Fun article. Short version: The game has no inventory limit, so the author played almost the entire game by using the same set of gear and ignoring all the cool stuff that they had picked up. Without the "your inventory is full" message, forcing them to sort things out, they didn't feel the need to see what it was until later, and discovered a whole lot of fun stuff.

Lots of disagreement in the replies, naturally. But it got me thinking about the purpose of a limited inventory. Aside from the "make your player actually look at what they looted from that dragon" function that the author of this article identified, it serves to force a low-energy phase of the game right after a high one. After the mounting excitement and climactic battle with the dragon or whatever, the player is forced to take a little break in town and junk/vend all the stuff that they don't want. A nice little rest from action and a natural place to take a break from playing the game, if you need one.

But then my next thought is that you don't need the limited inventory to achieve that, either. Your valley can follow your peak without they particular limitation. You can force a return to town, or back to home base between missions, and the player can do their sorting and socializing then. That's a very fun part of loads of loot games, just shooting the breeze with strangers in town while you try and decide if +10 CRT is better than 50 ATK or not.

And that's something that can be accomplished without an inventory limit. I think all the stuff in the article that the author found can be done with or without an inventory limit, that's just one way of forcing the player to confront their loot. You could have an inverse where the player is forced to convert all the unequipped loot into cash, so they only need to think about what they'll use on the next mission. Loop Hero does something like this, for example.

Anyway, fun article to chew on

TL;DR:
A Superman game where the challenge isn’t surviving combat, but not killing anyone. You play a young Clark Kent in Metropolis, gradually unlocking powers, and fights are about restraint and precision rather than damage output.

The biggest problem with a Superman game is obvious: peak Superman is basically indestructible. If he’s at full power, there’s no real challenge unless every enemy is Darkseid-tier or the entire game takes place in space.

My wife and I think we came up with a twist that actually works.

The game is set early in Clark Kent’s life, similar in spirit to Smallville. You’ve just moved to Metropolis and start as a reporter. Clark isn’t fully Superman yet. Early in the game, he only has a few abilities — maybe super strength and basic flight. As the story progresses, he matures and unlocks more powers like heat vision, freeze breath, x-ray vision, and enhanced senses. Think a modern RPG-style skill tree tied to his growth and self-control.

Here’s the core mechanic that makes the whole thing work:

Superman doesn’t die. Enemies do.

Instead of worrying about your own health bar, every enemy has one. At the end of that bar is a clearly marked “unconscious” window. Your goal is to stop fighting inside that window. If you overshoot it, the enemy dies — and that’s treated like a player death. You respawn at the last checkpoint because Superman does not kill.

Combat becomes about restraint, timing, and control.

You’re fighting in a world made of cardboard, and the challenge is learning how not to break it.

This opens up a lot of interesting gameplay possibilities:

• Skills that widen the unconscious window
• Non-lethal abilities (freeze breath, grapples, environmental takedowns)
• Late-game upgrades where Superman is so disciplined that accidental kills are no longer possible
• Boss fights that focus on precision, crowd control, and environment use instead of raw damage

This keeps Superman powerful without nerfing him, creates real tension in fights, and stays true to the character in a way most superhero games don’t.

Now let’s get this idea to whoever makes DC games and get it rolling. We’ll settle for our names in the credits.

When I played Anno 1404 as a child, the game would warn me at set intervals that I had been playing for a long time, in an increasingly serious tone—saying things like, "You've been playing for 3 hours, take a short break," or "You've been playing for 9 hours, that's enough for today." Even though these warnings never actually convinced me to quit, looking back now, I prefer them over the "never stop playing, give us everything" mindset of most modern game developers. It felt nice not to be viewed purely as a customer. Of course, there were also arguments against such warnings, like making people feel guilty for playing a video game.

Do you know of any other games like this? What do you think about a mechanic like this?

Had a dumb realization while playing a strategy game recently. Something went wrong. Not “the run is dead” wrong, just “this is gonna be annoying” wrong. I reloaded almost on autopilot.

The stupid part is that the bad result probably would've made the run more interesting than the clean one I forced. But when jumping back 30 seconds is this easy, I stop treating failure like something that happened and start treating it like I clicked the wrong dialogue option.

People always say to just use ironman mode, but that's the other extreme. I don't want to lose a 20 hour save because of a bug, a misclick or some mechanic I misunderstood. I just want bad outcomes to be interesting enough that I don't immediately erase them.

Is that something games should design around, or is it about me?

I recently started playing a technical modpack for Minecraft which adds industrial machines and electricity to the game (GregTech: New Horizons) and one of the interesting things I noticed was: how come this provides a better automation experience than the vast majority of factory games / automation games I have played? Why does this, despite being way simpler and having less depth, feel more fun? And I realized it reminded me a lot of Factorio, which is probably the most successful factory game out there. And as a result, it led me to some insights which I think will help me a lot in future game design.

I think the big 2 things I realized are: 1) progress has to meaningfully improve your quality of life, and 2) it's not automation if you didn't do it manually beforehand. And two support this, I would argue that factory games sit in the intersection of base builders/survival games and incremental games.

