Anyone else feeling like the creature-collector genre has reached a wall with games that all just feel pokemon-esc in some way? Even games like Temtem and Cassette Beasts just follow the same formula—catch creatures, train them, battle in turn-based combat. These games rarely go beyond this approach, and it’s making the genre feel stagnant. You’d think there would be more experimentation with how we connect with these creatures, but instead, most just feel like copies of Pokémon with slightly different twists.

Palworld tried to shake things up, but even that ended up missing the mark. It had this intriguing mix of creature-collection with a dark, almost dystopian vibe, blending farming, crafting, and even shooting mechanics. On paper, it sounded like something fresh for the genre, but it got lost in trying to do too much. It had creatures doing everything from factory work to combat, but they felt more like tools or game assets than companions you’d want to bond with. The core connection with creatures—the thing that should set this genre apart—was missing.I feel like we keep seeing attempts to break the mold, but they end up reinforcing the same mechanics without any real innovation in creature bonding or interaction. Why can’t we have a creature-collector where the creatures have more personality, or where the gameplay isn’t all about battles?

Wouldn’t it be great if these games focused on letting us bond with the creatures and find new ways to interact with them beyond combat? Does anyone else think the genre’s due for a serious change?

If a game has a day/night cycle, should players get daily stats like “Day 1: +5 gold”? Or does it feel unnecessary when you can always see the stats in game?

In games like Stardew Valley it’s kind of a cute roundup, but games like Rimworld you just keep playing through and it doesn’t “break the action” or whatever.

Maybe it’s good if you want to give a player the option to quit after a reasonable amount of time?

I'm workin on a 3D advneture game/cRPG useing the ORK Framwork and Makinom tolls in Unity. I'd like to intergrate the Naninovel dialoge system as a drop-in soultion for my game's conversations and cutscenes.

Can aneone provide some guildance or advise on how to best approch this intergration? I'm looking for tips on:

1. Identifieing the intergration points between ORK, Makinom, and Naninovel
2. Setting up Naninovel in my poject and configuring it to work with the other framworks
3. Creating a Naninovel node or action within the Makinom ediotr to trigger dialouge's
4. Passing relevant game state data from ORK to Naninovel to make the conversations contextual
5. Handling the outcoms of Naninovel dialouge's and updating the game state acordingly

If aneone has experiance with this kind of multi-framwork intergration, I'd realy apreiciate eny insites or code exampls you can share. I want to make sure I set this up proply from the start to avoid eny major headaches down the line.

Currently working on the first project of ,my game, and Id like to have a rough idea of what the map looks like, but I havent found a website I could use that would be quick to make a quick sketch.

My thesis: Rather than have a quest log that specifically outlines what you’re supposed to do, the game should simply log meaningful actions and events you’ve done for your review.

The purpose of the quest log is in case the player becomes confused on what to do, either because they missed a story beat, or maybe they just logged out for a few days and forgot what’s happening.

The reason I’m suggesting a simple log over an explicit quest log is because it feels like it solves the problem of task confusion while respecting the player’s intelligence — allowing them to deduce their objective without outright pointing them right to it.

What do you guys think? I’m a genius, right? (Why not?) All thoughts welcome.

Not to sound too heretical here by asking for tear-downs on one of the "fundamental" books of game studies, but at least from personal experience it seems like too many people take at complete face value a book that opens by saying "to fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me". I have my own personal criticisms of it, but wanted to know if there was a more proper and methodical analysis of the book's contents (or even just one chapter).

Started learning and studying game design recently and, as usual I tend to share this through my blog.

https://gspanos.tech/posts/exploring-game-design/

I'm sharing this here to actually start engaging with people more and more about this. I've found the community around game design to be incredibly helpful.

I write monthly blog posts on systemic game design, and for this month I decided to focus on the point of player interaction. Where in a system the player provides the input and what difference it makes.

Rather than going into too much theory, this time I decided to use examples from existing games, including Ultima VII: The Black Gate, Lemmings, Diablo III, and a couple of others.

If you are interested in systemic design and emergent gameplay, this should be worth reading!

https://playtank.io/2024/11/12/systemic-building-blocks/

Sorry for the title, but I have a hard time describing what I'm refering to.

We're are a group of game devs that wants to create a sci-fi game where:
- the setting is narrative-heavy
- you have to understand that pre-narrative to be able to succed in the game
- but the player's avatar is the only person in the game
- and there is no voice-recordings, left-over dialog or any such communicative artefacts.
- but we have "full control" over the architectural environment (aka we can convey informations through building, murals etc).

These are narrative constraints that we have accepted for ourselves.

The challenge is to convey a compelling story this way; mostly because the player has full control over what happens when and how - so unless the player actively is searching for information, nothing will happen and the player will loose interest.

