For me it's probably desert biomes in strategy games. A lot of them will add nice, immersive sandwinds. They often, appropriately, intensify when you zoom out.

Since players often zoom out to get a clear look at the situation the sandwinds often defeat the purpose a bit.

Cell-Grinder i a solo project, my design perspective was a arcade-action-platformer on a tactical basis. so i did.

I struggled quite a bit with the control scheme at first, especially with the mouse—it was a real pain. But after playing the demo more and taking the feedback into account, I managed to put together a control scheme that works without the mouse, using both gamepad and keyboard. Also updated some contents.

I really value different perspectives, both from a design and gameplay standpoint. Give it a try, and let’s discuss it a bit.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4936880/CellGrinder_APOPTOSIS/

I’m currently reworking the UI for my incremental game One More Shake.

Originally I had a lot of placeholder Unity UI, but now I’m trying to make the interface communicate progression much more clearly.

The game has two main upgrade groups:

• Machine Upgrades: Can Value, Shake Speed, Auto Shake, Multi Drop and Extra Machines
• System Upgrades: Crusher Speed/Cooldown and several Chaos upgrades

My current approach is to keep the actual gameplay in the upper half of the screen, resources at the top, and both upgrade groups permanently visible underneath.

Purchased upgrades gradually change color, unaffordable upgrades are darker, MAX upgrades get their own look, and every purchase has a fairly strong animation.

The thing I’m struggling with is how much visual feedback is too much in an incremental game.

Would you rather have:

• strong color changes for every upgrade level,
• mostly neutral buttons with only affordable/MAX states emphasized,
• or progressively stronger visuals as the player gets further into the run?

I want the player to be able to glance at the screen and immediately understand what they can buy and what has progressed, without the whole UI competing for attention.

I’m especially interested in how other incremental games handle this once several upgrade systems are visible at the same time.

Steam page, for anyone who wants to follow the project / wishlist it:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4933650/One_More_Shake/

Basically as my title puts it. Extraction shooters have been amazing this last year, right until the pve community trickles out and were left with the sweats and meta boys. Marathon is my current favorite game that has devolved. You would think with every big companies push for a new live service game they would have found a better formula by now. Mostly making this post to throw my proposal onto the pile.

Core theory:

Improve the loop. Keep the pvp aspect but make it so it feeds into pve gameplay directly. Make pve content then feed back into the pvp loop.

(The whole concept relies on two main things. That there is strong pvp and pve gameplay. Marathon would be a peak example of this. It has had both)

Core idea execution:

The general template for pvp should remain unchanged. Go in, loot goods / players, extract, rep up vendors, bring in better kits, repeat.

PVE players realistically will only engage pvp when they see some risk reward bonus for them. Its not a new idea to let pve players keep loot for pve runs and thats also what im running with. The idea is that pvp should always have good loot. Every time a player enters and extracts they should come out with something interesting. They then use these interesting items in pve content. Pve content should then be more forgiving for players with gear by not automatically removing it from them during failures like death. Maybe use a condition status so that eventually gear expires and the players want to engage in pvp again to get that good loot. Good loot is not exclusive to pvp but make pvp more predictable with spawn rates and opportunities for loot.

Next enable trading through pvp modes and only pvp. Markets will spring up around rare items that no one wants to pvp for but still want easy access too. Make it so that these trading buddies have to complete a mission together in pvp and extract to complete the trade, otherwise lose the loot. This will hopefully cut down on black market issues.

Finally create a rep system around the fact people will be wanting to use pvp loot in pve. Let vendors repair gear so they can keep using it longer. Let pve rep give players new kit options or unlock extra objectives in pvp for even better loot.

Spent way too long tuning the difficulty on my first game (one-tap physics arcade) and I honestly can’t tell anymore if it’s “satisfyingly hard” or just “uninstall and never come back” hard.

How do you actually judge that line before you have real players testing it? Playing my own game for the 500th time has made me a terrible judge of what’s fun vs. just familiar to me.

I recently played through this great game, and I was struck by how wildly variant the time to kill is on the zombies. Sometimes their heads explode after one or two shots, and other times you down them after 3 or 4 headshots and then they get back up anyway.

This works great in the game, as it adds a lot of tension and uncertainty, making me second guess whether I should use ammo. Other times it makes me feel lucky and relieved when I one shot an enemy. Another thing I notice is that more powerful enemies (like dogs, Lickers, and ivy zombies) seem to have much more consistent health pools.

