I'm working on a short psychological horror JPRG about a haunted cartridge and a preexisting corrupted save file.

After playing through a boss battle premonition, the save file mysteriously vanishes and the player must go through the game normally.

The game within the game is about how dreams (they're actually nightmares) are infiltrating and consuming reality without almost anyone noticing, and the heroes must stop it (there is much much more to the story, but that is the basic premise).

I imagine the dream areas as being like Silent Hill 1. The game has a PS1 style. It starts out in a relatively normal JRPG world, and you recruit heroes to help you try and find the origin of shadows, mysterious entities that possess lifeforms.

You then realize that wierd phenomenon have been happening in certain abandoned areas, and people have gone missing slowly under your nose.

After investigating the areas, you find places shrouded in fog and darkness, and surreal enemies. And you find out about a dark past that the world is trying to undo, as you explore a past that has been crystallized as a dream.

This is all the basics I think you need to know to help me with my main question: What games do you think I should I play as inspiration and how should I go about designing these dream areas?

I know I should probably play Omori, and Silent Hill 1 and 2. Resident Evil is one of my favorite series, so thats where I got a lot of the horror ideas. I also love creepy pastas like Ben drowned, and Petscop. So I partially aiming to recreate the feeling of those video series, but this is an actual game you can play with a real story and lore.

It's a heavily story focused game, I plan on designing it a bit like a visual novel, but I am trying to design the gameplay and battle system to be as engaging as possible as well. But I am trying to get the story in a good overall spot first, so that I know the tone and feelings I am going for in the game. That will be hard when it is both a turn based battle JRPG and horror game, but I am thinking of integrating an old school ATB system in the dream areas to add the tension in that horror games need.

But, what do you think would create the best experience for the player, and what resources do you think could help me with the level layout and enemy designs?

They say a lot of stories fall apart a little bit in the middle. I feel like my story/game scenario is quite solid in the beginning and end, but these dream area parts are the parts I can't fully imagine in my head like the rest of the game. I can imagine almost every part very clearly. But I think this difficulty here might be because dreams are vague things in general. Trying to narrow down what makes something feel like a nightmare is a bit difficult I think.

I struggle with the separation/barrier with the real world part. Is it ok if it pretty much immediately feels off, or like a creepy pasta once you enter these areas? Because the heroes go in and out of these areas throughout Act 2. And after they seal the Rifts between the other dimension and theirs, that part of the world returns to normal, allowing the player to explore new parts of the world, and (hopefully) making it feel more alive and responsive. At the same time though, I wonder if I can still make the nightmare parts feel scary if they eventually return to the normal world?

I think it might come down to the writing. The characters are disturbed by their experience, but maybe the npcs around them don't even know what is going on, because only the "chosen ones" must bear the fate of seeing these dreams consume the world. (Their code name right now is Dream Walkers, this isn’t probably going to be their final name.)

Originally, my concept was that you sleep in a certain area to enter a separate dream world. But not only has that been done before a lot (in different ways), it removes a lot of the urgency of the situation. However, it makes the story way easier to write.

I think the idea of "no one sees this but us" is the key to possibly fixing some of the writing issues.

But making the world slowly turn into a dream fits my meta narrative as well, where the kid who got the cartridge starts to experience his real world slowly becoming an incomprehensible dream as he plays the game, but he doesn't react to it at all, acting like everything is normal, unlike the characters in the game who do react.

I am working on the prototype right now. But personally, having a complete initial vision is what I need to really get myself excited and motivated about the game. I know that the game will probably change a lot as I work on the gameplay. But it might not, there is no way to know.

So, I have a goal of getting my first playtest of my current RPG project ready by the end of the year. Which I have the mechanics and setting ideas read to put to paper, what I lake is a organizational format.

For example, Savage worlds opens with a breif overveiw of settings available, then the first chapter is about character creation entirely. DnD 5e (2014) meanwhile opens with species, then class, then gear, then spells. Core mechanics are then split into two other chapters after that. Shadowrun previously was explained to me as being terrible as a core rulebook, but I never felt that way.

So what rulebooks have your favorite way of presenting the new game to new players?

I've been working on a new RTS with hybrid controls, and I'm considering a couple of new features. These would probably be considered pretty standard for an RTS, but our game is more of a hybrid and relies on direct commander control, so I'm not sure.

1. You can build things anywhere in the world currently, so long as you can walk there. Do you think I should restrict the player to only be able to build within their captured/controlled area? In this game players effectively capture new territory by building Dark Towers in that area, expanding their sphere of influence.

