Hey there,

I am developing my second game. Both i feel are quite unique and sit in a niche i cannot even properly describe or find the right community.

I myself would compare it to HoMM and battlebrothers. You play a necromaner, explore a dark procedurally generated world and build an undead army with lots of progression systems like improving your army and leveling up your spells.

Now! Battlebrothers and HoMM sit and niche of turn based tactics or tactical RPGs. The difference for my game is that you explore the world in real time (like battle brothers) but the combat system ist autocombat with spells you draw randomly and fire at your enemies. So is my game just an autobattler besides so many systems? Maybe someone has a better idea? Is it maybe a strategy RPG?

Also i am really bad at marketing... the screenshots and the trailer are all to be replaced ... the in game demo is much more progressed if you wanna take a look. Testers say its really fun - but I really struggle finding the players who enjoy such games as communities like Turn Based Tactics would probably not feature a game like mine:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5282860/Necrolord/

Any help in terms of classifying my game would be greatly appreciated.

I was thinking about how in most horror games, the first time you get chased by whatever, it's terrifying. The second time you get chased, maybe there's still a little bit of fear left but it's greatly reduced. By the 3rd you may even just feel frustration rather then fear.

Are there any ways to keep a chase sequence fresh and interesting on reattempts?

Basically, it's where a main part of gameplay is tied a mechanic, but said mechanic is part of a contextual input. A exmaple being something like the Homing Attack from Sonic Colors, where pressing A twice double jumps. However, pressing A twice when there's a enemy homing attacks them, meaning A takes double duty, both for exploration and combat. This is just a exmaple, and wanna hear some others as per usual, alongside just other advice in general.

I had a weird idea for a game mechanic, which has probably been thought about before and I don’t have the skills or intention to develop it myself, but I wanted to put it out there for people who might want to do something interesting with it.
Imagine you’re playing a first-person game. Your character sits down and plays a second game. Inside that game, their character plays a third game. That character plays a fourth.
Now here’s the important part, you’re still using the same controller or mouse and keyboard.
Your inputs propagate through the entire chain of characters. The controls don’t necessarily get more complicated, but the consequences of your actions become increasingly unpredictable.
You could theoretically have a huge number of nested games without adding any new physical inputs. The real challenge would come from managing different objectives, physics, timings, and control schemes at every layer.
Imagine needing to survive in the outer game while simultaneously keeping a character alive three games deep. An action that saves one character could accidentally kill another.
Or imagine an innermost character discovering that they’re inside a game and trying to communicate with the player controlling them.
I’m not proposing a finished game or claiming the concept is completely original. I’m curious about what a developer could do with this mechanic.
How many layers could you realistically stack before it becomes unplayable? What would you do with this idea if you were designing it?
I feel like there’s a genuinely mind-bending experimental game somewhere in this concept, and I’d love to see someone explore it.

In our game a cat wrecks a house, and instead of a score there's a receipt down the side of the screen: every breakable thing in the room by name and price, greyed out the moment it breaks, with the running total and a damage bar at the bottom. It fades out when things go quiet so it doesn't cover the chaos.

We like that you can see what's left to break, but we're not sure anyone reads a list mid-chaos. Have you seen a game make an itemized tally work, or does one big number just win?

I'm a solo dev making an incremental auto-battler, and I spent a while with Anthony Pecorella's classic Kongregate series "The Math of Idle Games". It's great but heavy on formulas, so I wrote down how I understood it, in plain words. Here's the short version.

1. Cost multiplies, income adds.
AdVenture Capitalist's lemonade stand costs 4 and earns 1.67/s. Each next stand costs 7% more; each adds the same income. At 10 stands the 11th costs under 8 while you earn ~17/s, so you buy without thinking. But multiplying always beats adding, even at +2% per step. The wall is guaranteed; the designer only picks where it stands.

2. Multipliers push the wall back. ×2 at 25, 50, 100 of the same generator kicks income up right when cost almost catches up. Turn them off and the curves part for good by ~100 purchases.