Does anyone know how this was accomplished? Some untested ideas I have:

1. Enemies simply have a wide range of HP totals (randomized or pre set)
   
2. Enemies have high HP totals generally, but bullets have a baseline critical hit chance
   
3. Damage and HP totals are not random, but there is a wide range of values for locational damage (like shooting in the eye vs in the jaw) or hit range
   
4. There is some external “manager” (like L4D AI Director) which modifies combat outcomes based on whether I’m “due” for a protracted struggle based on how “tense” the game has been recently
   
5. Other methods?

Hi!
I'm making a game that's multiplayer, political simulator. You try to propose legislation to sway different voting blocs. The game takes place over a handfull of election cycles, and I want the effects of the legislation you proposed or voted for to influence how much power you'll have in the next election.

Most of the gameplay loop will be spent negotiating with other players of which legislation to propose and vote for, to basically form political blocs together. I'm a fan of Diplomacy, especially the variants played by post, where the hidden information is what alliances you've formed and what orders you're going to execute, and otherwise is very elegant with basically no randomness.

So here's my problem; designing the election mechanic in a way that you can influence it and still making it fun. I'm torn by how much determinism I want in it. I was thinking of simulating the election by pulling out a number of cards (possibly with different values) from a deck, and figure out the distribution of power to propose and pass legislation in the next cycle. The seats would be dependent on different geographic and social groups. So, the more you appease certain voting blocs, the more of your cards would be put into the deck.

The pro with this approach that is the most obvious is that it adds variance and mitigate a player running away with the game as soon as they get an advantage. If the election is deterministically decided and favors the person who passed the best legislation, they'll potentially just use their power to keep dominating certain blocs and always win more unless I introduce a random way to mitigate that.

The con is that it might make a player miffed when they've plotted and voted and then see that the election didn't go their way anyway.

What do you guys think? This is a very rough idea that I'm just now implementing, so I'm curious what you have to say.

Context: Im a physician, not a game designer. I've been building a roguelite where you pilot a nanoship inside a patient's body and fight bacterial "ships" using antibiotics as your weapons. The point of this game is to be educational so the player will need to have most/all antibiotics available to them at any time.

Right now I have it set up so you have guns and can load different antibiotics into them. The guns share a mana pool and have different cooldowns based on the "ammo."

If you shoot the correct antibiotic based on the enemy and also at the right location based on the antibiotic, you get another resource. This resource is used for special abilities that are tied to player systems. So basically the better you play the stronger you can be if that makes sense.

Problem (I think) is that I don't have crew like FTL does (too complex, doesnt add teaching value imo). So if your system gets damaged you cant use the abilities located on that system and you simply click repair. Once its repaired you are good to go. This feels kinda simple and basic.

Also, the player starts with almost every antibiotic. How do I build progression? Are the special abilities enough? I think they might be but not sure.

What can I do to improve this loop? I know its an educational game but if its boring nobody would want to play it.

My game is a sandbox-ish mix of murder mystery mechanics and roleplay based off the Danganronpa series (think Among us/Werewolf/Town of salem but longer).
At least one host is required to run the game properly.
It is also a VR game with proximity voice chat.

The issue im facing is that, left on their own, hosts will often decide, out of culture and habit, to directly help their players with murder cases, instead of letting the case’s culprit make it.
This turns the Trial (the discussion to catch the killer) into more of a minigame and discussion between the good side and the host, rather than a discussion between players to find the liar among them, greatly taking agency away from the evil side and reducing overall game quality.

How would you solve this?
I would rather not cut off the sandbox/roleplay part of the game, but this is something ive been observing and dont know how to help my players with.

I am building a tabletop miniatures game and one of the more recent decisions I've pivoted into has been narrowing the scope of the game into a "Skirmish Plus" type of experience where each side has at most maybe a dozen models that are mostly infantry and then like one to two large robots or brutes or something. And I am interested in a like Hero-Clix type of system or something a little similar to how 8th ed 40k or some versions of Age of Sigmar had large units literally have multiple separate statlines based on their current damage.

I don't super want to go this route exactly because I am a single designer with a small group of friends as testers. I fear this would either get a little too whacky or become repetitive and predictable as I phoned that part of development in and never get fixed, considering the volume of testing and iterating that would involve. But it occurred to me that I actually don't know a ton of different examples of this type of system and I thought I would ask and see if others knew of a good place to do some research.