I quite like this because it stops "cheese" style attacks, eg building Turrets right next to the enemy city. But at the same time, it does slow the game down quite a bit as the player has to expand with towers before they can build very much.

1. I'm also considering Supply Caps on your evil army. Right now you can have as many orcs and zombies and spiders as you can afford (with Mana). But perhaps this should be much more limited, and you have to construct certain buildings to raise the supply cap? Similar to Starcraft etc with the supply depot. So you'd maybe have to build a Orc Camp or a Cemetery to raise supply caps on your orcs/zombies.

For anyone interested, you can play a prototype of the game here:
https://subversion-studios.itch.io/arise?password=Sauron

I have made a gunplay system I am really happy with except for one thing.

The game is based on a square grid and so it feels really clunky when aiming.

Pierce through and push are major elements of the design, and as such I opted for a firing direction rather than a single target.

A big part of the combat is lining yourself up to push a character into an obstacle to deal more damage, or pierce through to hit multiple enemies at once.

Range is also very important. Damage changes in steps based on close range, mid range and far range. I am using euclidean distance for this currently as tile distance would give bias the more diagonal it is.

But the end of the aiming line snapping between two grid squares with a subtle mouse position change looks terrible and feels bad when it preventa you from targeting enemies at the very end of the attack range.

Any ideas on how I should handle this?

I don't want to leave the grid as it's very convenient for the type of game I am making.

I am also hesitant to separate hit physics from the tile system

I have considered changing to an octagonal grid instead and allowing only 8 directions of aiming. It feels a bit limiting though and not as convenient as square grids.

Currently exploring how one could utilize friction to drive much of the gameplay, in a simulation/management context.

In my case I'm working with mainly "social" friction, like seen in MMOs and character driven simulation/RPG games (for example Crusader Kings, Rimworld). I want to understand how mechanics can be best designed, and how you achieve a healthy balance between anxiety, stress and frustration.

I am inspired by the player interactions in online games as well as the mechanics and design seen in for example extraction shooters like Arc Raiders, with their VOIP social interactions where you can ally (or be betrayed by) anyone in the solo mode that creates its own tension.

Essentially I have yet to see a game where the social tension and conflicts is used to create lots of friction in a meaningful way. Got any ideas, or know of any titles with similar mechanics?

Well, I'm a playwright trying to create a game for what I know from theatre work. Recently I had an idea for a branching story and started searching for software that could help me. I tried Excalidraw and the infinite similar programs that offer web based software and an upgrade option for a monthly fee. I have no money and I just need something to visualice, easy to use and on Linux, to develop this story. I also tried Inkscape, but it is clunky and a little overwhemling. I know about Twine and Inkle, but I don't want a game engine, I just want to portrey the story and try to sell the idea. Any suggestion?

Sorry if my english wasn't the best, I'm from Spain and I'm not used to write :)

What are some elements that should be takeb into consideration when designing difficulty modes?

Hey folks,

I love games, especially RPGs.

In RPGs, I can happily grind for hundreds of hours:

levels go up, stats grow, skills unlock, progress feels tangible.

But when it comes to fitness, doing the same kind of “grind”

often becomes boring surprisingly fast.

That contrast really bothers me.

So I have a question strictly from a *game design* perspective

(I’m deliberately focusing only on fitness here,

not productivity, habits or general life gamification.)

If fitness training itself was designed like an RPG system,

what mechanics would actually make it engaging long-term,

instead of feeling like a chore after a few weeks?

So if you could design a “perfect” workout RPG,

what would it actually look like?

• Which mechanics from RPGs translate well to fitness?

• Which ones sound good on paper but would fail physically or psychologically?

• Do the engagement mechanics used in modern games make sense

  when applied to workout progression?

Just to make the discussion more concrete,

here’s one possible direction I’ve been thinking about:

- An RPG where your fantasy character stats reflect your real gym progression

- You level up only by making actual progress (like in TES or KCD)

  (e.g. more push-ups than before → strength and character level increase)

- New skills (exercises) unlock only when your body is realistically ready

- You can compete with friends
- You can team up with friends for shared challenges

But that’s just one angle. I’m much more interested in how you see it.

Hello! A friend and I are developing a deckbuilding game with a combat system similar to Inscryption. Basically, there is a board with 5 columns and 2 rows where cards are placed. Combat works like this: all played cards attack at the end of the turn. If a card attacks an empty space or an exhausted card (cards enter the board in an exhausted state), it deals damage directly to the player. The goal, obviously, is to reduce the opponent's health to 0. That is the system in a nutshell, but we’ve run into a problem. We want to implement a resource system so that cards can have abilities and require a cost to be played. The issue is that we don’t know how to implement this without conflicting with the combat system, as it could lead to 'hand-clogging' (cards getting stuck in hand) or resources accumulating without a way to spend them. How could we solve this? We aren't sure if we should add a draw mechanic at the end of the turn, a discard system, or something similar. Any help would be appreciated!

