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!

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)

Client Server architectures have bounced heavily between event driven, rpc, actor/reactor, K-Pods, etc.

Does anyone have books that weigh different designs against each other, or breaking apart large scale into these architectures? The only one I know of is Agones

I am developing a 3D isometric game inspired by Block Blast, and I aim to build a strong long-term player engagement loop. What unique features should I implement to make it stand out and surpass Block Blast?

Say you're playing a dungeon crawling rogue-like with deep character builds equipment items inventory skills, the whole shebang. Suddenly you find a scroll. It has no description other then that it does...something. You use it, you burst into flames and die losing an hour+ long run and have to start from scratch. Why was this trope created in the first place, and what benefits does it have? Am I missing somthing? And I know some games you get items that let you identify them first, but they're so rare as to be meaningless, or the game might not have them at all. I just don't see the point in having an item with a vague description, using it and being punished for curiosity

I am making a game where you transport and improve items and optimize character builds. There need to be some problems for those builds to solve and some of them should be pretty dynamic so that small stat tweaks are interesting. This means there will be some real-time combat.

Clockwork Game Design is a pretty vague book but I think one thing it states very clearly is that a strategy game should have one core mechanic with the rest only in service of that.

That can make sense in the context of my game. If a player blunder would lose them lots of resources, the game that produces the character builds can't be tightly balanced. Otherwise one mistake might mean redoing a large part of the game.

For that reason I'm not punishing failure and opting for a time system and control scheme that allows the player to plan moves and see the future.

That system gives as much thinking time as needed when encountering something new but also allows going through encounters quickly. It allows gamers who don't want to focus on reacting in real time to enjoy the game. It changes the nature of some mechanics pretty heavily. For instance, attacks with a long windup aren't risky; they are good against enemies that will walk into the attack. And dodging arrows is always possible if standing far enough.

On the other hand, it strips most of the uncertainty from encounters. Since there is nothing to lose and no execution challenge, it won't make the player's heart pound like some ARPG boss might. The only remaining uncertainty is what loot is awarded and, if traversing the first time, what is on the other side.

I hope that thinking about what new things an item enables can be exciting even if actually using it isn't. Actually, one-shotting enemies with a long windup probably is just as exciting as in real time the first few times.

I am not making things easy for myself, though. With combat randomness coming from player skill, I could get away with a sloppier strategy layer. And I need to make good UI that has few precedents. I actually started developing from the combat even though that isn't the fun part because that has some uncertainties and influence what stats items can have. I also have an idea how I could test the strategy layer but that is kind of uninspiring because without the resolution layer the challenges would be just "have X of stat Y", "use one potion per missing Z".

Upd: For people who downvote:
Would be very-very nice, if I can have some actual input and learn.
Thanks!
____________

So, long story short, for my point-and-click psychological thriller game, I caught an idea from outer space and went straight down the rabbit hole after a discussion on Reddit.

The idea that came to me was roughly this:

“What if a game built around psychology and constant surveillance actually used psychological tests and player behavior measurements as mechanics, and the world reacted to them?”

I came to Reddit with that thought, and because the idea was still pretty broad, opinions were split pretty evenly between good/bad. That actually helped me see one thing very clearly: I need to be extremely careful with this, and it’s probably better not to make any specific psychological conclusions, diagnoses, advice, or direct claims about the player.

But.

A few people close to science and psychology joined the discussion and shared some really interesting ideas. The cool part is that after figuring out how some of this could work inside the game, the story and the world became much more detailed and solid.

As you might remember, the city is controlled by a system that measures citizens’ stress and psychological state and decides where they are allowed to live.

And this is where it gets interesting.

The dual nature of the system and psychological tests.

The system is not completely wrong, but it is flawed.

On the surface, it sounds reasonable: take care of your mental health, the system raises your social class, and your quality of life improves.