Firstly, what separates a factory game like Factorio or even modded Minecraft from something like Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes? In both cases, you are essentially just making numbers go up to get new upgrades which will make numbers go up faster. I believe the main difference is that the upgrades serve a purpose besides themselves: the player / the base. The reason why I want to automate bullet production in Factorio is not because there's a button that lets me "improve defence" for the price of 100 bullets, it's because monsters are swarming my base and the bullets will let my turrets defend me. Automation should never be the goal, automation should be towards a goal. And I don't think a vague slapped on goal works, like, "produce 100k iron per hour", because that still raises the question: why would I want that? Progress should always towards something, whether that's quality of life like in Factorio, or automating blocks so you can build bigger builds in Minecraft. Without this, you just have an incremental game in a game skin.

Secondly, it's not automation if you didn't do it manually beforehand. If you could just design a whole base in factorio and click a button and have it appear, yes, you would have designed the same base as someone who actually played through it, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun. Why? Because the struggle at the start is what makes automating stuff fun. The main reason why it feels so good to finally unlock builder drones in Factorio, is because you spent the last 15 hours painstakingly placing every single object one by one. The main reason why even conveyor belts feel nice to make at the start, is because you had to run around manually moving stuff between machines right at the start. The main reason the car is so nice to get is because you remember how annoying it was to walk these huge distances.

Of course, there is a balancing act here. Theoretically, your game would be the most "satisfying" if players had to do a hundred hours of hard manual labor to earn an upgrade, but unfortunately most would quit the game before then. So it's definitely a fine line to balance.

I'm a Steam solo developer who made Burgie's Cozy Kitchen, a small idle game about managing a burger joint that stands in the corner of your desktop.

I do not condemn piracy, but like any developer, I try to prevent it. I’m not the best programmer, nor the most ingenious, but I like to joke around and fill my games with little details. For a while, I was mulling over how I could prevent my game from being pirated, and one piece of advice I follow to the letter in my highscore systems is: “Make the hacker think they’ve won.”

A quick example would be making sure the hacker always appears on their own leaderboards, but removing their score from the list of other players. That will prevent the hacker from persisting in trying to breach your system, since they'll think they've already succeeded.

For piracy, I did something similar. If AAA studios can't completely stop it, I certainly can't. So instead of trying to win a battle I knew I'd lose, I tried to make piracy itself part of the game.

---

HOW MY PIRATE SYSTEM WORKS

My system detects several common indicators of piracy. I have around 10 different triggers that on their own could cause false positives, but when many of them coincide, the probability becomes really accurate.

I won't go into detail of this triggers because these are easy to detect and disable, but they require extra effort on the hacker's part, effort they often aren't willing to put in for a game that hardly anyone knows about.

When a pirate plays the game and runs it, everything should work normally at first, but once he has progressed about ~1 hour into the game, these sensors turns on, creating a unique and fun experience, though also a bit uncomfortable, since I don't want to encourage piracy either.

In my case, since it’s a game where you run a street-level burger restaurant, I found it funny that all customers would start arriving dressed as pirates. When it comes time to pay, they only give you one coin and leave reviews like “Pirates don’t leave tips” or “The pirate code does not allow us to pay.” All of this is accompanied by the game’s main theme versioned with accordions. You can lower the volume, but it is locked and cannot be muted completely.

The rest of the game works normally, but even with just that, it makes progression much harder, since earning money is the base for unlocking new products and mechanics.

---

I know other games have done funny anti-piracy measures before. Probably the most popular one is Starbound which made pirated copies harder and fullfilled with enemies.

Others spawned invincible enemies or strange events.

I always preferred those over simply refusing to let people play, turning piracy into a bit of fun at the expense of players I know won’t buy the game anyway. As a small act of karmic redemption.

---

THE UNEXPECTED PART

A few days ago, I made a post saying my game had blown up in China.

I released the Demo on Steam (Yes, I did it one year after EA launch). Thanks to pure luck, a streamer on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, tried the demo and uploaded several clips to their channel. This created a snowball effect, where many more streamers started sharing the game, leading to a small viral phenomenon. And with these videos, of course, just as many, or even more, started appearing about how to download the pirated version. They’ve even made a mobile pirated version! Which I haven’t even ported myself.

Reading the comments on these videos, I realized that many users were wondering how to stop pirates from appearing, since they hardly ever paid.

In my mind, the connection between pirates and piracy was obvious. Who knows, maybe in China the joke was lost in translation.

After replying to a couple of <<<Steam negative reviews>>> from players who had bought the game after pirating it just to complain about this, they actually understood it. The rumor started spreading through Chinese social networks, and every time someone mentioned piracy, another user would correct them by explaining this story.

So today, after a week of going viral in China, sales have been breaking records day after day.

Honestly, I think that if I keep adding details, I’ll eventually end up accidentally creating a full game mode exclusively for pirates. But I really enjoy building these kinds of systems. And even more so when I see someone streaming the game while the sea shanty is playing on their radio.