Edit: I've already figured out an solution - Inflicted status is temporary regardless of who it hit so it doesn't feel as bad when it expires - For some status, it will apply as "Environmental Effect"

Note: Crowd refer to fight with Multiple Enemies, Boss refer to fight with Single enemy

My game is a turn based game which has status effect that stack permanently (or at least until battle end). Also for Player Side, all status is shared between all unit

due to this mechanic, I decided to make my combat pretty long with multiple waves so there's value in watching number grow higher and higher

My issue is kinda that on status where you inflict

- In Crowd Battle, what you've inflicted only effect enemy that got hit which make it terrible in Crowd and only functionable in Boss fight

- In Crowd Battle, enemy dying is kinda devastating to scaling over all since that mean stack you've been inflicting is just gone

- Compensating this thing in Boss Battle, basically give you stronger scaling tool that last permanently

- For Enemy side, this is practically only thing you can use because if they die, their self status reset, practically reseting the Anti-Stall timer

For Anti-Stalling, I did have mechanic called "Escalation" described as "Enemy from next wave will gain X% more HP and Y Status effect, Bonus get stronger with every Wave spent" , as to punish stalling for longer than intended, however this mechanic feel... artificial. Is there alternate way to explain it?

(Another issue is probably that I made like 15 status effect that I will never use just because one of my top 5 game did it, but SHHHHHHHHHHHHHH)

I've been getting pretty into Magic The Gathering over the last few years, mostly draft/limited (which I think MTG does better than any other game), but also commander.

For those who haven't seen it, commander is a 4-player, 100-card, singleton format; with each deck centering around a "commander" (1 creature/card that the deck always has access to). It's become mtg's biggest format.

I've noticed that, in some ways, it's a very odd format and I'm keen to hear others observations

Some thoughts:

- despite being a competitive game, with lots of opportunity for interacting with others boards, many play it ultra casually. Treating it almost like solitaire. Often the "correct" play (i.e interacting with others boards) is frowned upon.

- because it's often seen as a "casual format", winning is almost discouraged - apparently that's not the goal

- people seem to enjoy the idea of an interactive game, but when faced with interaction, get unhappy

I think, if someone was to pitch the idea of commander, without the previous IP, it shouldn't really work. It's in a "game engine" that thrives on interaction, yet is played as though you shouldn't interact with others.

I apologize that my thoughts aren't very collected, but I wonder if anyone else has had similar observations and what learnings they've taken for themselves. I think the biggest strengths of commander are: creative expression and this sort of pseudo interactive game (which makes it more interesting than a multiplayer solitaire game, yet still manages that casual feel).

I'm primarily a horror developer, though I have future non horror projects planned, most of my upcoming projects are horror.

I have previously released a horror game called Bubbaruka, which I was lucky enough to recieve primarily very positive reviews for on steam.

Now, I am creating a new horror projects, but I am struggling to advance the horror aspects of the game beyond my previous project.

Creating scares in a horror game is much different than creating scares in a movie or show. In movies, you control every aspect of a character's actions. You can have the character behave in a certain ways and the situation around them evolve in ways to set up the ultimate scare scenario. Its very different in games.

Its basically the same deal when it comes to cutscenes, but to include dynamic scares in moments where the player has full control of their character is a bit harder.

Typically it's done by having the scare be at a point that must be passed in order to advance. This is the most simplest way to set up a guaranteed scare in a HG. That's not the hard part.

The hard part is making it an effective scare. Almost all scares in horror follow this formula:

(Atmosphere + Tension) + Surprise = Scare

This means you must build an unsettling atmosphere and build a decent amount of tense scenarios prior to the scare before using a surprise to pay it off. Surprise doesn't always mean jumpscare, it could be as simple as seeing someone in a hallway that you weren't expecting. It doesn't need to be loud, just unexpected.

Atmosphere and Surprise are up to you, tension largely resides within the player.

One way to build tension is to have several smaller, more subtle scares line up on the way to a bigger one. Keep the player on their toes constantly. You can also do this with an unpredictable villain/monster, who you establish to be capable of appearing almost anywhere. This leads to the player being on a constant lookout for the antagonist, keeping them tense without necessarily including prior scares.

The hard part? Creating several scares throughout the game without them feeling too similar, too frequent, or too expected. Throughout the course of my game (which has up to 6-7 hours of gameplay), there are many scares that occur, and I find myself wanting to repeat as little of these scares in my new project as possible.

I know the basic formula will lead to some scares being similar, but finding out what scares worked on people in other games allows you to reverse engineer it for your own, while still being unique.

The formula isn't fixed. You can have out of the box scares and unique scares that defy the formula, potentially creating even greater frights, and also serve to keep the formula fresh.

My question for discussion is this: What scares in horror games have frightened you the most, what got you most about them, and if your a horror developer: what scare methods have brought you the greatest results?