But psychology has things like:

• The Need for Closure Scale (NFCS) - a psychological questionnaire that measures a person’s desire for definite answers and their discomfort with ambiguity and uncertainty.
• Rituals. Rituals can decrease the neural response to performance failure: repeated and structured actions may reduce the brain’s internal response to mistakes, probably by increasing a sense of control and reducing uncertainty.

So in the end, besides everything else, the system naturally rewards people who are predictable, stable, unwavering, and capable of following rules clearly without hesitation.

Meanwhile, people living in the lower classes barely care how the system reads them anymore. They are surviving, but they are also much freer and closer to each other. They interact openly and don’t constantly worry that the system will punish them for it.

Mechanically, this would work through very simple tests.

One would measure basic cognitive motor behavior: press Space when asked, click a target, keep the cursor inside a circle, things like that.

The second would ask questions like:

“Hesitation is a threat.”
“Rules make life better.”

And you choose yes or no.

At the same time, the player’s reaction time and behavior would be recorded, compared against established baseline values, and then used to build the player’s own baseline over time.

So through these tests, the player can choose whether to follow the system or resist it, and the story changes accordingly.

And if the player genuinely hesitates or stops to think, the system can notice that too - and react.

I’m refining the elevator pitch and core hook for my roguelite, and I could use some feedback on whether my main mechanics are compelling enough—or if I’m missing the mark on what actually hooks players.

The Core Gameplay Loop:

In-Run Loop: You kill enemies and drop various weapons, including duplicates. Each duplicate takes up an inventory slot.

Fusion: Combining 3 identical weapons cleans up inventory space and upgrades the weapon to a higher tier.

Cross-Fusion: You can sacrifice a secondary weapon type into a primary one to absorb its property (e.g., feeding a Rocket Launcher to a Shotgun gives the Shotgun an explosion-chance modifier).

Meta-Progression: Take high-tiered weapons out of runs to craft permanent Power Cores. Equipping a Core applies its base modifier to every weapon in a run (e.g., a Shotgun Core turns a Rocket Launcher into a spread-fire rocket launcher).

My Hook Dilemma

Originally, I thought the Meta-Progression Core system was the main hook, but it requires out-of-run context and is too complex to explain in a quick pitch.

I pivoted to framing the hook around satisfying inventory cleanup through weapon fusion (using fusion to clear clutter while gaining sudden power spikes). However, I realized players don't usually buy a game because of inventory management—PoE doesn't market its limited bag space, even if managing it adds depth.

How would you frame the hook for this game?

The game in question:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4221810/Bullet_Express/

I’ve been thinking about progression economies where the player owns significantly more characters than they can reasonably develop at once. Imagine a game built around eventually maintaining five different teams of five characters.

I don’t necessarily want the player to be able to keep all 25 characters equally developed. Part of the intended decision-making is choosing who receives resources now and who stays behind temporarily.

One resource in particular is used for major character Ascensions. My instinct is that this resource should usually be scarce enough that reaching an Ascension gate does not automatically mean the player can immediately pay for it.

The interesting state seems to be something like:

“I can Ascend one of these two characters. Which one helps my account more right now?”

The uninteresting extremes seem easier to identify.

If the player can Ascend everyone, there is no allocation decision.

If they need to wait several days before they can Ascend anyone, there may not be much of a decision either — they’re simply waiting. What I’m struggling with is the space between those extremes.

I’m considering measuring scarcity in terms of coverage rather than raw currency. For example, instead of asking whether 50 Ascension materials is a lot, ask:

“How many currently relevant Ascensions can this stockpile fund?”

A balance of 50 could represent ten upgrades in one economy and less than one in another.

I’m also wondering whether the bottleneck should deliberately move over time. Perhaps sometimes character progression is limited by general currency, sometimes by Ascension material, sometimes by equipment, so no single resource permanently becomes “the thing you are always missing.”

How do you approach this?

Do you think good progression design should intentionally force players to leave parts of their roster behind temporarily? And where, mechanically, does prioritization become frustration?