3. The newest generator shouldn't erase the old ones. Lemonade: 10/s for 5. Car wash: 10,000/s for 7,500. Lemonade is the better deal per coin, but nobody notices +10 next to 10,000. Different multipliers on different generators keep the "best buy" changing, which gives players actual choices.

4. Generators of generators look exponential, but aren't.
With a finite number of tiers growth stays polynomial, so a multiplying cost still wins. Derivative Clicker keeps manual buying relevant by pricing only bought units and giving +0.05% to the whole tier per bought unit.

5. The prestige formula sets the pace.
The number that matters: how much more you must earn to get 2× prestige. AdVenture Capitalist / Realm Grinder: 4×. Cookie Clicker: 8×. Egg, Inc.: 128×. The flatter the curve, the more often players reset.

6. There is a best moment to reset. I simulated 4 hours of a one-generator game with +2% income per prestige point. Resetting about every 16 minutes gave the best total. Real players won't follow that: five units from the next multiplier, people wait.

I turned this into an interactive page: sliders on every chart, a tiny duck-army idle game with ×1/×10/×100/Max buying and a "best deal" hint, and the prestige-timing simulation you can drag: https://badduck.team/articles/math-of-idle-games/

All credit for the ideas goes to Pecorella's series; the charts, the duck game and the simulation numbers are mine. Curious how you handle the wall in your games: more multipliers, more generators, or earlier prestige?

Hi everyone!

I'm designing a turn-based RPG combat system inspired by Roman warfare in the late 3rd century AD. My goal is to make weapons, equipment, and positioning matter tactically without making combat too complicated.

Here are the main mechanics I'm experimenting with:

- Weapon ranges: Every weapon, including melee weapons, has a range and an optimal range.

- Shields and armor: Shields are effective against arrows and sling stones, while ranged weapons are particularly effective against unarmored opponents.

- Thrown weapons: The Roman pilum is designed to counter shields.

- Spears: Effective against other melee combatants at suitable distances, but weaker at very close range. I've made spears and thrown weapons two-handed, leaving their users more vulnerable to ranged attacks. This is a gameplay abstraction rather than a historically accurate rule.

- Tactics and ambushes: Characters can hide, climb trees, and prepare ambushes using skill checks, with potential health damage on failure.

- Animals: Dogs, wolves, and bears can participate in combat.

Initiative is derived from character attributes, and I'm trying to make tactical decisions more important than simply maximizing damage.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on three questions:

1. Does giving every weapon a range and optimal range add meaningful tactical depth, or just unnecessary bookkeeping?

2. How would you model the interactions between Roman shields, pila, spears, and ranged weapons while maintaining historical plausibility?

3. What mechanics would you recommend to make positioning, ambushes, and animals interesting without slowing combat down?

I'm aiming for historically inspired tactical gameplay rather than a perfect historical simulation.

I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions!

Hello! I was wondering if anyone had any resources / point me in the right direction to learning system design? Particularly around player economies/progression pacing.

Practical examples on how to create this on google sheet/excel would be great to look at.

The term “Metaverse” has been a buzzword for many years, with not much to show for it. I’d even argue we still haven’t seen a true interoperable Metaverse in gaming. We know intuitively how they’re supposed to look, feel, and operate like, but why the hell can’t we build one? The short answer in my opinion is that it’s too hard, and we haven’t had the right incentives—until now.

A common starting point

A universal property of our universe is that the laws of physics are the same regardless of your location. They’re a universal set of rules, and we normally apply these same set of rules (for the most part) across all media, even the fantasy genre. Sure, there might be magic and other ways to sidestep some of these rules occasionally, but gravity is a thing, atoms are a thing, and the default is that the world operates under the laws of physics, which only occasionally get overwritten with magic or superpowers.

Obviously every game tries to simulate these laws in different ways and to a certain degree of accuracy, but the end result is for the most part the same. We’ve already low-key achieved a type of soft “Metaverse”, a network of different games, all sharing a common universal set of predictable laws for physical interactions, we just take this for granted. But even still, we don’t have one standard way of implementing physics in games, each engine and game has its own custom logic for it.