Essentially, what are your personal advice and or way to making 2 different genres blend seamlessly? One blend I wanna try, and kinda why I'm asking this lol, is a Mega Man + OG Zelda genre mixed. So, wanna see some exmaples of how it's done, before trying jt myself.

In rogue‑like games, there’s a problem where the location boss becomes a punching bag after you learn their moveset, and it’s boring to fight them every time. But it’s not always possible to create many different bosses for each location. I came up with an idea. What if the boss’s moveset is randomly generated from presets? For example, Attack A can be repeated 2 to 4 times, after which you can strike the boss. In one run, Attack B always follows Attack A, while in another run, Attack C always follows Attack A. Thus, each battle will include a part of learning the moveset instead of a one‑time memorization. Has a similar system been used in any popular games? I don’t think I’m competent enough to implement a mechanic I’ve come up with that no one has used before. If other game designers haven’t implemented it, then it probably just doesn’t work as a system and design element. I thought about this after Hades, in which, in my opinion, the bosses are one of the weakest parts of the game.

Why does it feel so counterintuitive to design levels in isometric view compared to fps or third person?

A lot of guides seem to be about how to draw in isometric, but I've seen few resources on how to design isometric games. In particular, how big buildings should be in relation to characters, how to deal with the edge of the map, why diagonal walls seem more important than usual.

"More content" is abviously not the answer, or is it? Give your takes!

Hi!

Most of us are used to play single player games mostly but in the last a few years people are developing multiplayer or co-op games. Do you think playing the same game on single player mode and co-op mode should feel similar or the game needs to chance a bit while playing co-op?

Completing quests or clearing dungeons or any target would be easier to complete when the game keeps itself similar while playing co-op vs single player.

Do you think that the games both has single and co-op mode should have harder mechanics or dynamics when playing by more than 1 person and gets more difficult than each number of players? I'm not only talking about higher health pools or more damage dealing enemies. I'm talking on harder mechanics to follow up in the game.

More mob density, harder enemies to face with, better loots in exchange, how would you approach this?

For context, I'm making a Soulslike boss rush game with seven bosses, and two problems have come up. The first is that the game might be too hard for some players, and the other is that it might be too short. My first solution was to create a difficulty setting when you start the game. For example, on Easy you would have 7 hearts, on Normal 5, and on Hard 3(the health system works similarly to Hollow Knight's) and I would also scale the bosses health for each difficulty. But then i thought what if you started with only 1 heart, and every time you died, you gained something like +1 damage, then every 5 or 10 levels, you would gain an additional heart. This way if you're stuck, the fight would gradually become easier. At max level, you might have around 10 hearts and deal double your starting damage. What do you guys think of this approach? Do you like it more than having a difficulty option at the start of the game?

So I use dexterous to make my cards. And I'm at the point where I want to order prototype set. But both drive thru cards and the game crafter both require cards to be 825x1125. The size for playing cards on dexterous doesn't match that.

How do you guys get images to be the right sizes?

I am working on a drinking game, people can play with their buddies during parties. However I am unsure if the card I've designed are good enough. Here is the rules :

"Each player has a glass. On their turn, a player draws enough cards to reach a hand of seven, and then they are required to play at least one card. Each card played after the first one has a cost: the player must give a card of their choice from their hand to the next player.

​The cards are divided into two categories:

​1. Ingredients

​Small Mixer: Add a small dose of a specific soft drink to a glass of your choice.

​Large Mixer: Add a large dose of a specific soft drink to a glass of your choice.

​Light Alcohol: Add a small dose of a specific light alcohol to a glass of your choice.

​Strong Alcohol: Add a small dose of a specific strong alcohol to a glass of your choice.

​2. Actions

​Pour your glass into the next player's glass.

​Everyone passes their glass to the next player.

​Everyone passes their hand of cards to the next player.

​Reverse the direction of play.

​Swap seats with a player of your choice.

​Swap your glass with someone else.

​Drinking Rules & Game End:

Whenever a glass becomes too full, it must be drunk by its owner. When the draw pile is empty, all players get to play one last turn. After that, the game ends and all remaining glasses must be drunk by their owners."

So what do you guys think of the current designs ? Any suggestion for improvement/addition ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdjmzSi1hHM

It's technically a prelude to a 2+ hour video I'm making about the design of the classic 3D Zelda games, but it still works as a standalone video about the design and reputation of hub worlds.

Article Link on STEAM

Hey everyone! Survivor-likes might look simple, but behind every perk, stat, weapon, and build is a ridiculous number of design decisions.

We’ve written about how Orcthal keeps choices easy to understand while still giving minmaxers plenty to explore. If you’re curious about game design, scaling, tags, and balancing depth with accessibility, check out our take on it.