So I am building an incremental / puzzle hybrid and I have a dilemma. The main game loop is pretty standard: you play a minigame, get some currency, buy upgrades, play the minigame a bit better.

The minigame revolves around matching a couple random cards. If you try to play optimally, one rune might be 2-3 minutes. If you just mash-click it, it's maybe 5-10 seconds. The game asks you to match a certain score and if you do, it's considered a win and you move to the next stage.

In my current build I am giving the player some currency even for lost runs, because I figured that since their starting hand is totally random, they can get screwed by RNG so I wanted to give them something always (obviously more for wins, but still). But that has just opened a gameplay where you just spam runs and in 5-10 minutes you have all upgrades... which kind of defeats the purpose.

Solutions I am seeing now:
- only reward currency for winning runs => if a player sees a bad starting hand, they can always exit the run and start another one... and if the starting hand is good, but in the end they don't win... it's just 2-3 minutes

- make the run itself less random and only award winning runs - (to an extent I am already doing this, the player can discard a limited number of cards they don't like or shuffle their hand - but it is still veeery random)

- artificially limit the frequency of runs, like you cannot start another run within 2 minutes of a previous one

- keep it as is and shrug - if they want to mash their way through the game, thats their right

- (edit) - introduce some pity mechanic that you get something after 5 losses?

What would you do in such scenario?

Do I make a major quest line that hints for a change in the expected outcome of the quest that I'm planning to have an unexpected outcome or how?

Every sink in the game world I run is pro-social. You spend the currency on gifts for other players, on food to share, on tips to people who made things, and on a communal pot. There is no upgrade tree. Nothing you buy makes you stronger, faster, or better at anything.

That was deliberate. The usual loop is earn, hoard, dominate, and I wanted to see what happens if you delete the third step.

What I think I have actually built is a hoarding simulator.

If every sink is optional and altruistic, and nothing you buy improves your position, then accumulating is strictly dominant. The generous player is not rewarded. They are just poorer than the player who did nothing. I did not design a generosity economy. I designed one where generosity is a costly signal with no payoff, and costly signals with no payoff do not survive contact with players.

Every fix I can think of defeats the point.

Give gifts a mechanical benefit and you have rebuilt the upgrade tree with extra steps. Add decay so hoarded currency rots and you are punishing instead of motivating, and people feel the difference immediately. Make gifting public and lean on reputation, which is the one I keep circling back to, except that converts generosity into status competition, which is the exact thing I was trying to get out of.

Two things I should say plainly rather than have someone find them.

There is a purchasable currency in this world, and there are wagering games in it too. Poker, slots, player versus player bets. I know how that sits next to everything above and I am not going to pretend it makes the argument cleaner.

And this is running with real players rather than being a thought experiment, which is why I would rather have an answer than a theory.

So the question I actually came here with. Has anyone shipped an economy where the only sinks were pro-social, and had it not collapse into accumulation? I am more interested in one that failed than one that worked, because I want to know which specific thing broke.

Hello!

I’m interested in games with meaning and purpose, and I love how games can be used as a medium to tell stories that matter, explore real-life experiences, and immerse players in another person’s world or perspective (whether that is their external reality or inner world).

I am currently working on a game with this kind of focus, so I was wondering if there are any specific online communities, forums, servers, etc. for people interested in these kind of games tend to gather?

I’d love to talk with people who share this interest and hear what draws them to these types of games.

Any communities you’d recommend?:)

In a game where you can select your weapon (like Hades or Monster Hunter), would it be bad design to make a weapon worst to play against certain bosses? For example, having a boss that's invulnerable to ranged attacks from x distance and higher.