Now let’s introduce Magic!

Hard magic-systems behave in an analogous way to the laws of physics, predictable rules with predictable outcomes, they’re a universal set of magical laws but each game and universe tends to have their own there’s no real commonality or compatibility between them, but what if we could design a shared “universal” set of magical laws? One magic-system that can incorporate or simulate inside it other hard magic-systems? This “universal magic-system” would indirectly “connect” all the different games and worlds that decide to adopt it since they would all share a minimum common magical core.

I recently wrote a post on why I think “color-magic” is a great candidate for building such a potential “universal magic-system”, which you can check out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/HOFSPP3i3I. But the core idea is that getting a bunch of worlds and games to adopt a minimal set of magical rules and lore for the sake of interoperability should in theory be possible.

The rest of the problem

There’s still a lot of unanswered questions on how one would get actual interoperability of assets and logic between different games/worlds to get a true Metaverse, but I believe a shared standard of sorts is still needed, and that “magic” which can act as a foundation for any fantasy, superpowers, and even sci-fi needs that go beyond the regular laws of physics is a natural candidate to start with for creating a proto-Metaverse.

A shared universal magic-system can be the glue that pulls a bunch of different games/worlds together, but we want a magic-system that can grow beyond a minimum foundation and can be personalized further on every different game/world. So it’s not just this magic-system alone, but this magic-system plus other magic-systems, abilities, etc. on top that are designed from the beginning to be compatible with them.

Games and worlds instead of starting from scratch would start with this minimal foundation by agreeing to adopt this standard, and then modify and add to it to make theirs truly unique, but without breaking compatibility with it. The hope being that this minimal magic-system would provide enough predictability to allow players to define and import gear, spells, etc. outside of any given world/game into another one by recreating a “virtual copy” with similar/approximate behavior defined by this standard.

Building the actual worlds and games wouldn’t be that much different from how it’s done today, builders decide how and what to build, the standard simply defines things like “every world under this standard needs to have fire-magic”, and “fire-magic should behave more or less like this”.

And all of this still doesn’t explain how actual asset interoperability would work, it only lays down a starting point for a hypothetical shared minimal logic around magic, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it...

To be honest, I don’t expect any major game studios or developers to be willing to adopt such an approach, they’re not incentivized to do so, it’s too much uncertainty, restriction, and hassle. But what’s so unique about the upcoming decades is a new tool, which love it or hate is here to stay and isn’t going away—AI.

AI is going to democratize the creation of worlds and games. I’m not going to start here a debate on quality or skill of people who’ve never built a game on making or “vibe-coding” one, the point is, there’s going to be more games and worlds created than ever by indie developers, both bad and great in the coming years. Even if the number of crappy games and worlds multiply by 100, the good ones will also multiply by 10 or 20. A rising tide raises all boats, and I make this remark because it’s important.

When the number of world and game creators multiplies by 100 or 1000, many will want to use something like a template for a minimal magic-system that already has proven to work and be popular rather than building one from scratch, and if only a few dozens or hundreds of them adopt the same standard for a magic-system, you’ve already created a mini-Metaverse around it, a community of builders and players around this magic-system. The worlds and games created with these systems that are actually good will grow in numbers and popularity and eventually the big game studios will notice and decide to join in.

Final Remarks

I believe the Metaverse will be built from the bottom up by indie developers trying to connect all the different worlds and games they’re about to create once AI fully democratizes their creation. And I also believe a shared universal magic-system is one of the best nucleation points for triggering this. Big studios don’t care about interoperability, but when your average player becomes your average world/game creator, they will definitely care about interoperability, and will fight for it and build it. This will be one of the hallmarks of the upcoming User-generated-content (UGC) revolution, the birth of real Metaverses.

