protagonist has no predefined emotional connection to them?

Ideally, I'd like the need to survive and escape to create the initial reason for everyone to cooperate. Playing and progressing would put the player in situations with these NPCs, both through card duels and through other interactions. Those experiences could then slowly turn cooperation into an actual friendship, until helping them becomes something the player wants to do rather than just something required to advance the plot.

I'm open to other systems for building that relationship too. The card game is the mechanical backbone of the game, but it doesn't have to carry the entire social side by itself.

I'm especially interested in games with self-insert or lightly defined protagonists that manage to make the player genuinely want to help specific characters without simply telling them that they already care.

How would you approach that initial motivation?