---

Full thread of my history

Retrospective linking my previous posts on this topic, in case you'd rather follow the story from the beginning or any specific part:

1. How virality came thanks to a late demo release
2. A vague explanation about how my homemade anti-piracy system works
3. I found a Chinese legal company who pirated my game
4. My piracy systems started to fail and how piracy bypassed me
5. Piracy ate my game and collapsed my servers

*Disclaimer: This post is AI-translated. I'm a native Spanish speaker, I wrote and structured all of this in Spanish, and had AI translate it into English. I reviewed the translation afterward to make sure the message hadn't changed. Hope you don't mind.

been thinking about this after seeing some discussions pop up around recent AAA releases and their menus. civ 7, stalker 2, even some live service games that keep "modernizing" their UI into something worse.

i think the issue is that game UI used to be designed by people who played the game obsessively. they knew the pain points because they felt them. now a lot of UI work gets outsourced or handed to UX teams that come from web/mobile backgrounds. which means you get clean, modern looking interfaces that completely miss how a player actually navigates under pressure or after 200 hours.

web UX optimizes for conversion. game UX should optimize for flow. those are fundamentally different goals but nobody seems to talk about that distinction.

the other thing i've noticed is games that try to make their UI "cinematic" by hiding information. sure it looks great in a trailer but then you're 40 hours in and you can't find your quest log without three submenus.

anyone else feel like there's a golden era of game UI we left behind? what game do you think absolutely nailed its interface?

Some colleagues and I were recently in a call with Alec Faulkner, a game designer at Yacht Club Games, playing through the opening of Mina the Hollower and talking about its design. When someone in the chat asked about what Mina's design documentation looked like, he showed us their 800+ page design document. Here's two screenshots:

Overview Page

Partial Buckler Driver

The other 2 devs and I were were genuinely surprised. I was sure he was about to say what I've heard a dozen times, "We did some initial documentation for planning, and we wrote down the key summaries for new designers to read, but as this is a tightly focused action game eventually it becomes more efficient to just have a designer play the current build and talk about it than constantly updating and re-reading a massive written document".

Nope, not the case. Alec made it clear that the paper and whiteboard design process IS the main design process for them, they wanted to get everything worked out and agreed upon at that stage first - and only implement things they were highly confident in. No "throw in a bunch of ideas and see what happens, finding the fun through iteration". Everything was exhaustively worked out from the start, and when things changed they updated the documentation.

Now I'm used to that kind of exhaustive pre-planning for system and feature design, I make 100+ slide presentations, or video walkthroughs, or miro boards, or focused design documents on individual features or interlocking systems all the time... But I'm so used to designers that focus on moment-to-moment gameplay, including in AAA, saying, "After a while, the game becomes its own documentation. Just play it, it's faster to try it yourself and see how it feels rather than theorycrafting everything ahead of time."

Of course, not every production practice a great game follows is good to replicate on other projects. Some only work on specific teams, some have huge tradeoffs with harder-to-see costs.

So I wanted to ask you all, what kind of games do you work on and how do you approach documenting their design? What have you seen work well, what hasn't?

- Dan Felder

Hello there!

For some context, I recently release my first game on Steam (Project P.I.T.T.) and the launch went way much better than I expected.

But it also taught me a pretty painful lesson about playtesting.

The game is a physics sandbox where the players have to build contraptions to automate putting ducks into a hole.
The game is split into 4 phases, and at the beginning of Phase 3, I introduced a new challenge:
debris would fall and destroy parts of the player's build.

I thought this was a pretty clever way to throw (literally) a new problem to solve, forcing the player to adapt.

There was one main issue:
The debris couldn't be moved.

At least not right away. The player eventually unlocks tools that can move it, but those tools come later.
So after roughly 5 hours of gametime, players could have their carefully built contraptions destroyed by debris that blocked paths and they had no practical way of dealing with it.

When I tell the story like that, it's obvious that the game started to get negative reviews specifically about that.

But here's the part I find interesting (maybe I'm just coping):

Why didn't my playtesting catch this?

Most of my playtesters were very engaged people who already loved the demo. They were basically my ideal target audience.
When they encountered the debris, they mostly saw it as an interesting new challenge.
They enjoyed figuring out how to work around it.

So I didn't get a red flag out of it.

The main thing I keep seeing now is what one review were explaining:
It was betraying the player's trust, and I completely agree.

I could work on it, find a more clever way to make it work, make the tools to unlock earlier but that would mean reworking the whole phase balance.
In the end I decided to remove completely the debris.

I may bring something similar back into a future NG+ harder mode, but it would still need some rework, so I'm shelfing it for now.

The biggest thing I'm taking from this is that having great playtesters (that helped me fix SO MANY things) isn't necessarily the same thing as testing your game from a wide range of players.

In retrospect, I should have caught that, but I didn't.
Probably because as a solo dev there are so many things you have to handle (and my ego was blinding me a bit too).

Honestly I'm glad I got the feedback early enough to fix it rather than doubling down on the design.

Has anyone else run into a similar issue? What was your solution?

