#game design
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prokopetz · 2 days ago
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"Generically medieval" settings can be annoying, but what really burns me is when people try to "correct" others about what the medieval period was really like, then hit the wrong era. They'll be setting forth a checklist of "authentically medieval" features and I'll be like, that's the German Renaissance. You are describing the German Renaissance.
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nestedneons · 3 days ago
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By jilt
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blackblooms · 2 days ago
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Here a copy of my small rant about boss design from bluesky Also a link if you'd rather see it in its original context and presentation https://bsky.app/profile/blackblooms.bsky.social/post/3lhynncijkc2g
Okay, i keep hearing this idea that bosses are supposed to be "the final exam" that tests out your knowledge of the game and its mechanics, but i gotta be honest, i dont think they can or are even supposed to in the great majority of cases. In most games, bosses just dont operate under the same rules as the rest of the game, often invalidating entire mechanics or introducing new ones. Saying they are the final exam is like having to study for your math finals, only for every single questions to actually be about the history of math. I rather think that bosses are supposed to be a shakeup to the formula, to take the game mechanics and put them in a new context to force the players to learn and adapt. They often are difficulty spikes because thats parts of the shakeup where the smooth difficulty curve is replaced with a wall. To give some exemples, bosses in rpg often are immune to status effects despite them being a core mechanics, bosses in beat em up rarely can be juggled, and platforming bosses dont involve all that much platforming. Heck, escape segments and arena brawls often make for a better test of your aptitudes as they do center around the mechanics you have been using in every other levels, but even these i would argue to be introducing elements that simply are not analogous to every other levels by their very nature. Anyway my main point is that a boss is so different from the levels that surround them that the only thing it can test you on is your ability to fight that very boss. Its not a bad thing through. Bosses tend to be the highlight of many games for a reason. They test your ability to learn and adapt. Anyway, that's all just a general observation and not an unbreakable rule. Bosses that do test our knowledge and flexibility with the game mechanics are usually pretty cool (though id argue they still completely change the pace and context of normal gameplay) so if you know any, do share. Ps: you can respond to the rant here if you like, but doing so on bluesky is going to be much easier and effective.
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200-word-rpgs · 4 months ago
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200 Word RPGs 2024
Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.
This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.
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greenflamethegf · 2 years ago
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TBH that might even thiner they avrage
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insertdisc5 · 1 year ago
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📚 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
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falloutconceptart · 8 months ago
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I cannot overstate this enough.
There is no single person more responsible for the aesthetics and design of modern Fallout than Adam Adamowicz.
Fallout and many of its designs were of course established prior to Adam's involvement with the series, but his work on Fallout 3 brought an astounding depth and detail to a world he had full vision for.
His concept work was the foundation that the game designers intensely relied on and its astounding how closely his concepts were translated into the game.
I just went through all 800+ concepts he did for Fallout 3 and it is fucking *insane* how he seemingly designed almost everything for that game, at least at the conceptual level.
From mutants-
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To robots-
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To the buildings-
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To guns-
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To the details and vibe of the decayed metro-
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Adam's artistic vision and creativity was behind the style and design of the entire game.
Adam was a generational talent and he left the world too soon.
Bless him and RIP.
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amberautumnfaebrooke · 2 years ago
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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.
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boggsart · 10 months ago
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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
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prokopetz · 3 days ago
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You've talked before about how "generic" ttrpg systems still contain hidden assumptions about genre, story, playstyle, etc. (e.g. gurps and military scifi/fantasy) how do you figure out what those assumptions are? what should you look for in the rules to find them?
That's a fairly involved question for which a full answer is beyond the scope of a Tumblr post (even my notoriously long-winded ones!), but I find that a good place to start is with the "who gives a shit?" principle.
For example, suppose that the first piece of mechanically significant information on a game's character sheet is a statistic called "Strength", rated on a scale from one to ten.
Who gives a shit?
That is, why do we care how strong player characters are? Why do we care about having a definite, codified answer at our fingertips to the question of which characters are stronger than other characters, to a fair degree of precision? Why does any of this matter? What assumptions are we making about the nature of the conflicts that will be present within the game's narrative?