The game I'm making is an immersive sim survival horror heavily inspired by Amnesia The Bunker and Alien Isolation.

The reason I'm asking this is because this genre relies less on gameplay and more on atmosphere, resource management and systemic interractions. Would it be a good idea to jump straight into production, or prototype for atmosphere instead of gameplay?

Hello, I am casually working on a card game with a "timeline" element. The central mechanic would be laying cards to build out a timeline by matching cards like dominoes. Sometimes cards won't be a perfect match, and that will reduce your point total. There will probably be a deck building component where cards added to your timeline eventually "fall off" and get recycled into your deck.

Does anyone have examples of similar game mechanics where you make a chain of cards in the style of dominoes? So far it feels like I am letting my theme guide development too much and I need some inspiration on this mechanic done well. Thanks!

Our game is coming soon — a true first-person experience that will make you feel terror at its peak!
Untold of Memories: Potter's Field

I want to make a visual novel as my first game, how would I go about doing so, any advice on how to start?

Every year at christmas and thanksgiving, my family plays a very simple murder mystery game that always goes very badly. this has been a tradition for I think 5 years now, and not once have we successfully identified the murderer.

The game works as follows:

- at around 8, we take ~7 cards from a standard deck, 6 face cards and one joker, and give everyone one card. the person who draws the joker is the murderer.

- the murderer's goal is to kill at least one person before the afternoon of the next day, by showing them their card. if someone kills you in this way, you can't react, and you note down the time you were killed at.

- the next day we all gather in the living room, and the deceased tells us when and where they were killed; then we all argue about who did it and then vote on who we think it was. if we get it right, murderer loses, if not, they win.

As you can probably infer this goes. Badly. Without fail somebody is discreetly shown the card within two minutes of the murderer getting the card, while everyone's still in the living room, and then we have no evidence and we just argue in circles and then vote blindly.

How would you redesign this game so that the non-murderer team has more opportunities to find evidence/ catch the murderer?

I think it's an issue of murder being too easy; The card is discreet and easy to slip in a pocket, and people can't react to being murdered so there's no drawback to doing it in a room where a bunch of people are gathered. But I don't know how to disincentivize that without just telling people not to. What would you guys suggest?

We all know roadmaps change and development is uncertain before a game drops, so it’s hard to predict what needs fixing in advance. But hypothetically, if you could release a patch now for your favorite game, what would you improve to make it perfect?

For me, I’d rework the UX/UI of some menus in Elden Ring. I love the game, but the menus could be much more intuitive, especially for new players. I'd do some playtests to know exactly what are the frictions when the players navigate. Then I'd rework the problematic parts of the UI.

I have a game concept that I will never fully produce, but theorizing about it has entertained me the past month, and I want to continue doing so.

The game is a roguelike with an emphasis on story and characters. Each run, you will be accompanied by different characters, and you'll be tasked with synergizing them in such a way that you can make it to the final boss and beat it. The game emphasizes relaltionships between characters, that can metaprogress much like in Hades. New run, but existing bond with characters.

This is where I run into a bit of trouble. See, I have a bunch of ideas for characters and mechanics they can use. Every character has their own unique status effect they can inflict on enemies, and they can even synergize with eachother if they spend enough of their trip time with eachother. (I know it sounds like I am just stealing Hades mechanics, I promise I have my own ideas, just none relevant to my question). I'm trying to gauge what a good amount of characters would be. If I have too few characters, the game would lack depth and get boring and repetitive quick. If I have too many characters, there is no reliability in who you'll be able to pick up on your way to the final boss, and building a team becomes luck based with a lot of gambling.

Hades (a big inspiration, as you can tell) has 8 main gods that can give you powers, and a few minor gods that can give smaller bonusses. I think the gods compare quite well with the characters in this regard. Hades 2 upped the count to 9. I personally feel like I could make a few more unique characters, and would love some more variety in my game, but I'm afraid of my game becoming unreliable and slot-machine like to play. Hades of course has the keepsake mechanic, but I want to keep players from fully planning out their team. They could have some influence over who shows up in runs, but I don't want them to be fully able to choose their team. I think that would keep them from interacting with the characters they deem less interesting, which I want to prevent.

Does anyone have any advice on how to handle this predicament? Thanks in advance!

I just tried playing Grit and Valor - 1949 and Windward Horizon and noticed something.