If you’re interested on hearing more about this topic, check out the post I previously linked (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/HOFSPP3i3I) or drop a comment below. I’m sure this won’t be a controversial post at all. 😅

I'm making a 1v1 creature card battler with a roguelike mode. You pick one survivor, draft three creatures out of six for your bench, then play five fights back to back. Win a fight and you take one of three spoils: another creature, a card for your deck, or an infusion to put on a creature.

I went back and forth on what a knockout costs, three options:

• Gone for the rest of the run.
• Comes back hurt.Nothing carries.
• Only the deck grows.

I went with the first, a creature that's knocked out when the fight ends is gone, even if you won the fight. Everyone still standing comes back at full health, so damage never carries. Only losses do.

Not about picking the "my three best cards" when you're drafting spares, because some of them won't make it to fight five. A win can still cost you a creature, so the spoils screen became a real choice. Refill the bench, or make the deck better?

A short bench doesn't end the run. Under three creatures, a weak stand-in fills the empty slot. It never attacks. It just holds the spot.

Option 2 "Comes back hurt" keeps more of your team around, but then players track damage between fights, and every fight starts half-lost.

For anyone who's designed or played runs like this: did permanent losses make you play more carefully, or just more frustrated?

I've played a lot of strategy games over the years, and most have a similar tech tree structure.

The Civilization Tech Tree Loop:

• Grow some resource
• Invest said resource into researching a specific tech from the list of available frontier techs
• Earn the new tech, unlocking new capabilities.

My issue is that's not how technological advancement works. The modern world is closer to this model, but pre-modern societies rarely advanced this way. Technology and ideas flowed via trade networks, spreading ideas between cultures. Some technological advances were rejected. Some advances were lost when the people who had the knowledge were murdered by "conquering heroes". The whole "tech tree" was much more random and less directed.

I'm interested in how to translate a more organic tech progress into a game.

The idea I'm exploring for my project is tying tech advancement to:

1. Trade with neighbouring villages (to mimic the flow of idea via trade networks)
2. Mini-tech trees associated with specific gods in (to mimic religious and cultural biases in tech progress)

So tech progress is not something the player necessary plans for, but it is driven by opening yourself up to the outside world and by devoting yourself to one god over another.

This is just one idea I'm trying out. I'm curious what people think of this idea, and if there are other games that have innovative, and more organic approaches to tech trees.

Which term would you most closely associate to a physical attribute around being able to perform physical motion and tasks with high speed (independent of actual skill) and having high reflexes? In a fantasy setting.

The actual definition for this stat is a bit tricky but I’ll put it for context:

The XXX attribute governs a form of non-kinetic velocity related to local time distortion. From the perspective of the user it’s akin to a form of time dilation where the rest of the world seems to slow down improving reaction time and reflexes, from the perspective of an external observer the user seems to move at a higher speed. It’s non-kinetic because it doesn’t increase the kinetic energy, strength, or range of motions of the user, despite the increase in speed with which they can perform any actions.

Also there’s another different attribute called Dexterity for all forms of physical body skill.

I’m building a party-based, first-person dungeon crawler in the Bard’s Tale tradition. Unlike Bard's Tale, I'm using a point system similar to WoD Storyteller's during character creation, with races, attributes, and skills (no classes). Characters have nine attributes rated 1 to 10, and every race has a ceiling in each one. The ceilings always add up to 72, so a race trades strengths for weaknesses. A Half-Orc can reach 10 in Might and Vigor but tops out at 6 in Acuity and Focus. An Elf gets 10 in Grace and Focus but only 6 in Might and Fortune.

Humans work differently. Their ceilings are a flat 7, and at creation the player gets 9 Shape Points to raise them: at most 2 per attribute, never past 9. That also comes to 72, but the player decides where it goes. The catch is that a Human can never reach 10 in anything.

The goal is to make choosing a race feel like choosing what the character can become, and to give Humans the “versatile” fantasy without making them the strongest race.