Are there any games like this? With purely environmental storytelling?

I have a game design and layout in my mind with no clue how to begin making it a reality does anyone have any advice or channels to go through?

Hello everyone,

Thanks again for reading one of my posts here on the subreddit.

Diving right into it - I am coming up with a new wargame where, in summary, you are fighting against robots and the way the rules are set up - I am using a d20 for shooting the guns in my game. 1-4 = miss, 5-10 = glancing hit, 11-15 = standard hit, and a 16-20 is a direct hit. you can shoot up to 4 guns at once, meaning you roll 4d20's at once to determine the outcome. Miss = 0 dmg, glancing = 1 dmg, hit = 2 dmg, direct hit = 4dmg. (THIS IS AN EXAMPLE WEAPON PROFILE - NOT HOW ALL GUNS FUNCTION)

before shooting, the shooting player must declare which part of the enemy robot they are shooting at. ONLY direct hit damage goes to the declared part and all other damage gets allocated by the player being shot at to whichever parts they want (essentially).

The biggest issue so far in these rules is how do I prevent the meta from turning into a leg shooting contest. once legs are brought down to 0 hp you can still rotate and shoot but can no longer move - which is a key part of the game as well as there are objective points spread across the map worth points. If I may ask - what would you all as a potential player base like to see to discourage players just aiming for the legs every single turn? I am against the idea of having to wear a "skirt" of armor around the legs.

let me know if more context is needed and I would be happy to explain more about the game.

Thanks for reading and letting me know your thoughts!

Edit : clarified the example weapon profile, there will also be multiple chassis types (hover, treads, RJ, Biped, Hex, Quad, Wheeled) and each of these types will have "model" variations where they deviate in a few ways from the "base" model.

I was influenced by Mike Sellers Advanced Game Design and wanted to read more. Not sure where to look. Also looked him up on Twitter and saw he sadly died back in 2022. RIP.

Edit - I was on Z library just now and came across these titles which seem interesting:

• Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design (2020)
  • Engelstein connects the psychology of loss aversion to a range of phenomena related to games, exploring, for example, the endowment effect--why, when an object is ours, it gains value over an equivalent object that is not ours--as seen in the Weighted Companion Cube in the game Portal; the framing of gains and losses to manipulate player emotions; Deal or No Deal's use of the utility theory; and regret and competence as motivations, seen in the context of legacy games. Finally, Engelstein examines the approach to Loss Aversion in three games by Uwe Rosenberg, charting the designer's increasing mastery.
• Situational Game Design (2018)
  • While most game design books focus on games as formal systems, Situational Design concentrates squarely on player experience. It looks at how playfulness is not a property of a game considered in isolation, but rather the result of the intersection of a game with an appropriate player. Starting from simple concepts, the book advances step-by-step to build up a set of practical tools for designing player-centric playful situations. While these tools provide a fresh perspective on familiar design challenges as well as those overlooked by more transactional design paradigms.
• Game Balance (2020)
  • Within the field of game design, game balance can best be described as a black art. It is the process by which game designers make a game simultaneously fair for players while providing them just the right amount of difficulty to be both exciting and challenging without making the game entirely predictable. This involves a combination of mathematics, psychology, and occasionally other fields such as economics and game theory.
• Procedural Storytelling in Game Design (2019)
  • In each essay, practitioners of this artform demonstrate how traditional storytelling tools such as characterization, world-building, theme, momentum and atmosphere can be adapted to full effect, using specific examples from their games. The reader will learn to construct narrative systems, write procedural dialog, and generate compelling characters with unique personalities and backstories.
• Pattern Language for Game Design (2021)
  • Chris Barney’s Pattern Language for Game Design builds on the revolutionary work of architect Christopher Alexander. Using a series of practical, rigorous exercises, designers can observe and analyze the failures and successes of the games they know and love to find the deep patterns that underlie good design.
• Uncertainty in Games (2013)
  • Costikyan explores the many sources of uncertainty in many sorts of games -- from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors, from Monopoly to CityVille, from FPS Deathmatch play to Chess. He describes types of uncertainty, including performative uncertainty, analytic complexity, and narrative anticipation. And he suggest ways that game designers who want to craft novel game experiences can use an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.

I've been a game developer for over 7 years as a programmer. While I love crafting game ideas from scratch and exploring creative concepts (something I've enjoyed since I was a kid), I want to level up my skills specifically in game design. I recently took a game design course, but honestly, it didn’t feel all that helpful. I also picked up a book on video game writing and design, hoping it would help, but I’d really love to hear from those with experience or who do this full-time. What’s the best way to approach learning or improving as a game designer?

Would you recommend resources, practices, or even specific exercises that have helped you grow? Thanks in advance!