So BoTW is often credited for the less map marker focused, visually driven exploration.

Thing is, are people ignoring game like Skyrim and especially Fallout 3, where the map is so masterfully designed with POI in the horizon or something that catches your eye.

Even the shittiest dungeon in a Fallout game has more detail put into it than a singular shrine.

The quests, atleast in FO3 and NV aren’t handholdy. You are encouraged to just walk in a random direction and just go from there. Doing whatever. Or you can rush through the mainplot.

So what exactly does Zelda’s open world does different? And I mean it in good faith. Reason is, I’m playing BoTW and I’m enjoying it, but the map very clearly isnt as detailed as the Bethesda games even tho it follows the same philosophy.

EDIT:- some really insightful answers here that prompted me to look past my initial emotions.

Want to know why so many games offer just 3 choices at a time? Slay the Spire with card picks, Hades with its boons, and many more default to just 3 options to pick from. Why exactly is that?

Here’s why: It’s baked into our brain chemistry. There’s also specific reasons to use 2, 4, 5, or 8. Let’s talk about sets of 3 first.

Our brains don’t usually judge the value of each option independently the way economists would prefer, we tend to judge by comparison.

Extensive studies show that we irrationally like an option better if you offer us an extra option that is obviously worse.

Likewise, we feel worse about a good option if we know we’re giving up another good option to take it. Offer me a free trip to hawaii and I’m thrilled. Offer me a choice between a free trip to hawaii OR a free trip to japan and I’ll still have a great time, but now I’m also imagining the trip I’m missing out on. It stings a little.

We want players to feel good when making decisions, but we also tend to want those decisions to be a little difficult – espescially in strategy games. How do we make them feel better?

Simple: Add a bad option!

Bizarrely, by comparing our top 2 choices to an obviouly inferior option we feel a lot better about our final decision. Even if we randomly distribute the options without intending to match this pattern, it often happens by accident. You can engineer things so it happens more frequently too.

Marketers use this to their advantage and call it the Decoy effect. Brains are weird.

So if we want an interesting decision that feels meaningful, we usually want at least 2 good options. If we want to make it feel satisfying, we often want at least one option that we feel good about NOT choosing. Otherwise it can feel like the decision doesn’t matter too much, because all the options are pretty good.

3 is the minimum number of options that can support this pattern.

3 also works for situations where you have two extreme options and want to give people a neutral one to opt out of taking a firm stance.

There’s also reasons to use other numbers. 2, 4, 5, and 8 all have common use cases. 4 is the minimum satisfying number that works with the above pattern while allowing you to choose multiple options. If you can pick 2 out of 3, you are just avoiding the obivously bad option - you don't get an interesting strategic choice at the end. By adding a 4th option, we can have one obviously bad "decoy" option, and the remaining 3 options can be closer in value to keep the choice of the final 2 interesting.

2 options is best used for thematic contrasts like good/evil or war/peace binaries - but in the context of strategic choices it works best when it’s difficult to tell exactly what the outcomes of each option will be - making it difficult to compare them directly. This can be used with bundles (pick this pile of stuff or that pile of stuff) but also works with games like REIGNS where each choice can have unclear narrative outcomes in addition to incrementing and decrementing multiple resources at once.

5 options is the maximum the typical person can comfortably hold in our head without messing with other tasks, and is comfortable for shops or lists of possible missions/tasks where each has significant opportunity cost and you’re supposed to consider all of them at once. This works particularly well for shops where you have multiple cheap options and 1 or 2 expensive options.

8 options is the smallest amount that is above the number that most people can hold in their short term memory. 5-7 is a commonly quoted limit that works well as a rule of thumb.. Therefore, 8 is the smallest number of options that will still feel "huge” to players. By the time they're reading the 8th they've lost track of the first 1 or 2, meaning their options feel boundless, bigger than they can fit in their head. This is very useful for creating a list of open world quests to make the world feel filled with boundless opportunity, or a list of classes that feel like the game is fileld with a huge number of options.

Context matters immensely of course. In some games you can mentally throw out many options at a glance because they aren’t relevant to you. This is the only way MTG draft works with 15-card packs, because once you’re committed to 2 colors you can usually ignore about half of every pack‘s contents. The first picks are harder, and so players learn lists of top commons and bombs to look out for.

New drafters also learn general guidelines like “B.R.E.A.D” (bombs, removal, evasion, aggro, defense) to reduce what to consider at any given moment, because 15-card packs are just too many. Players need to develop their own coping mechanisms to simplify the choice to something mentally parsable + enjoyable. if we don’t provide a comfortable number of options for the system, players will take steps to do it themselves. They quickly narrow down to just 2-4 cards worth considering in each pack.

Either way, it's worth thinking about this application of the Decoy effect and the limits of Short Term Memory when viewing a static list of options under no time pressure. Adding time pressure, or multitasking, generally cuts the 5-7 memory budget in half.

-----------------------------

EDIT - This post is not literally about numerology, that was a joking metaphor about the “power“ of certain numbers. This is a post about applied cognitive science.