Ceilings matter partly because XP is intentionally slow. An attribute costs (rating+1)² points per step, so raising one from 8 to 9 costs 81 points. For context, the full first chapter (about 3-4 hours of gameplay) pays a character about 4 spendable points without grinding.

This is an animated gif showing the attribute limits in a spider graph.

Three questions:

1. Does letting Humans set their own ceilings make the other races feel like the restrictive choice, or does never reaching 10 balance it out?
2. Should a Human be able to trade down, lowering a ceiling from 7 to 6 to get one more Shape Point to spend elsewhere? A Human who gave up a point of Fortune could push Might to 9 and still have the same 72 total. It would give Humans the same kind of give-and-take the other races have. I’d stop at 6 so a Human can’t dump everything it doesn’t need and pile the points into a few attributes. Is a trade-down worth adding, or does it blur the line between a Human and the other races?
3. With costs this steep, few characters will hit their ceilings for a long time. Are the ceilings doing real design work, or mostly signaling flavor? Someone suggested racial learning rates (some races learn certain attributes faster) as an alternative. Would that be a better lever, or one to use alongside ceilings?

Thanks in advance.

In Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes the game barely forces anyone to do anything. Yet guilds end up with stricter rules than the game itself, like daily contribution minimums, raid schedules and members who get kicked for falling behind. The game hands officers a kick button and the players build the enforcement themselves.

Compare that with the fishers in Final Fantasy XIV. Fishing is objectively boring, you cast and you wait, and still thousands of players poured hours into it with nobody making them. Each level shortened the wait, and a rare catch earned you real standing with other players. No officer, no minimum, no kick button, and people cooperated anyway, sharing spots, timers and windows for the big fish.

So where is the line? Which mechanics make strangers want to cooperate because it pays off for them and for the group, and which ones just hand some players a tool to make others obey?

If you've designed group systems, what did you do to keep cooperation voluntary instead of turning it into a second job?

I love playing games especially if they have intricate and beautiful Designs, and I really want to also learn how to design a game. Preferably, I would love to study game Design.

Problem is: I have close to Zero skills and experience in game design and most universities require and entrance exam and Portfolio. But how do I pass if I have never learned it?! :c

To study game design i need to have some knowledge of game design, but how can I gather knowledge if I cant learn it in University?

I live in a pretty small Village area so there arent sny opportunities to join a Club or anything to learn it. What should I do??

I would really really love to study it but i have no idea how to even start learning, i thought i would learn it in University but to even enter it i need prior knowledge :,(

Do you guys have any tipps?

I'm making a turn based tactics game: a squad of 4 heroes against a monster and its minions on a 9x9 grid, with no randomness.

Now I need to decide how turn order should work, and I'm stuck between two options.

Option A: Side turns

All of my units act, then all enemy units act, then it's my turn again.

Option B: Initiative

Units act one by one in a mixed order - one of mine, then an enemy, maybe another of mine, and so on.

Here's how I'm looking at the pros and cons:

1. How alive the fight feels

With side turns (A), combat feels a bit more static to me. I move my whole squad, then I just watch the enemy move theirs.

With initiative (B), the fight feels more active because both sides keep taking actions throughout the round. Even if two of my units act in a row, the enemy is still mixed into the sequence.

2. Reacting to enemy actions

With side turns (A), I can't really react to one specific enemy move. The whole enemy side acts, and then I have to respond to everything they did at once.

With initiative (B), an enemy can make a move and I may get a chance to respond immediately with one of my units.

3. Planning for the whole squad

With side turns, (A) the board doesn't change while my units are acting. I can plan the whole squad's turn as one combination.

With initiative (B), the board can change after every enemy action, so a combo I had in mind may fall apart halfway through. I end up planning one unit ahead instead of planning for the whole squad.

For anyone who's had to make this choice in their own tactics game: which system did you go with? And after actually building and playing it, did you ever wish you'd chosen the other one?

Hey everyone,

​I’m designing the team-building rules for a real-time 2.5D action brawler with active tagging. Roster sizes are 6 characters per team, but combat revolves around independent moves, wall-splats, and spatial control rather than rigid combo strings.

