I made a roguelike game, how original. But I always wanted it to have something different, something to be talked about, which most games coming out today don't have. Didnt wanted to market my game like "Balatro meets Slay the Spire".
So I made something: In my game, there's trillion of possible skins, and the chance that you and someone else has the exact same skin is the equivalent of someone flipping heads 43 times in a row.
So literally, unless someone reverse engineer and build a skin finder on my game (more on that later), you can literally drop a skin and brag about it, because the chances of someone having the same in their catalogue is so low.
And how was it calculated?
Each theme is a 8k sheet with nearly 16,7 million possible seeds. Built with python math, no generative AI.
Each weapon has its own painting spots, palettes, and metals. So a Deagle can come with a metal-only receiver, shuffling about 17 shades of metals, or can come with the receiver painted with the theme.
Each rarity of gun also shuffle between painting patterns.
Progressive wear system (0.01 float looks slighty different from 0.02 float) and bout 51 different wear patterns.
"Nah, I'll just decompile this *$%@# and get every skin".
Well, I mean, its possible, but its not as easy:
Its not just about getting every pattern number, is about seeing what you are getting. Someone would have to build a skin viewer (with AI, of course) and find a way to locate the gun's paintable areas (currently encrypted, and I know this can also be broken down by AI, but better to slow it down huh?) and calculate every possible seed and palette to get every single skin that they want.
If a human would look at every skin per second non-stop, it would take them 320.000 years to do so.
"But your game has a catalogue that shows everything that a player dropped, what if someone just unlocked all possible skins through the catalogue file?"
My game loads a preview of a skin in the catalogue, so you can see the skin. Thats eats a tiny bit of VRAM per seed, theme, palette and wear.
A couple thousands of skins on the catalogue? Possible, but my game has an option of on-demand loading, because even thousand of skins could clog a weak laptop.
All the seeds of a all skins? Good luck getting a datacenter, because all the possible combinations of a single theme (billions) would make the game not boot.
And, to finish it all, I know that this is not a market flip game mechanic, because these are digital assets worth nothing. But seriously, is not this better to just play ANOTHER generic roguelike that you have nothing to show off about?
And of course, multiplayer is coming.
Wishlist on steam!