That's a fairly trivial case, but the principle can be extended to more fundamental features of a game's rules. Let's consider the classic Dungeons & Dragons style skill check, for example: roll a die, add a stat, compare to a target number, pass or fail. What assumptions are we encoding about the nature of conflict in this game?
Well, for a start, these assumptions might include:
The assumption that generating binary pass/fail outcomes for performing discrete physical, mental and social tasks is how most conflicts will be resolved;
The assumption that your game will benefit from these outcomes having a high degree of player-facing uncertainty;
The assumption that your game will benefit from this uncertainty containing a relatively high likelihood of complete failure;
The assumption that your game will benefit from the principal determinant of that likelihood of failure being some intrinsic and objectively measurable attribute of the acting character;
... and so forth.
If you're only familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and its very close imitators, these may seem like things you have to assume in order to have a functioning game, but there are a fairly specific set of conventions being expressed here. Why do we care about any of these things? Who gives a shit?
Even the first bullet point can easily be knocked down: one can imagine, for example, a game which simply assumes players can always choose to have their characters succeed at anything it's within the realm of possibility for them to do, and whose rules instead focus on providing a codified game-mechanical answer to the question of what that success will cost them, with the only uncertainty being whether the player is willing to pay that cost.
It's clear that a game which approaches conflict resolution in this way is expressing a strong set of genre assumptions. The trick is recognising that the industry-standard alternative (i.e., the D&D-style skill check) is equally laser-focused on a specific set of genre assumptions, in a way that's often rendered invisible by how common it is.
All of which is a very long-winded way of saying there isn't a simple checklist you can go down to identify a game's genre assumptions. But then, I warned you way up in the opening sentence that this would be the case – I hope I've at least given you a place to start!
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magpieandpossum · 10 months ago
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I'm already about 110% in love with these rough draft character sprites....
these are all unshaded, and will probably be continued to be edited, but I just wanted to share to get feedback! both garak and quark have alternate outfits as well ^^
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blacktabbygames · 2 months ago
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Scarlet Hollow UI Redesign Work In Progress
HELLO! As some of you may know we've been hard at work on a large overhaul patch for the first four episodes of Scarlet Hollow to bring the game closer to our ever-higher standards. While there are a lot of content changes and additions coming with the update, here's spoiler-free look at how the UI side of it is coming along. New UI on top, old UI on bottom. First, and most importantly is the updated textbox. We've been adding a lot of detail to small UI elements, and this is no exception — there are more leaves, and those leaves have some color in them now, which we feel makes the in-game art feel a lot richer. On the usability side, you'll notice that this new box is both taller, meaning that we can fit more options before you need to scroll, and that the scrollbar is located further to the right, meaning options can be longer before flowing onto the next line. (Again, meaning there will be less scrolling.) We've also moved the quick menu into the textbox so it no longer overlaps with any background art.
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Next up, we've got the main menu. Not a ton to say here. Logo is smaller and has some color so it feels less stark. The font choice is tighter, and we added a border where the text options start to improve the feel of things. In general we're trying to make options that make the interface feel warmer, more organic, and less sterile.
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Next we've got the in-game menu. Again, framing things with organic shapes to provide better flow and separation. We've also added a wooden "frame" around each save game thumbnail give them a more natural feeling.
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Similar notes for the new confirmation screen. We're probably going to increase the opacity a little bit. At the moment is a little too transparent.
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The journal has new assets, and instead of a generic cross-hatched background, we add a semi-transparent black layer so you can still see the game world behind it.
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And speaking of generic cross-hatching, we've also removed it from character creation, instead replacing it with backgrounds from inside the game. Overall this should feel a lot more welcoming.
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These backgrounds change with each new slide, too. Here's how trait selection works.
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Anyways that's it for now! Happy new year :)
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mysticdragon3md3 · 11 months ago
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fort-of-novelty · 4 months ago
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I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.
Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.
Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.
Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.
And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.
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regal-bones · 9 months ago
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White clouds, the wind whistles in the air. Somewhere in this world, someone small is just waking up… Last Sprout: A Seedling of Hope - first look trailer! 🌱 A roguelite adventure, grow plants, master powerful weapons, and fight the swarm of robot enemies that thirst for your blood 🩸
Follow this tag to learn more about Last Sprout 🌱
You can support me on Patreon for £1 and see concept art, assets, and snippets of story for the game!
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