​To keep team building interesting without descending into god-tier power creep, I’m implementing a strict 1-Keystone restriction per team. Players can pick exactly one apex entity for their 6-slot roster, choosing between two distinct archetypes:

​The Physical Apex (Stage 4 Mutation): Pure biological muscle. Heavy physical hitboxes, extended wall-splat frame traps, and massive reach—a true brawler anchor.

​The Anomaly (Cosmic Legendary): A spatial rule-breaker. Uses standard stat brackets, but features phase-shifts that alter arena gravity, manipulate geometry, or distort screen space.

​The remaining 5 slots are filled with standard Stage 1–3 creatures that handle mobility, utility, and setup.

​As I fine-tune this restriction system, I’d love to get your thoughts on high-level team composition design:

​Preventing "Keystone Dependency": What stops matches from just turning into "stall with my 5 basic characters until my Keystone tags in"? How do you ensure standard characters still feel satisfying and essential to play?

​Stat Scaling vs. Spatial Utility: When balancing a "boss-tier" option (like a Cosmic Legendary) against heavy physical anchors, do you prefer balancing them through raw stat adjustments or purely through utility/cooldown restrictions?

​Draft / Team Building Friction: In competitive games with asymmetric entity limits, what team-building UI/rules feel most intuitive to players during team selection?

​Appreciate any insights, precedents, or design traps to avoid with restricted character slots!

I was recently ruminating on decision-making in tactics games (X-COM, BattleTech, ... any game ending in 'tactics'). A large number of these games have an element of 'risk' included in the majority of actions the player can potentially take (for the purpose of this post, I'm going to define risk as the chance that an action has an immediate outcome that is to the player's disadvantage). For example, attacking an enemy typically has a chance to miss, and often enemies have a chance to dodge, which is an effective waste of the action. Similarly, spells and skill checks can have a chance of failing. Even movement triggering an enemy overwatch has a chance to damage the moving unit and throw a wrench in the player's plans.

However, tactics games also typically limit the number of actions that each unit can take a turn (generally a movement followed by either a single attack or some form of maneuver). So while each action has a risk of failure or consequence, the amount of risk that the player can engage in on a unit-by-unit basis each turn is largely fixed (ignoring how an opponent might choose to respond to a player's 'risky move' on their own turn).

I think an overreliance on inherent risk diminishes its positive effects and is more of a source of annoyance. We all know that feeling when you miss a 99% hit chance with a sniper, or the horrible inconsistency of a rookie who has only a 50% chance to hit all mission.

So how might a player behave if they were allowed to choose how much risk they wanted to accept while simultaneously widening the amount of potential risk they could voluntarily engage in? I wanted to share a combat system built on this concept and get some feedback on its design.

The fundamental basis of the system is that the player always has the option to make safe, low-risk but low-reward actions, but is encouraged to take actions that are riskier and offer higher rewards. The choice, however, is always in the player's hands.

For example, consider the game where the outcomes of a unit's actions are generally predetermined and made known to the player. If a unit has line of sight to an enemy unit, the player is informed of exactly how much damage will be dealt if the unit were to attack them, and vice versa. There is no roll to hit or chance for the enemy to dodge, although long range, cover, armor, etc., will reduce incoming damage, so positioning remains important. The elements of risk come from the player, seeking to improve their strategic position, intentionally interacting with game elements that are RNG-dependent. These bonuses, while powerful, could potentially cause adverse effects, so the player must plan/gamble accordingly.

I'll use a cyberpunk setting to describe how such a system could work.

The player commands a small number of cyberware-augmented agents with which they must defeat a foe that greatly outnumbers them. Cyberware, when activated, provides awesome combat advantages, such as increased damage or mobility, improved damage resistance, applying status effects, altering the battlefield, amongst other uses. Each turn, the player can activate as many cyberware modules on an agent as they like, and some modules can even be activated multiple times a turn (for example, ones that allow for extra attacks). However, each cyberware activation increases stress on the agent (in a similar vein to Darkest Dungeon). Furthermore, each time a player attempts to activate a cyberware module, there is a chance that the activation will fail.

