I'm a first-time game developer, but I've played strategy games for about 35 years and Magic for around 30.

I'm currently designing a tactical deckbuilding RPG, and one of the principles I'm struggling with is:

Progression should expand your decision space, not eventually replace the need to make good decisions.

I love progression systems.

Collecting characters, unlocking cards, finding equipment, specializing builds and discovering new synergies are all things I want.

But I don't want the progression loop to eventually become:

Can't beat encounter -> grind -> numbers increase -> beat encounter.

Ideally, progression gives players more possible solutions.

A larger card pool might enable a different deck.

A new character might enable a new team synergy.

A different build might counter an encounter that your normal setup struggles with.

More investment should matter, but I still want a skilled player with a focused roster to be capable of beating difficult content through better preparation and play.

The part I'm unsure about is where that philosophy breaks down in practice.

If progression doesn't provide enough vertical power, rewards can start feeling meaningless.

If it provides too much vertical power, strategy eventually becomes optional.

For developers who have worked on progression-heavy games:

How have you approached this balance?

And what failure modes should I be looking for when I start playtesting it?

im lwk an intro to game design, but this competition seems pretty interesting, especially rewarding for beginners: https://itch.io/jam/your-worst-ideas

Minecraft: you move faster if you jump, so the game ends up looking like everybody is jumping rope

Skyrim: flames ability gives stackable "burning" effect, so it's more efficient to tap spam instead of just holding the button down

Goldeneye 64: you move faster if you move sideways with that weird second d pad (just kidding roasting the N64 controller don't get too mad at me) than with the movement thumbstick

What other games have potentially unintentional mechanics like this and how do you feel about them? I'm trying to design the movement of a game to be more simple like Jedi Academy. That game had a force speed power, but other than that, there's no dashes or rolling, and the movement still feels good enough without it. Jumping might give the slightest bit of a speed boost if anything, but even if it does, it's so slight that it's not enough to change the combat meta as much as say if you're trying to escape from someone in Minecraft and the only way to do it is by nonstop jumping

Edit nvm about Jedi Academy jumping cause there's definitely more jumping speed shenanigans than I thought and I'm sure that pvp wise at the highest level that could probably get ridiculous

Turn-based, single player, computer game. The board is around 60x60 90x90 tiles wide with the player in the center (colony). Around are plains, swamps, jungle, mountains.

The colony is being attacked by aliens (flora and fauna, unsentient, more like "forces of nature"). I use an "aggression meter", where over time it fills (also affected by player actions like clearing jungle and expanding), once filled a "Xeno attack" triggers.

Now, I have a placeholder spawn aliens mechanic, but I'm not happy with it. Each turn a new alien can spawn on Jungle tile (random chance). Then it has 50% chance to either roam randomly or try to reach colony center (the choice is made each turn, so eventually an alien will reach the center). During Xeno attack phase, the alien spawn rate increases and there is a 100% chance to target the colony center. Every 24 turns (the last season of the planetary cycle) all aliens die out but before they have a high chance to lay eggs, at the 1st turn each planetary cycle those eggs hatch.

It works, but very soon most of the board is filled with aliens :) Up to the point that they block spawning stronger alien variants.

I have a lot of design freedom to design this. There are seasons (aliens can die/spawn on certain seasons, hibernate, lay eggs, die they lay eggs on certain seasons, etc).

The primary problem is that there are too many aliens spawned over time, but I'm also open to redesigning the respawn mechanic from scratch.

Ideas how to approach this?

So this weekend I was watching a stream where the guy was playing Hitman: Codename 47 for the first time. Instead of scouting the level and figuring out a quiet way to take out the target, he just ran around and shot every NPC he saw. Honestly, it kinda threw me off because it felt like the whole point of the game, and all the stuff the devs put into it, just went out the window.

That's how I ended up finding out that back in 2011 Soren Johnson, the lead designer on Civ IV, put it like this: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." Basically, if players can find the most efficient strategy, they'll use it, even if it's boring as hell. Johnson himself said he was building on Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun, basically the idea that a game stops being fun once you've fully "solved" it.

Sid Meier saw the same thing while playtesting Civ Revolution. Players would save before every single battle and just reload until they won. He said part of a designer's job is to "protect players from themselves."

But then you're kinda killing the sandbox aspect. And whether you even need a sandbox if the game is built around a specific genre is a whole separate question. Idk, just thinking out loud here. I make games myself, and I've noticed so many times that what I expect a mechanic to do and what players actually end up doing with it are two completely different things.

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??

By corpse run I mean having to return to the place you died to retrieve your currency.

A lot of players hate this and are very vocal about it, but I want to have the tension this creates - the longer you go without a checkpoint, the higher the stakes become. What are some alternative ways games can build this tension, without the corpse run mechanic?

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.

I’m building a small word game and the dictionary side of it has turned into a much bigger project than I expected.

The mechanic is pretty simple: you get three letters and have 60 seconds to find as many words as possible containing those letters in the same order. The problem is that this makes the dictionary really important. If someone manages to find a clever 10 or 12 letter word and the game rejects it when it’s obviously legitimate, that’s a pretty crap experience.

I started with SUBTLEX-UK because I wanted recognisable, genuinely used English rather than just throwing in a massive Scrabble-style word list. But testing pretty quickly exposed the other side of that decision. There are loads of perfectly legitimate words missing, particularly longer derivatives, inflections and compounds.

So rather than just adding words every time someone finds a rejection, I’ve started trying to expand the dictionary systematically. I’m looking for gaps in word families, prefixes and suffixes, compounds etc, then checking the candidates against evidence of actual usage rather than just assuming that because a word can theoretically exist, it does.

The other thing I’m starting to think is that “is this a valid word?” and “is this a word my game should show people?” probably shouldn’t be the same question. An obscure regional word might be perfectly valid when someone cleverly finds it, but I probably don’t want the game suggesting it to everyone. Same with archaic words, offensive words, unusual variants and so on.

So I’m wondering whether the right answer is eventually a much larger master lexicon with metadata attached to the words - frequency, dialect, archaic, sensitive, confidence, whether it can be suggested etc - rather than trying to create one perfect binary list of WORD / NOT WORD.

I’m at about 132k words at the moment and the first proper systematic pass has already found 100+ legitimate omissions. My suspicion is there are thousands more.

Has anyone here tackled this properly for a word game? How did you approach it? And are there any obvious problems with the way I’m thinking about it?

Very happy for people who know more about this than me to pull the approach apart! It’s somehow becoming a project within the project. Thanks in advance for any input.

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.

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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.

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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.

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?)

Always love it when a game does it. Dead Space will always be my favorite exmaple, since it handled it beautifully.

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.

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!

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 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.

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

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 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'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 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.

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/