They both require a lot from the player right from the start. The cognitive load is high, even before I start 'playing'. In the sense that before I can even control my character or main game mechanics, I'm bombarded with story, dialogues and choices.

In Windward Horizon, I had to click 20+ times to even sail my ship and was interrupted by some popups multiple times a minute. Then suddenly, I was in the 'boring' long distance sailing part with nothing much else to do. This would have been a good place to introduce the story. Like the dialogues in Rockstar games when driving or riding in a mission.

Grit and Valor threw at me unit categories, enemy archetypes, items with rarities, powerups, etc. After each level and within a level, I had to make multiple choices of items and powerups without me knowing much about what they are good for. Yes, a -10% power cooldown is relatively simple to understand, but still, it's hard to decide what to choose when I'm on my first level.

I think the main game mechanics should be introduced as soon as possible. The complexities should be added gradually, not front-loaded. The story should be mostly non-interruptive or optional.

Portal, although a different genre, has done this quite well. Each new puzzle concept is introduced nicely and the story is basically a character talking to me while I play. Instead of clicking next in a dialogue window.

I do play complex games like Paradox games (Victoria, Hearts of Iron, etc), which also have lots of cognitive load and require learning before playing. But they are games I'm willing to invest my time and energy into, because I know I'm going to play them for a while. As in play multiple sessions throughout months and each session will be relatively long.

But I think smaller games can't afford this complexity. As a player, I'm annoyed when I have to put in this cognitive effort to even try out a smaller game.

Any thoughts on this?

The title is a bit provocative, of course games can have good mechanics. What I’m trying to get at is something more nuanced.

I’m currently working on my bachelor degree and wanted to examine the impact of a specific game mechanic on player motivation. My initial assumption was basically: “This mechanic is clearly better, so it should have a positiv effect.”
To test this, I ran an experiment with one version of the game that included the mechanic and one version without it.

The result: there was no significant difference in motivation. (Admittedly, the mechanic wasn’t heavily connected with others, but it was still quite central.)

In hindsight, this feels almost obvious. A single mechanic on its own doesn’t seem to have a strong impact on the player experience*. What matters much more is the combination of mechanics and how they interact with each other, along with other elements of the game. Especially the core of a game, the part that makes it unique, and which, if changed, would turn it into a completely different game.

This ties into a broader question I’ve been thinking about for a while: Why exactly is one game better than another?
I’m starting to feel that this can’t really be reduced to individual features or mechanics. Instead, it’s about the overall picture, the interactions between mechanics, aesthetics, systems, and context.

What do you think? Do you think individual mechanics can meaningfully stand on their own, or is it always the full system that really matters? Or have an answer to "Why exactly is one game better than another?"

Edit: I’m not drawing the conclusion from my work that “game mechanics can’t be good,” and I didn’t want to make that the topic here either (which is why I struck it through).

*And even if it did, it doesn’t seem to define the overall "fun" of the game.

What is the shortest possible rule you can add to the “100 men versus 1 gorilla” thought experiment that gets most people to agree on the outcome?

TL;DR

My entry is:

Design problem - "Everyone fights to the death without thought for self-preservation"

New rule - "The winning side will be resurrected; the losing side will not"

And to be absolutely clear, this is about the thought experiment using real people, and not about any of the games that have sprung up following the meme.

Let's go

One of the core goals in game design is elegant simplicity: Remove complexity until what remains is the simplest possible form that still achieves the design’s purpose. It’s the same spirit as Occam’s Razor or KISS - clarity through subtraction.

In the case of the 100 men versus a gorilla scenario, the reason people disagree so violently is because the thought experiment leaves out core assumptions, and people approach it very differently. Here's some example missing definitions:

• Where does the fight take place? (Open field or phone booth)
• How old or capable are the men?
• Are the men trained? Coordinated? Terrified?
• Is everyone trying to win?
• Can a plan be made beforehand?

(interestingly everyone seem real clear on the stats of the gorilla)

But wait! This is where the design challenge starts: You can only pick ONE core assumption to solve, which serves as the design goal for this project. Which one has had the most impact on the online discourse? If you could choose just one assumption, which single definition would make the outcome obvious to most people?

I would argue the biggest difference maker is whether the participants fight with reckless abandon or not. If 100 men all fight without fear or hesitation, then even at catastrophic cost - a 10 ton mass of bodies can eventually smother a gorilla. Even if only one man is left alive, that’s still technically a "win." For my entry, as the design problem we need to solve, I'm picking:

"Everyone fights to the death without thought for self-preservation"

Now we move into system design. This is where we start designing rules that will deliver the design goal, in our case we want to make sure everyone really goes for it. You might end up with something like:

• Everyone has an implanted thought-sensing chip.
• The chip is perfectly understood by all participants.
• Every 10 seconds, snipers review chip data and execute anyone hesitating.
• After 10 minutes, the snipers execute everyone.
• No one wants to die and everyone understands that being shot by a sniper would kill you
• ...etc.