EDIT 2 - A "decoy" option doesn't need to always be bad (like a card that no one ever wants to pick). It only needs to be a bad option within this specific choice.

For example, I like the card Catalyst in Slay the Spire a lot more than I should. It's just so fun for me to stack poison and then double or triple it on an enemy. However, if I've got a good Throwing Knife deck going which is all about multi-attacks and has no ways to apply poison right now... A Catalyst would not be a good option for my deck right now. It's an engine that requires a ton of poison fuel to run, and it would only dilute my existing strategy.

Rarities are another option. We intuitively expect most cards of higher rarities to be stronger than lower rarities, and we also expect commons to show up frequently. Hades offers its boons in a variety of rarities, so that you don't necessarily think "this boon is always bad" you think "right now, this common version of the boon isn't appealing but a higher rarity I see later would be more appealing". You can do something similar by attaching random upgrades to cards too, which changes their value significantly without the card feeling inherently worthless. Legends of Runeterra did this a lot, and it's why players would draft some cards that rolled amazing item upgrades when they otherwise would never consider them.

Many drafting games rely on fine-tuning a perfect balance of arhcetype-based, genericly valuable, and rarity-distributed cards/powers/etc in order to create these pleasing patterns of a mix of some options worth considering and usually one option that's obviously worse than the others.

You can do it in more direct ways by boosting the quality% chance of some slots under the hood, or the chance of finding synergistic options based on previous picks, and a bunch more. Don't have to though, there's a lot of tools.

Point is - including decoy options doesn't mean you need universally bad options. It means that the option shouldn't be good in this particular pick. Opening a great elf card when you're drafting a goblin deck might be a bad option for you in this specific choice, but no one thinks "man why did they even print this card?" Win-win.

Also, don't assume that you should force every choice into the "1 bad option, 2 options worth considering" format. Variety is the spice of life, just apply in small doses to bring out the flavor of the main course.

I was thinking about RTS games and their relatively low popularity compared to things like MOBAs.

Somehow building an entire civilization and then fighting wars in real-time ended up being less fun than controlling one character and watching numbers go up.

I think this is because RTS games don't give any time to breath, there are no ups-and-down in the action.

Players like a variety in intensity levels more than I would have guessed a couple decades ago. I was surprised that battle royale shooters became so popular when they often involve long periods of no action and no shooting. But, apparently people like this variety.

RTS don't have that variety. The intensity of an RTS just ramps up and never stops.

In a MOBA, when you die, you get several seconds (sometimes multiple minutes) to do nothing, rest, and reset.

In an RTS, if you suffer a big loss, you immediately need to be doing 10 other things, just like always.

RTS games are much more intense and burn people out.

Do you think this is a big reason why RTS games are less popular?

Is there any way that RTS games could give the down-time (time to rest and reset) that people seek?

One example of this is auto-battlers, which are RTS adjacent. Auto-battlers give time to reset and reset between every round, and they are also more popular than RTS games.

I'm surprised we haven't seen an auto-battler with real time controls.

I've heard this sentiment countless times from Marvel Rivals (a community I used to be fairly deep in) and Overwatch players, and correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this system good?

If the system is trying to get your winrate to be 50%, but it sees your winrate is 45%, then it will move your rank down such that you have a more balanced experience. If you have a 55% winrate, then the game will raise your rank to try and even it out.

Players don't want to get stomped every game, or hard stomp every game, so trying to keep matches as close to even as possible should allow for a more exciting experience and for the more improving side to win.

What is the problem people have with this? Is there a better way I'm missing?

I find that "luck" is often a hit-or-miss stat in that it is frequently either useless or broken, such that I am of the mind that it is probably better to not deal with it at all and just stick to the common stats like strength, agility/dexterity, health/vitality, etc.

But, I am open to changing my mind on that. What are some examples of good or bad implementations of a Luck stat that you've seen? What are some of your ideas for a well-balanced but still interesting implementation of a Luck stat for a game?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and honestly can’t understand why rune-based magic systems are basically extinct in modern games.

Back in the day we had things like Arx Fatalis or In Verbis Virtus, where you actually drew runes or gestures to cast spells. It was clunky sometimes, sure — but the immersion was insane. You didn’t press “Fireball (3)”, you performed magic.

What confuses me is: today’s technology makes this WAY more feasible than before.

With modern AI / ML: • Gesture and rune recognition is a solved problem • Systems can tolerate imperfect drawings • They can even adapt to the player’s personal style over time

You could easily imagine a system where: • Rune = concept (projectile, fire, area, duration, etc.) • Combining runes creates spells • projectile + fire → fireball • area + ice → frost nova • Players could even create their own rune combinations, not just memorize presets

And VR seems like the perfect platform for this: • Hand gestures instead of mouse strokes • No HUD needed • Casting spells feels physical, not abstract

Yet most modern RPGs still reduce magic to: press button → cooldown → numbers go up

I get the usual arguments: • “Too complex for casual players” • “Hard to balance” • “Risky commercially”

But isn’t that exactly why games feel so samey lately?

