#Game Design

[prokopetz]

"It's better to do one thing well than two things poorly" is definitely a solid rule in game design, but I have to admit a weakness for old console games that were basically two different games stacked on top of each other. Zelda II: The Adventures of Link (top-down exploration overworld which becomes a side-scrolling action platformer in dungeons), Blaster Master (side-scrolling metroidvania which becomes a top-down arcade shooter in dungeons), and The Guardian Legend (top-down action RPG which becomes a vertical shoot-'em-up in dungeons) are all titles I remember fondly, but I think my favourite example of the type is the Super Nintendo version of Jurassic Park, which has a brightly coloured Legend of Zelda style top-down overworld, then when you go inside buildings it becomes a survival-horror first person shooter. It's a game-mechanically incomprehensible choice which actually makes perfect sense in terms of emulating the source material, and it's a small disappointment to me that nobody's ever made a serious effort at elaborating on it.

[jesawyer]

Do you prefer skill/stat checks that are chance based, or just a flat you pass or you don't pass? Example: To reactivate a robot you need a Robotics skill of 50. If you have 49 in Robotics you're guaranteed to fail. If you have 50 in Robotics you're guaranteed to succeed, vs. If you have a Robotics skill of 50 it gives you a 50% chance of reactivating the robot.

Flat checks whenever the checks are "stand alone", i.e. they are not part of a series of checks and cannot easily be retried via reloading or other mechanics that require no adaptation from the player.

RNG in stand alone checks you can retry with no cost (other than time) feels more than pointless to me. Feels bad imo.

[nancydrewgamesofficial]

Nancy Drew is 94! 🎉 Since 1930 our beloved iconic teen sleuth has been inspiring amateur detectives everywhere for 94 years and counting 🥳 From your new friends in #MysteryOfTheSevenKeys and Team HeR Interactive — Happy Birthday, Nancy Drew!

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[bdragon1727]

Avatar Frame part 1

Download More and Free:

https://bdragon1727.itch.io/

[underspacegame]

Hasn't even been a month and someone has already modded Thomas the Tank Engine into Underspace.

[omeletcat]

i can't be the only one that doesn't remember gwimbly having a fucking tail?? i played all his games and never noticed this wtf??

[wifflum]

Video games that suck and why they suck

Dark Souls spawned a wonderful genre with an excellent, new (besides Demon's Souls), combat system that has been improved to have everything you could think of asking for, by games like Stellar Blade. Dark Souls, even though it was first, however, sucks. Here's why it sucks.

Dark Souls was made by a self-proclaimed masochist who said, about the game, "these are ways I would like to die," and then set the entire game design team to the objective of killing the player at every opportunity. It's like hostile architecture as a video game. The game is trying to kill you at almost every step, but it had this amazing new combat system, so that was tolerated. Now the blind sheep that are the masses worship it.

Elden Ring and Sekiro, on the other hand, did not have this incredibly sadistic touch to them, and are far more fun to actually play. And these trainwrecks who love Dark Souls would say it's a skill issue, to not enjoy crawling your way to the next death spot like it's progression in Final Fantasy XIV raids only through a fu**ing level, let alone the boss fights, and would blame the victim of literal and admitted game design sadism.

Red Dead Redemption, Spiderman, God of War, and also Grand Theft Auto (at least the campaign) and Uncharted-- all of these games also suck. This is because they are not made with gameplay in mind, because the target audience hardly gives a sh** about gameplay and just wants an interactive movie. They are, as a popular and often contrarian video game critic put it, "ghost train rides". They are theme park attractions that are purely there to entertain from a distance, and not really to be interacted with like you would expect from a video game. Gameplay is secondary, and it's often almost tertiary it's so far from being considered important. That is why these games suck.

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Another somewhat extensive area for video games to suck in, is the Fallout and Elder Scrolls type of games. These games, instead of making story so fu**ing primary that gameplay, the whole point of video games existing at all, is ignored, do the exact same thing with their open-worlds and RPG mechanics. Just imagine a turn-based game like Final Fantasy 7, only the gameplay that can actually kind of stand on its own is actually gameplay that sucks co** and could never stand on its own.

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I play video games for combat. To have fun and display skill. Everything else is set dressing for that one primary thing, and games that suck either intentionally obstruct fun combat, like Dark Souls does, or might as well not even include it it's so bad.