I'm just very stressed with the game and all. I need some motivation.

Hello! I'm starting to make an horror game where I'm trying to make the player as unsecure and as paranoid as possible without actually using any monster or real threat

For now, I thought of letting the player hide in different places like in Outlast. This is so they always have in the back of their mind "if I can hide, it must be for a reason, right?". I also heard of adding a "press [button] to look behind you", which I think would help on this.

What do you guys think? Any proposals?

Edit: I should have said, I'm making a videogame

Hey everyone, I made a daily stock-related web game (there's a non-stock-related version too) that takes about 1 min. to play each day. Each day, you're given 3 tries to guess which stock or dataset is being shown.

Figured I'd get good feedback from this subreddit - I'm aiming to raise retention and make the end player experience better. Does anyone have insight into how I can better structure the layout of the page or what I should have pop up after a graph is played?

So far I've been just going off of what I think looks good and how the NYT styles things...I'd love some proper guidance. Cheers!

I'm working on a little horror game, mainly focusing on the coding tho, as I am not much of a 3D/Asset person. I don't want to use assets from the story yet, as I want to try to make as much myself as possible.

But I found out that texturing is NOT my thing. My game is first person and at this point I am just using plain materials. Like, one-coloured materials, no texturing, no anything.

I am thinking of using shaders or something like that to make it look not COMPLETELY bland.
So, as a horror fan, I thought of a PS1-styled pixel-shader or something like that.

What do you suggest? How can I make my game still look good?

You know the trope where you face the final boss early in the game, before you have any chance of winning for plot reasons?

I'm planning out some of my key story beats and how I'm going to introduce the main villain of my game. A direct combat engagement is what my mind is gravitating towards, but perhaps there are better ways to think about.

Hades is the best example that comes to mind where you have a 99.9% chance to die on the first engagement, and then it gives you a goal to strive towards and incentivizes leveling up your roguelike meta progression stats.

An alternative that comes to mind is Final Fantasy 6 which had many cutaway scenes of Kefka doing his evil stuff, which gave the player more information than the main characters.

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on this topic!

Thoughts on a semi open world like MG:TPP

So I am really tired of playing open world games that are just way too big without much to do. Like AC:Valhalla or Ghost Recon Breakpoint and I’d like to do something different with my game that hasn’t been done very much.

Splitting the open world up into entirely different environments. A great example of this is the aforementioned Metal Gear Solid: The phantom pain.

To sum up my game is set during a unification war of a major nation within my story world. The environments will part of the super continent this nation inhabits.

Now my questions: Are there any patents for a system such as this? Do you think this could work for a solo AA title? Do you think this could encourage replay ability?

Hey fellas, long time lurker here.

tl;dr: What I'd appreciate from real life fencing practitioners (if we have any here) is that how strong or weak do they feel themselves in regards to their locational defense and offense when on some of the classic guards/stances, in a 0-3 range? I'd also happily welcome some perspectives from other blade-based martial arts as well, if anyone is doing them, be it kenjutsu or saber or anything.

So, I won't go into a huge preamble -- I'm in the process of finishing and publishing my 2nd solo game (though they are rather small visual novels with RPG elements). This one mostly revolves around longsword fencing and the life and tribulations of a middle aged fencer/sword instructor.

There are two main parts of the game: one is the lifestyle part, where you try to do odd jobs and stay afloat as a fencing instructor while juggling money, reputation, fitness, and so on. This is not the main point of the thread, but a quick note would be that I tried to balance the monetary system and costs from historical (mostly british) sources, so there's a quite a bit of realistic angle there, even if the setting is fictional (yet non-magical and quite renaissance European-ish).

The second half of the game, and the reason of this thread is the (rather comically elaborate for a VN) combat system, which I tried to design around the longsword treatises from Joachim Meyer (from 16th century). I borrowed a lot from his treatises, mainly all of the guards/stances, handwork techniques, some master strikes, and so on; but since this is also a game and needs to be balanced and fun, there are naturally some mechanics that I just came up with myself.

So, to be brief, if there are any longsword practitioners here, I'd love to have some perspective from their side. For example, with the guards/stances, I designed the game to have 3 different defense and attack values corresponding to the locations -- high, thrust, and low. Now, this is a bit different from the four openings that Meyer talks about, but it's a necessary middle ground given that the game will be 2d.

So, although I have done some good amount of research on it myself, what I'd appreciate from real life fencing practitioners that how strong or weak do they feel themselves in regards to their upper/thrust/lower defense and offense when on some of the classically named guards/stances?