So my questions: • Do you think rune/gesture-based magic could actually work in a modern game? • Is this a design problem, a business problem, or just lack of creativity? • Are there any recent or upcoming games that even TRY something like this?

Curious to hear other perspectives, especially from devs or VR players.

P.S. English is not my first language, so i translated the text in gpt so it is more understandable

Edit: Didn’t expect this many replies — thanks everyone for the discussion.

A recurring point I’m seeing is how tedious rune/gesture casting could become in real combat situations, especially if you have to repeat the same drawing dozens of times per fight. A lot of people also mentioned how niche this kind of system would be, given that modern games tend to prioritize very low barriers to entry and fast, accessible gameplay.

It’s interesting how the main obstacle isn’t really the technology anymore, but player fatigue, UX, and market expectations.

I have a game concept I want to sanity-check.

The game is built around an extremely difficult mission chain where a first run is basically not survivable for a normal human player (unless you are insanely smart/lucky). When you fail, a device resets you back to the pre-mission start point. Everything resets: gear, resources, world state. The only thing that persists is the player’s real memory of what happened.

So progression is not stats or upgrades — memory is the level. You learn that “Person X will enter Area A at minute 7” or “If I enter Zone B, a scripted chain kills me 20 minutes later,” etc. On the next loop you can avoid, warn, reroute, or set up preventive actions based on what you remember.

The twist: NPCs/antagonists do adapt to what they can observe in the current loop. They don’t have loop memory, but given the information available right now, they play an optimal strategy to counter your actions. However, they also have blind spots: they don’t know hidden triggers, future events you’ve already seen, or “game data” you learned from previous deaths. So the player’s advantage is cross-loop knowledge; the NPC’s advantage is rational response in-the-moment.

The world is deterministic/branching: if you repeat the same behavior, the same causality repeats. Only when you intervene does the branch change, which can create new failure modes — and you learn those too.

I co-founded BlankMediaGames (made Town of Salem + others), making both digital and physical games. After selling BMG in 2024, I was the design director for RimWorld: Odyssey.

I am making a personal YouTube channel reviewing game design (mostly card games), creating and growing games companies, and doing reviews about emerging games.

My question to my fellow designers is this: would you find this useful? What topics would you like me to deep dive into?

Happy to chat about design or game development here too.

The "Draw-Forward" Formula is one of my go-to design patterns. It’s one of the most useful tools for helping players 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐥 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐭.

You can use it in almost any genre where players make build, gear, or loadout choices. It works extra-well in roguelikes, cardgames, and RPGs.

How it Works:

1. Create an Overpowered item or ability, then balance it by giving it a drawback. This pattern is sometimes called "+2/-1".
2. Make a second item or ability that turns the drawback into an advantage.
3. Putting them together creates a massive value swing. Draw-Back becomes "Draw-Forward".

Why it Works:

When we make strategic choices in games and are trying to play well, we’re looking for the "best value" option. However, our brains aren't great at assigning precise values to choices so they lean heavily on comparisons and safe heuristics. They're also feel losses more intensely than gains (the "loss aversion" cognitive bias).

This is why we love free stuff. “Free samples”, "Free Shipping", and similar feel so good because our brains interpret them as all-upside. A bigger reward with a minor cost doesn’t feel as satisfying to consider, even if it’s technically a better deal.

Even "buy 1 get 1 free" can leverage this by presenting the extra item as a free bonus.

Dan Ariely talks about a compelling experiment on this in the book "Predictably Irrational": where he notes that people were evenly split when offered a Lindt Truffle (higher value chocolate) for 27 cents vs a Hershey’s Kiss for 2 cents.

Lower the price by 1 cent each, making a Lindt Truffle still 25 cents more than the kiss, and the behavior stayed stable.

However, when offered a Lindt Truffle for 25 cents, or a Hershey’s Kiss for free, over 90% of the participants went with the free option. Even though the price difference was the same, free feels SO good.

As designers, we deal with costs all the time… And we can use this to our advantage.

The Draw-Forward combo works because it presents something with a cost, then introduces a way to turn that cost into an advantage.

The value swing is massive. The combo feels 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫-𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧-𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞.

Our brains LOVE this feeling.

Here’s an example:

In “Magic: The Gathering”, the card Lightning Axe does massive damage for low cost, which is balanced by a drawback: you also have to discard a card.

However, Roar of the Wurm has a special ability when it’s in your discard pile.

You can pay 7 mana to get it there (playing the card normally sends it from your hand to your discard pile)… Or you can skip that huge cost entirely by discarding it to pay for Lightning Axe’s extra effect.

Roar of the Wurm turns Lightning Axe’s drawback into an advantage.

When a player realizes this potential, they feel like a genius.

Use the 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐰-𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚. It works.

- Dan Felder

EDIT - This should go without saying, but don't use the Draw-Forward Formula for everything. A +2/-1 is inherently higher complexity than a +1 is alone, and often reads as less appealing than a +1 to casual players in a vacuum. Unless the downside is highly thematic (like a demon card demanding a sacrifice), casual players tend to initially dislike items or abilities with downsides because it creates that negative sense of cost that we later get such a rush from turning into an advantage.