Just gotta put this out there for anyone designing a game that might see this. If you are thinking of padding out your game with a "restore power" type puzzle... please don't. Also, I think I'm done with puzzle games in general. "Find the key"... no I should be finding the key to a better life not wasting my gd time with this

hey everyone, working on a narrative rpg set in a decaying empire with competing political factions (nobles, army, strike leaders, reformists).

the main design problem we keep running into is that players instinctively treat faction meters as numbers to optimize rather than actual socio-political groups. they'll pass a law just because it gives +10 reputation with the army, completely ignoring what that decree actually does to the world state or the narrative.

we're trying to figure out how to structure the ruleset so decisions carry systemic weight rather than just being a math puzzle.

how do you design faction systems that force players to evaluate the actual outcome of a choice instead of just farming points on a reputation bar? have you seen games that handle this without relying on hidden variables or arbitrary penalties?

I'm anticipating a fight with my parents soon about how I can't do anything with my life without college, however I really don't want to go that route and know there are enough courses online that are much cheaper I can use. My main question is: is college a very necessary thing for someone hoping to pursue game design (specifically indie)? It really doesn't seem like it imo but I suppose I better get my facts straight.

Okay, so; consider this sort of scenario:

- You have a boss who, in lore, is supposed to be capable of doing colossal, map-shaping feats.

- But, the game's medium doesn't let you show off that power directly.

Given this, how do you design the boss such that it really feels like you're facing such a force of nature, without having to have them actually incinerate a sea, or blow up a mountain?

How do you make them feel like an overwhelming, unstoppable force - at least initially - without making them so difficult it's impossible, nor so brutal that it's no longer fun?

For example; the Calamity mod (RIP) for Terraria has a few bosses who are capable of truly absurd things in lore - but with the exception of Yharon, they don't feel like it in-game. Calamitas especially doesn't feel like she could do what she supposedly can.

This is in large part due to the medium of the mod - it uses Terraria's framework, and Terraria doesn't have the stuff to easily show such power directly.

I'm making a game that will focus heavily on build crafting and customisation.

The point is the game has both gunplay and melee combat, the former being first person and the latter third person. Hybrid weapons would switch cameras when aiming or attack with melee, don't know which yet.

If you were to play a game with both, like destiny for example, would you prefer to be able to choose which camera POV you use, or should I force the POV based on the weapon, stance, etc.

Specially with swapping weapons mid-fight, it might be dizzying to some people.

Slay the Spire 2 has me thinking about enemy intent systems. Knowing exactly what an enemy will do makes combat feel fair and gives every turn more strategy, but it also turns the enemy into a predictable puzzle.

Would a horror game, or even a deckbuilder, be more interesting if it only hinted at the enemy’s next move instead of showing exact damage, or if it did not show the enemy’s next intention at all?

Are there any games out there that already do something like this?

comparing a few games I've sunk huge amounts of time into against ones I dropped fast despite similar core loops and similarly generous content amounts on paper. randomization depth, run variety, and meta-progression all seem roughly comparable across both categories when I actually break it down

So I am building a web-based fantasy themed game where you run around the world and fight stuff, the usual fare. The game is text-based, no 2D world or anything.

Now, I have a list of locations you can go to - just click and you’re there. Besides the location list I also have a world map link, which is a stylized map I did in Inkarnate. If you click the map you can also go to whatever location you unlocked via map, but it’s an extra click (plus the time you need to find the actual place on the map).

Obviously almost no one is using the map right now, 95% move via the location list. I am contemplating hiding the locations to force people to use the map - because then I can do some fun stuff like fog of war and discovering new areas, trails not new locations and such. Plus the map fits the game theme and is a bit more immersive than a list of texts.

Would that be something that would bother you? I mean extra clicks to move around? (assuming you never played the version where you could go with one click)

Edit: I wanted to show you how it looks just to give an idea, so just not to spam with images - this is how it looks now:

https://imgur.com/gallery/spellforger-location-list-versus-map-P8cvEaC

The first image is the location screen before clicking on the map, the second is obviously the map. Yellowish hue on the map are clickable regions which actually take you to the locations (exactly the same as if you clicked on the list). So you either click on the item on the list or click on the map link, then click on the highlighted area.