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Some other games that suck are fighting games, because in order to get your ration of 3 seconds of neutral game per match, which might be pretty good but in my experience isn't anything to write to my girlfriend in jail about, you have to spend 8 million hours mastering filler moves that waste both players time and just drop the health bars to what they might as well be at the start, which is 3 hits until death.

Tactical RPGs are not that bad, I don't think, but dear God are they stressful sometimes. It's also slow and can get tiresome unless you personally are slow and tired and prefer that pace over action games.

First Person Shooters need defense options other than fu**ing sprint or better offense (throwing a flashbang is an offense action, as is laying a mine) for every situation, which Remnant: From the Ashes really put in sharp relief.

MOBAs, like League of Legends, need to be done differently rather than copying a game that had a barely passing grade on its combat system (DOTA 1 on Warcraft 3) because it took it from an strategy game where you're supposed to be spending 3/4 of your time managing your base and resources and only fighting a small portion of the time. Battleborn actually showed what MOBAs are capable of to some degree, although it didn't have dodges or anything, but got overshadowed by Overwatch which everyone either immediately regretted or regrets now since Overwatch is agony to play.

One game that largely sucked but did not entirely suck, contrary to what everyone and their goldfish will tell you, was Anthem. At one point it had a triple jump, triple dodge, comboing melee character that could frontflip into sniping something in the head or spraying it with submachine gun fire. Yes, that was motherfu**ing Anthem that had that, in the Interceptor Javelin, though the people in the other Javelins did not look to be having much fun.

The last games that suck, which I think everyone largely knows they suck, are Ubisoft games. Now Far Cry isn't that bad, because it still has a reasonable focus on gameplay, but Assassin's Creed games have combat that is almost as ass as Rockstar games' gameplay.

Just, all you have to do, lol, is take some reasonable approximation of soulslike combat, with an actual functional deflect if you include one, unlike Rise of the Ronin, and do whatever your little gimmick is on top of that. People will fall over themselves saying how amazing it is. Just make ACCEPTABLE gameplay with whatever your horsesh** is that your audience of nitwits loves, and it will be something as if from an advanced society in the future.

Although, I personally think the window for that is closing and it wouldn't be jaw-dropping anymore, with soulslikes branching out so much. All we really need now is a soulslike MMO and that'll be the kitchen sink, and I think it's rapidly approaching. All I would ask of someone doing that is that you model the PvP after Guild Wars 1 Random Arenas, and you'd have to study that pretty extensively because there's a lot of nuance that made it so good, but it was namely an extreme difficulty to combat, like you'd get from a PvE game set to Insanity difficulty, somehow enveloping the PvP experience.

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Anyway, that's how video games of today almost all suck. And it's because they're not really video games; they're either like a simulation of something, traveling or getting stronger, or just straight-up a movie, with video gameyness slapped onto the side like a sticker, with about as much effort put into the application. The games that are good, as video games and not interactive media, which is what a lot of these things should be distinguished as, ask the user to display skill and they make that display enjoyable and varied. There's a million ways to screw up the execution of that design or to excel at it, but only a few games even set that objective of good combat as an actual goal.

But, if it makes makes money it's fine how it is, fu** foresight and artistic integrity, and we must all keep churning out pig slop to the pigs.

[greenflamethegf]

TBH that might even thiner they avrage

[amberautumnfaebrooke]

i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.

the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year's winner - these candidates are young lovers forced to compete - he's smart - she's fast - root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they're in...a forest.

it's not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.

the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making "survival by hiding" an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it's a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what's happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what's going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they're intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.

this isn't even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.

the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i'm designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don't know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.

it makes me second guess enjoying the children's murder arenas at all.

[insertdisc5]

📚 A List Of Useful Websites When Making An RPG 📚

My timeloop RPG In Stars and Time is done! Which means I can clear all my ISAT gamedev related bookmarks. But I figured I would show them here, in case they can be useful to someone. These range from "useful to write a story/characters/world" to "these are SUPER rpgmaker focused and will help with the terrible math that comes with making a game".

This is what I used to make my RPG game, but it could be useful for writers, game devs of all genres, DMs, artists, what have you. YIPPEE

Writing (Names)

Behind The Name - Why don't you have this bookmarked already. Search for names and their meanings from all over the world!