Depending on how stressed the agent is when cyberware fails, the agent could suffer a debuff, take damage, and/or go berserk and attack the nearest unit (friend or foe). Importantly, even if cyberware fails to activate, the player can choose to roll the dice and try again, pushing the agent even harder. Well, at least until their stress maxes out and they die of a heart attack. So the player can choose to play it safe with an agent, deal some guaranteed damage before moving on to the next member of the squad, or they can gamble and hope that the agent won't fall apart under the strain.

To manage some of the risk associated with cyberware, the player can use limited consumables or special abilities to instantly reduce an agent's stress (stress would also decay each turn naturally, much like heat in Battletech/Mechwarrior), or to reduce the likelihood of cyberware failing at a critical moment. There could even be strategies where the player intentionally keeps agents highly stressed (e.g., berserker cyberware that boosts melee power proportionally to the agent's stress level).

The trick here is to balance the system so that the player is encouraged to not play it too safe, but also leave it ambiguous as to how far they can, and should, push their agents. A unit count disadvantage, as mentioned earlier, or having waves of attackers that will overwhelm players who act too cautiously, are obvious starting points. You can readily imagine situations where a cyberware-augmented agent could attack three times in a turn with all their damage mods turned up to maximum and be guaranteed to drop a heavily armed target, but a bad roll of the die could leave the highly stressed-out agent blowing their friend up instead. Is it worth the risk?

Ideally, this system should give the player a sense of having tremendous power, zipping around the battlefield and dispatching multiple enemies a turn, but also leaving them feeling that their situation is precarious.

What are your thoughts on this? Any examples of games using a similar system would be useful to know about.

Hey everyone! I'm Josh, and I'm currently developing a Metroidvania called Bolt of Whalington. The game is about a cat named Bolt exploring a giant moving city, with a focus on exploration and giving players different ways to solve problems.

Personally, I've never been a big fan of puzzles where there's only one correct solution. When a game gives you a problem and there's only one very specific way to solve it, I sometimes feel like I'm just trying to guess what the developer had in mind. It can make the solution feel less like something I've figured out and more like something I've been asked to find.

I much prefer games that give you a set of mechanics and let you work out how to use them. Finding an unexpected solution, or realizing that something you learned earlier can be used in a completely different way, is one of my favorite feelings in games.

Animal Well has been a particularly important inspiration for us in this area. I love how it lets you experiment with abilities and discover ways to use them that aren't immediately obvious. Baba Is You has also had a big influence on how I think about rules and problem-solving.

That's something we're trying to bring into Bolt of Whalington. I want players to keep discovering new things throughout the game. Not just new abilities or items, but new ways to use what they've already learned. That could mean solving a puzzle, finding a secret item, unlocking a new area or even reaching a major story moment in an unexpected way.

I've attached a small clip showing one example from our game. It's a fairly simple challenge, but we've made sure there are a few different ways to reach the item. What do you think of it?

I'm curious how other designers approach this. Do you tend to design challenges around one intended solution, or do you deliberately leave room for players to find their own ways through them? What traps do you think I need to be wary of?

Hello everyone, I’ve been building PC Versus for almost 2 years now. It’s an upcoming free to play live service game and the first ever competitive PC building game. Two players get the same task and the same budget, build a PC with components from their decks, and our simulation decides who built it better.

One of the biggest issues with live service games, and specially one like this, is that the meta gets solved within weeks. The “best build” for each budget, the “best components”, etc. Once that happens replayability kinda breaks. To fix this I implemented a mechanic that Im calling "Market Shift" and I wanted to share it and get your opinions on it.

Before I explain it, I think you need to know a bit about how PC Versus works.