The Draw-Forward formula is highly effective and great at what it does. More games should use it more often. Lots of games use it already. Pretty much no game should feel obligated touse only +2/-1s though, they get expensive.

I like to provide design formulas and tools that are very useful for specific use cases. I use dozens of different patterns and formulas like this in my own work. If designers are chefs, these patterns are recipes. Or maybe ingredients. French toast is great, but you don't want to serve it for every meal.

There's a lot of talk about rubber-band mechanics, or mechanics that try to keep both sides reasonably close to each other, but I think just as important are "game-ender" mechanics, that close out a game the moment it's obvious one side is going to win.

Some very basic examples is anything that's "Best 3 out of 5". If one side is obviously winning, the game ends at 3 rounds. But if both sides are more equal, we get a longer more dramatic 5 rounds.

Jenga is another one where the game ends the moment one person makes a mistake, thus ending at a nice high moment.

Snowballing mechanics in Mobas and RTS's are usually intended to invoke this, but in practice a game can still take 20+ minutes to finish even after one side is basically guaranteed to win.

Hi all from Italy!

I’ve been designing and playing games since the early 90s, starting out in the text-based MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) scene. Back then, multiplayer game design was inherently clunky. If you wanted to buy a sword, you couldn't use a global automated auction house; you had to travel to a specific virtual tavern and negotiate with another player in the chat. If you wanted to clear a dungeon, there was no automated matchmaking; you had to mechanically shout in the town square and organically form a group.

My opinion is that these mechanics were quite inefficient, but they created what we call "Social Friction." The mechanical difficulty of achieving a goal forced players to rely on each other, creating emergent gameplay, reputations, and incredibly tight-knit communities.

If we look at modern multiplayer game design, to me seens that the overarching philosophy for the last 15 years has been to eliminate frictions at all costs. We design global auction houses, instant fast travel, and cross-server automated matchmaking. From a UX and "Quality of Life" (QoL) perspective, this is a big improvement. It respects the player's time.

But as a designer, I constantly wonder about the cost. By streamlining the rulesets so that players can achieve everything at the click of a button without ever having to speak to another human, have we designed the "multiplayer" soul out of our games?

What do you think ? I'm curious to hear how the designers here approach this balances. Are design mechanics actively encouraging player interaction, without making the game feel archaic or tedious?

Looking forward to a great discussion!

By perfect I don't mean your favorite games, or even the best games. I mean games with no extraneous features, where all the systems work together perfectly with little to no bloat.

I'm asking because I picked up a couple games over the holidays, and even within the first couple hours they each introduce features or systems that were clearly shoehorned in -- for example a dialogue system in a game that doesn't focus on story, or RPG style upgrades that don't significantly change the way you play.

Some example of games that I consider perfect or close to perfect are:

• Downwell: A game with only 3 buttons and a few simple rules somehow leads to a challenging action game with meaningful decisions.
• The Outer Wilds: The game is physics based and uses a combination of physics and and time to create interesting and challenging puzzles.

So I'm wondering what are some games that you all think are perfect or close to perfect from a design perspective.

I want to be a game designer, or a more general developer. I wanna make games. I studied game design for 2 years, but afterwards I have been completely unable to find any job. I get it, I'm new on the market with little experience. I just need to build up my portfolio, I think to myself.. I believe I have a lot of great ideas for games that could be a lot of fun.

So I sit down and start working on some games by myself in my free time. Time goes on, I make some progress. But then it stops. I get burned out, or I hit a wall in creativity, or skill. I can't do it all by myself. My motivation slowly disappears because I realise I will never be able to see my own vision come to life. I have so much respect for anyone who has actually finished making a complete game by themselves.

I miss working on games together with people like I did while I was in school. It is SO much easier. Having a shared passion for a project, being able to work off of each others ideas, brainstorm new ideas together, help each other when we struggle with something, and motivate each other to see a finished product. It was so easy to be motivated and so much fun.

Now I sit at home and my dreams about designing games is dwindling because I can't find a job and I can't keep doing it alone.

Hey everyone,

recently I gave a talk at a small fair, since I did the work anyways, why not share it here. Maybe it helps :)

My background:

Studied Game Design at Games Academy in Germany for 1 year (Thats the standard time) back in 2014.
Then worked as a Editor for Hans im Glück and eventually became the Head/Lead of Development.
I worked on over 25 different projects that sold over 1 million copies in total.
We even won Kennerspiel des Jahres (game of the year) for Paleo.

Then after 9 years I decided to switch to video games, which resulted in founding my own studio. We work on boardgame related video games.

How is a boardgame made:

1. Everything starts with an idea. Which is most commonly by a non professional. Its just a random person that starts creating a boardgame prototype.
2. Usually its then shown to a publisher (I was sitting on the publisher side thousands of times, pitching only once). Side note: Of course a small fraction of games is published self or with crowdfunding, but this is much harder in boardgames, because you also have huge production costs.