Medieval Names Archive - Medieval names. Useful. For ME

City and Town Name Generator - Create "fake" names for cities, generated from datasets from any country you desire! I used those for the couple city names in ISAT. I say "fake" in quotes because some of them do end up being actual city names, especially for french generated ones. Don't forget to double check you're not 1. just taking a real city name or 2. using a word that's like, Very Bad, especially if you don't know the country you're taking inspiration from! Don't want to end up with Poopaville, USA

Writing (Words)

Onym - A website full of websites that are full of words. And by that I mean dictionaries, thesauruses, translators, glossaries, ways to mix up words, and way more. HIGHLY recommend checking this website out!!!

Moby Thesaurus - My thesaurus of choice!

Rhyme Zone - Find words that rhyme with others. Perfect for poets, lyricists, punmasters.

In Different Languages - Search for a word, have it translated in MANY different languages in one page.

ASSETS

In general, I will say: just look up what you want on itch.io. There are SO MANY assets for you to buy on itch.io. You want a font? You want a background? You want a sound effect? You want a plugin? A pixel base? An attack animation? A cool UI?!?!?! JUST GO ON ITCH.IO!!!!!!

Visual Assets (General)

Creative Market - Shop for all kinds of assets, from fonts to mockups to templates to brushes to WHATEVER YOU WANT

Velvetyne - Cool and weird fonts

Chevy Ray's Pixel Fonts - They're good fonts.

Contrast Checker - Stop making your text white when your background is lime green no one can read that shit babe!!!!!!

Visual Assets (Game Focused)

Interface In Game - Screenshots of UI (User Interfaces) from SO MANY GAMES. Shows you everything and you can just look at what every single menu in a game looks like. You can also sort them by game genre! GREAT reference!

Game UI Database - Same as above!

Sound Assets

Zapsplat, Freesound - There are many sound effect websites out there but those are the ones I saved. Royalty free!

Shapeforms - Paid packs for music and sounds and stuff.

Other

CloudConvert - Convert files into other files. MAKE THAT .AVI A .MOV

EZGifs - Make those gifs bigger. Smaller. Optimize them. Take a video and make it a gif. The Sky Is The Limit

Marketing

Press Kitty - Did not end up needing this- this will help with creating a press kit! Useful for ANY indie dev. Yes, even if you're making a tiny game, you should have a press kit. You never know!!!

presskit() - Same as above, but a different one.

Itch.io Page Image Guide and Templates - Make your project pages on itch.io look nice.

MOOMANiBE's IGF post - If you're making indie games, you might wanna try and submit your game to the Independent Game Festival at some point. Here are some tips on how, and why you should.

Game Design (General)

An insightful thread where game developers discuss hidden mechanics designed to make games feel more interesting - Title says it all. Check those comments too.

Game Design (RPGs)

Yanfly "Let's Make a Game" Comics - INCREDIBLY useful tips on how to make RPGs, going from dungeons to towns to enemy stats!!!!

Attack Patterns - A nice post on enemy attack patterns, and what attacks you should give your enemies to make them challenging (but not TOO challenging!) A very good starting point.

How To Balance An RPG - Twitter thread on how to balance player stats VS enemy stats.

Nobody Cares About It But It’s The Only Thing That Matters: Pacing And Level Design In JRPGs - a Good Post.

Game Design (Visual Novels)

Feniks Renpy Tutorials - They're good tutorials.

I played over 100 visual novels in one month and here’s my advice to devs. - General VN advice. Also highly recommend this whole blog for help on marketing your games.

I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye

[boggsart]

I’ve decided to post all of the progress here as well, not just on instagram. Some people have asked to be tagged once I post some progress, but I can’t remember who they were. So if you wanna see future progress, let me know and I’ll tag you!

This one may not look too different from the previous one, but nothing really turned out the way I intended to.