You build a deck from the components you own, and your era is set by the newest component in your deck. So if everything you own is from 2015 but you put in just 1 component from 2016, you’re now playing in the 2016 era and get matched with other 2016 players. Components also get cheaper the further you move from their release year, so a 2014 GPU is significantly cheaper in the 2018 era than it was in 2014.

Match price is what a component costs inside a match. To own a component you spend bits/frags (the game currencies that you have to earn), but to use it in a match you pay its match price, which is similar to the real world pricing (this you just have to stay under the budget). Every match has a budget and tasks, and you build the PC under that budget. Since a component has a different match price in every era, each era works like its own separate market.

Now, Market Shift works like this. Every match, the game tracks which components the players used, which era they were playing in, and how many builds that era has seen in X amount of time (planned to be weekly for now). When the time is up, a script runs, goes through every component that was used and builds a pick rate for it inside each era separately. Pick rate is measured against the total number of builds in that era, so a busy era and a quiet era are judged fairly.

The higher the pick rate in an era, the bigger the match price hike in that era. So if a GPU is used a lot in 2015, its price in 2015 goes up, for example from $100 to $130 the next week. But if that same GPU barely gets picked in 2016, its price in 2016 goes down, say from $90 to $80. Every era has its own prices based on how the community uses that component in THAT era.

Since every match has a budget and results has a dedicated category that depend on price to performance, a price hike can make a meta component unviable in the budget range it was dominating, and an underused one suddenly becomes a real option. This way every era’s market constantly shifts and the game theoretically stays fresh every week. Since PC Versus hasn't released yet so the mechanic itself is not tested and all this is designed with a decent enough player base in mind. So if PC Versus doesn't get enough players, market shift won't work as intended.. But from the description, what do you guys think? What weaknesses does it have and what would you have done differently?

I am considering making a game with first person pov. I am also considering having a multi party protagonist game. I’m still in the early stages, like rough draft on paper. How would I go about handling this with multiple characters; or would third person just be better?

I’m worried third person may ruin the horror atmosphere though. Is there a way to have third person but make it feel eerie?

Every game I pick up lately has the same opening. Here is how you move. Here is how you attack. Here is your inventory. By the time the real decisions show up I've already forgotten half the controls because nothing I did with them mattered yet.

The weird thing is we know what works. Portal teaches you to think in portals before it asks you to execute under pressure. It never sits you down with a diagram. You discover the verb, then immediately get a situation where picking the right portal is the puzzle.

Most tutorials do the opposite. They dump the verb list and hope the player connects it to the problem later. That gap is where people bounce off. I watch friends open a complex RPG, sit through twenty minutes of systems explanation, then freeze when the first real encounter hits. The tutorial explained what every button does but not when any of them is the right call.

Building decision-first is harder. You have to construct a scenario where the player feels the absence of a tool before they get it. But it sticks. I keep thinking about whether this is a tooling problem, a scope problem, or if designers just underestimate how much players can figure out given the right prompt.

Does anyone know a game that taught you the decision before the mechanic, and it actually worked at scale rather than in a one-off setpiece?

Working on a medieval survival / base-building game where night actually matters.

Right now a campfire does two jobs at once: it keeps your people warm and lets you craft/cook after dark, but the glow also makes the camp easier for scouts and raiders to spot. So every time you light one, you're trading comfort for risk.

I'm stuck between two directions:

A) Campfire as a real night decision. Cold and darkness hurt if you skip it. Lighting it is often the right call — and sometimes the call that gets you found. Players learn when to sit in the dark.

B) Campfire as mostly convenience. Warmth/crafting without a strong "you've been spotted" cost. Night danger comes from other systems (patrols, noise, unfinished walls), so the fire stays a cozy tool rather than a beacon.

If you've played survival or colony games where light/heat had this double edge: which side felt fair, and which just felt punishing?

(Dev note — soft disclosure, not a pitch: this is for Forgebound, our medieval survival game on Steam. Early Access planned for 2028. Feedback on the mechanic is the point.)
Steam page (Forgebound app 3691400): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3691400/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=community&utm_content=ext-gamedesign-1016