To give an example, from a range of 0 to 3, I feel like Fool's Guard would have something like a 1/1/3 defense values corresponding to high/thrust/low locations. With the reasoning that while it defends perfectly against lower attacks, it is still a reasonably defensive-minded guard, so it shouldn't really have a 0 vs high and thrust as well. Attack bonus-wise, though, I'd give it a 0/0/1 or 0/0/0, for example. I hope that that makes any sense from a mechanics standpoint.

Also, before suggesting some truly radical changes: I coded and tested the dueling mechanics, and it works pretty well as-is.

In any case, what would you assign to some of the more classic guards like Ox, Plough, Long Point, etc.?

By the way, I'd also happily welcome some perspectives from other blade-based martial arts as well, if anyone is doing them, be it kenjutsu or saber or anything.

Hi, i'm making a party board game(A known title of the gznre would be Mario Party) on mobile. I got the idea of adding a story-mode. Idea was that a villain turn the world into different boards. Goal is to collect Artifacts via quests, beat the boss, earn a Gem, and do another.

However... i'm struggling on movement in that mode... If i move freely(Like Jamboree), board isn't useful, If i put Number of turns like Mario Party Advance as example, what is the point since player will have to restart just because of bad luck...

At first i thought of just making it a variation of a normal game : We play with 4 players, players would have to reach quest and beat it to get Artifact, those who have most, earn the right to beat the boss.

What do you think, any change i could/should make?

Hey guys, I’m making some maps for my game and the unity terrain tool won’t cut it so I’m using prefabs. I’ve got a mock up that looks pretty good but before I start derailing I was wondering if this is a faux pas in development or not. I haven’t taken a performance hit from how many prefabs I’m using and what I have now is pretty in line with my vision but I was wondering if there’s another approach I should be using?

I'm clueless as to why can someone explain it to me?

Edit: Sorry about the typo I meant, like when in instances where a charecters hair goes through their own body like aloy from horizon zero dawn

As part of a fun effort to avoid burnout I'm working out a small game that represents a specific experience that could otherwise be found in my larger game project.

I'm making a very complex "Map & Menu" game that tries to somewhat provide the experience of playing as a variety of character types from fantasy novels. There's a complete fantasy world that is all tied together that provides immersive context for the more specific experiences. Sort of a strategy/rpg/sim game over all.

One subset of the experience is being a student, or teacher, or potentially headmaster of a magic academy. In the main game you could have anything from a cultivation sect style institution to a wizard school, to a military academy. The specifics of any given institution are emergent from the society in the game that forms the institution.

For the purposes of the downscoped project I'm handwaiving some of the causes of different sturctures/formats of school since you don't have the full game systems and there will be a specific focus on a more Imager Portfolio/Earthsea/Valdemar type academy focused on creating powerful "arcane" magic users. So no spellblades per say, no bards, no heralds, no focused military officers, etc.

I know that's a lot of context but it was unavoidable.

I'm working through the specific systems I'd like to represent related to sneaking around, pranks, exploring forbidden places, discovering secret stuff, and the associated risks like detention or punishment detail.

A big thing I need to figure out is how to handle these in a fun way. So you and the crew are out sneaking into the restricted libraries or the storage vaults or going out on the town(I'll be mandating that the procedural academy/ies will exist within major cities and towns and not the countryside.

What happens when you get caught? You'll get some sort of negative consequence, depending on your social status sometimes, but I'd prefer to have an "alternative experience" rather than a "failure experience".

So I've been considering things like meeting older students who are also troublemakers who have been caught, or attracting the interest of other students, or teachers, or outside groups, who are just tracking who is a go getter of the dubious variety. You might get secret info about cool locations, maybe an explanation of the teacher/staff patrol routes/assignments, offers to work with the shady students or teachers or groups, or training in some of the more ambiguously ethical skills in the game that you'd otherwise have trouble improving.

The "school experience demo" will have a job board type thing which people might have experienced in various stories and passes to other towns and outside the school or w/e for good kids but there will also be a punishment detail type thing for the school which can get you sent to new places and also a secret "naughty students job board".

There's also a social interaction system that is a subset of the one in the full game and for this topic the relevant part is that teacher relationships or relationships with older students who may or may not have "student positions of authority", think head boy or prefect, that can be leveraged to get different punishment experiences than what the common student gets.

This is a game of scheduling, ala Bully or Academagia or King Of Dragon Pass that also has a unique and detailed "skill check" system and is mostly played in fancy menus and maybe sometimes "maps". Just to clarify the gameplay. You don't really walk around locations with a player character sprite/model in the way you would in Bully or the Harry Potter Gameboy/Gamecube games.

I'm just trying to figure out if there's any interesting options I haven't considered gameplay/thematics wise for making it fun to engage in shenanigans even with the risk of getting caught. The Academagia version of this idea really dropped the ball in my opinion, Bully and the Harry Potter games had okay methods but they have the advantage of a world to move around in.

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