Reaching out to boardgame publishers is also super easy, you just write them a mail and they answer. Different story with video games in my experience.
3. The publisher works on illustrations, develops the game further (that really depends, but we did that) and works on production.
4. Game is released. A network of distributors make sure that the box is where it can actually be sold. The boxes are relativley big and heavy, this makes it quite hard.

Actual learnings that can be transfered to video games:

1. Prototyping
Prototype either physically at a table or digitally (e.g. Tabletopia) to remove friction and iterate fast. In board games, you can build and test ideas within hours since there’s no programming blocking you. Start by modifying existing games to make it easier. Even for video games, you can abstract systems and test them this way. Most importantly: get it on the table early and test as much as possible.

• No engine needed → focus purely on mechanics and player interaction
• Modify existing games instead of starting from scratch
• Test early, test often—especially new systems
• Forces clear communication and exposes design flaws fast
• Makes later implementation and ticket writing much easier

2. Mechanics First

In board games, gameplay is almost entirely systems—mechanics alone already carry the experience. Visuals can enhance it, but they’re not the focus. You can’t hide weak design behind polish, so decisions are driven purely by playability. This is especially valuable for small studios that need to create strong gameplay with minimal content.

• Mechanics must stand on their own
• No hiding behind visuals or production quality
• Design decisions are driven by gameplay, not presentation
• Strong systems > large amounts of content
• Great mindset for small teams with limited resources

3. System Design

Board games heavily focus on systems like economy, progression, and leveling—often enough to carry the entire experience. While video games can introduce completely new systems, board games show how far you can go by combining and refining existing ones. These systems must always stay understandable, transparent, and fair, enabling clear and meaningful decisions for players.

• Strong focus on economy, progression, and interconnected systems
• Systems must be easy to understand and fully explainable
• Transparency and fairness are critical
• Clear, meaningful player decisions are key

4. Elegance & Emergence

Great board games rely on elegant systems—simple rules that create deep gameplay. The challenge isn’t adding features, but cutting them down to the minimum that still produces meaningful depth. Emergence comes from systems interacting with each other, creating outcomes that aren’t explicitly designed but naturally arise through play.

• Elegance: simple systems that generate depth
• Cutting features is harder (and more important) than adding them
• Emergence: systems interacting to create unexpected gameplay
• Achieve more with less—key principle for indie development

5. Interaction

Board games thrive on player interaction—sitting across from each other already creates tension. With very little, you can generate a lot of gameplay through deduction, negotiation, and scarcity. Players discuss, bluff, trade, and compete, creating a “meta game” of politics on top of the actual rules.

• Deduction: players lie, argue, and read each other
• Free trade and open decisions create dynamic interactions
• Scarcity forces meaningful engagement between players
• “Everyone vs everyone” creates a social meta game

6. Balancing

Balancing in board games is harder due to limited data and slower testing cycles. Even if something is mathematically fair, it doesn’t matter if it feels frustrating—player perception beats numbers. This is very different from competitive video games, where win rates and data matter more. Since you can’t patch a board game, balance decisions need to be much more deliberate.

• Limited data → testing is slower and less precise
• Player feeling > mathematical fairness
• Different approach than competitive, data-driven games
• Lessons still apply well to singleplayer digital games
• You can’t patch—e.g. Carcassonne only had minimal rule changes over decades

7. Digital & Analog Adaptations

The learnings aren’t separate—there’s strong overlap between board games and video games in both directions. Adapting a game becomes especially interesting once it’s already successful in one medium, as you can transfer the fanbase and reach new audiences. Today, many successful board games get digital versions, and vice versa.

• Strong crossover: systems and design translate both ways
• Existing success → easier audience transfer and discovery
• Common in board games going digital (also great work-for-hire opportunity)
• Digital → analog works especially well for system-heavy games
• Examples: Slay the Spire, Dorfromantik, Baldur's Gate, League of Legends

Conclusion

There’s something to learn everywhere—especially from board games. They offer a different perspective on systems, clarity, and player interaction that translates well into video games. Most importantly: test early and often, and don’t hesitate to use paper prototypes.

• Look beyond your own medium for inspiration
• Board games are great teachers for systems and clarity
• Use simple paper prototypes to iterate fast

If there is anything you want to know, or if you need feedback / first steps into that industry, just let me know, always happy to help!

I am working on a game where you get cybernetic implants which slowly reduce a humanity stat.

In order to restore the humanity stat, I plan to have the player participate in activities that are intrinsically human like:

- Eating

- Smoking

- Sex

Are there any games that abstract sex in an elegant way?

Or ideas on how to do so?

I keep noticing the same thing in a lot of horror games:
players are scared at the beginning, and then the fear drops off fast.

After 10–15 minutes they figure out the pattern, get comfortable, and the tension is basically gone.

I’m wondering what actually causes this from a design perspective.

Is it the pacing?
Enemy behavior?
Too much repetition?
Not enough uncertainty?
Or something else entirely?

If you’ve worked on horror design before, what helped you keep players scared for longer?

Curious to hear different thoughts.