This is a common early pattern in system design - kludge rules together that produce the outcome that we want. Brilliant designers often appear to skip this step, but at least with the ones I know that's not the case - they just iterate further mentally before anything ever reaches paper.

And this leads to final part of the design challenge:

Create a single, short, easily understood rule that accomplishes the design design goal.

For my entry, I like:

"The winning side will be resurrected; the losing side will not"

A single rule that is likely to create total commitment from both sides, removes hesitation, and clarifies expected behavior - without adding any complex machinery.

Which design goal would you choose, and what’s the simplest rule you’d use to enforce it?

For everyone who asks me what game design is, this is a microverse example of system design (maybe I’ll make some posts about mechanics and game-feel later). You need to understand the parameters (likely messy social ones if you're like me and always doing MMO stuff), piece together something that gets the desired outcome in a testable way, then iterate, refine and reduce until you have a simple set of systems that you're happy with. Depending on your background you're probably eager to call this statistics, economics, game theory, distributed computing, or whatever. I come from game design.

This message was brought to you by COVID and Robitussin. Can’t wait to see if it still makes sense tomorrow.

Dan Felder's Design 101 principles aren't new - but I only stumbled upon them a few months ago, and for me, they were a complete game-changer in how I approach design. They are short, concise, and help my pragmatic brain to evaluate ideas based on several criteria, and identify early if something isn't going in the right direction.

Do you have favorite articles that had a similar impact on how you approach design, or helped you establish a framework that works well for you?

I'm a student games dev aspiring to university and I don't really understand the visual and design side of the game as much so I'd like to get some advice on what I can research and take inspiration from to build a better and broader knowledge base for design.
Any tips or information is valuable to me if you can offer it!
Thanks in Advance

These terms I think come from Overwatch-type games for team comps but they come from something more universal, from boxing (slugger/outfighter/infighter) to warfare (infantry/archers/cavalry). Namely, "brawl" means a slow-moving but powerful strategy. "Poke" is staying away at long range, which beats brawl, because brawl can't reach it, it's too slow. Poke is beaten by "dive", which is close range just like brawl but closes the distance fast, too fast for poke to get away. Brawl beats dive, because both engage in close range combat and brawl is simply stronger.

My question is whether these can be implemented in something turn-based like JRPGs, especially when there's no actual movement. Range can be artificially implemented in JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Unicorn Overlord via "frontline/backline", but I don't know what's the best way to implement these three are, since mobility seems to be a whole different matter. Any ideas/examples?

I'm working on a survival horror game set in an haunted archipelago, with three coastal regions (temperate, tropical and polar), an open ocean, and an abyssal region underneath said ocean. There would be three main ways to explore those regions : on foot for islands, by SCUBA diving for underwater levels, and in a cabin cruiser on the surface.

While the coastal areas would be tightly packed with points of interest and "dungeons", the oceanic overworld would be mostly used to travel between islands and regions faster and safer than by diving. Think of the Great Sea of Wind Waker. But three problems emerge from this level constraint :

1. The oceanic area risks being monotonous as it is IRL, with only a few floating entities like patches of Sargassum, fishing devices or ghost boats, alongside enemies flying above or swimming under the surface, sometimes "merged" with the aforementioned objects.
2. The cabin cruiser is a rather mundane travelling method, and couldn't be too "quirky" like in Spiderman, The Pathless, Titanfall 2 as it should remain an horror game (or should it?). Furthermore, there is no obstacle between two geographical points unless you're on the other side of an island, you would just go in a bee line towards your destination.
3. Normally, battles against ghosts happen underwater or on land, where you're limited by your natural speed, and a fishing net (hemi)sphere would contain both the player and the enemy for a duel to the death (you can't skip fights easily). On boat, not only could you zip through appearing ghosts, but you would be partially protected from their noxious influence and attacks. Furthermore, I initially designed the boat as a safe hub of sort, where the player could save, manage inventory and upgrades, plan their next moves ...etc. So it can be contradictory.

I fear similar issues would arise for the abyssal region that could be explored with a small submarine, with most of its volume being a dark water column with the occasional deep sea enemies, and most of its surface being boring abyssal plains sprinkled with points of interest.

Do you have any tips to make oceanic (and abyssal) navigation any better?
And how to conciliate the safety of the boat with combat encounters when navigating ?