The colors, the textures, the focus, the sounds, the camera, everything just seems so off, and oh boy the animation… this is the result of rushing and not knowing what I’m doing, just inserting keyframes, tweaking the graph editor and hoping for the best. So maybe signing up for this project wasn’t a great idea after all lol. Plus the datapad’s not even fully textured, you can literally see where I started adding details on the front, then for some reason I just left off lol

One thing I’ll definitely work on in the future is the menu itself, because if this project is for a graphic design thesis, then I might as well try to make the only thing that has something to do with it look more presentable. I’ll definitely be changing up the fonts, and I have some other ideas for the background as well.

But for now, I’ll move on to the remaining 5 character menu animations. Originally there were gonna be 5, not 7. At first I was randomly picking out the characters I wanted to make one for, then I realized, it’d probably be best, if each squad got one animation. The 501st gets Rex, the 212th gets Cody, the CG gets Fox, the 104th gets Wolffe, and the 241st gets Tukk. CF99 got Hunter but I really wanted to make one for Tech as well, since modeling and texturing him took the longest 💀

Once all of that’s done, I can finally move on to animating the trailer video. Which I’m terrified of, but oh well lol

[prokopetz]

A much-requested addition to Eat God which ended up taking surprisingly few words to address.

[videogames-i-wish-were-real]

Videogames I wish were real #97

A roguelike game that takes place in the world's biggest library, which has been overrun by monsters, where you play as a librarian determined to save it. You venture inside the library armed with your weapon of choice and two messenger bags you plan to fill with whatever books you can rescue.

After you clear the monsters in a particular section of the library, such as the Poetry section, you'll unlock a permanent buff that will last for the remaining of that run. For example: clearing the Travel section will help you map areas faster, and also unlock the bookworm railway system that will allow you to move more easily between certain parts of the library.

Besides section buffs, you'll also be able to learn all kinds of useful attacks and skills by finding specific books in the shelves, reading them and carrying them in your messenger bags. The more books you carry, the stronger your character will be, and the abilities each book will grant you will be on theme with the book, it's literary genre or one of its tropes: carrying with you a bestiary will allow you to quickly identify the weak points of monsters you've met before, a book with an enemies to lovers trope will allow you to turn a monster into a temporary ally that will fight alongside you, a botany book in your bag will let you gather medicinal herbs growing in the library, and carrying a potions book will allow you to prepare healing potions (more effective than just herbs), etc.

Not everyone believes the library can be saved, which is why during your expeditions your mission is not only to kill monsters, but also to rescue books and bring them to the new library. Since getting books out is one of your main priorities, starting your runs with your satchels nearly full of books that grant you useful abilities won't be very efficient, so you'll need to decide how many books you want to bring back with you to the library during each run.

Fighting monsters is dangerous, and sometimes you get hurt, but also, sometimes books get hurt, which why after some runs you might need to stop by your workshop to repair any damaged books. The hides of certain monsters are very sturdy, so using them to rebind books will make them more durable.

There is no respawning in this game. If your librarian dies inside the library, the next librarian that ventures inside might eventually find their body. If you're close to death and you have a particular book from the Travel section in your bags, you'll be able to use it to summon a bookwork that will take you quickly and safely back to the entrance with whatever books are currently in your bag.

You love your library, and you are determined to save it, armed with the greatest weapon in the world: knowledge (and a sword), even if it's one book at a time.

[devsgames]

Skyrim's late-game power-fantasy-creep is so funny even by fantasy standards. Like, it's hilarious how it feels like it completely steamrolls everything else. By the end of the game you're:

the Chosen One

dragonslayer

Archmage of the only magic college in the kingdom

leader of a group of werewolf paladins (or alternatively a literal Vampire Lord)

vampire slayer

minor nobility of literally every county in the kingdom (and one not in the kingdom)

high ranking soldier of a faction of the civil war

personal conduit and champion for like a dozen various deities and gods

leader of an ancient and forgotten dragon-slaying warband

master of the thieves guild

leader of a group of serial killers

protector of the entire kingdom

member of a bard's college

Like imagine a person existing that had all these titles and also the actual lived experience to back it up.

[ganondoodle]

rough concept for the unique boss within the deku-tree (required for the quest to repair the mastersword; boss name is a placeholder)

(totk rewritten project)

[underspacegame]

We've been doing tons of updates to Underspace, in case you missed it, and more are coming this Saturday.

This includes things like lots of new UI QoL stuff, as well as new effects for collecting cargo. Because we want you to know you're basically flying a wizard's staff with some rockets attached.