Character progression through leveling, skills or items? I'm working on a design for an RPG game, and I'm having some doubts about the skill and level system. I'm going for a more casual, explorative gaming experience and so thought about lowering the game complexity by simplifying character progression. But I'm having trouble deciding between the following Progression through leveling, no complex skill progression, leveling increases base stats. Progression through skills, no leveling or base stat changes, skills progress through usage. Progression through items, more focus on stat changing items, items confer skills, no leveling. However, I'm uncertain what the effects on gameplay might be in the end. So, my question is this What would be the effects of choosing one of the above alternatives over the others? (Particularly with regards to the style and feel of the gameplay) My take on it is that the first sacrifices more frequent rewards and customization in favor of a simpler gameplay the second sacrifices explicit customization and player control in favor of more frequent rewards and a somewhat simpler gameplay while the third sacrifices inventory simplicity and a player metric in favor of player control, customization and progression simplicity. Addendum I'm not really limiting myself to the above three, they are just the ones I liked most and am primarily interested in.


Where to find designers for independent projects? Let's say I'm a programmer, I know some artists, we've got a game engine and fun prototype done, and we're ready to enter the indie equivalent of "production". But the game is full of "programmer design" (and or "artist design"). We've got a core design concept, but average level design, average AI patterns, average writing, poor balance here and there. Other questions have covered how to help independent developers find programmers and artists. Where can independent artists and programmers find designers? People who can refine and extend the design elements of the game until they really stand out.


My game engine is done, how can I get ideas of a game to make with it? I read at many places how people have this GREAT ideas but are not able to program themselves. I have quite the opposite problem. I have developed game engine, level editor, embedded Lua scripting language, I have even made wrapper for Android and it all works well. But I have no good idea about how to proceed with actual levels I have no good ideas. The engine itself is very generic and can be used in many game concepts, but I just cannot think of anything useful. Do you have any thoughts on how to proceed? Where should I seek ideas? Who should I ask? I am sorry if this question is a duplicate. EDIT Thank you all for your responses. I see now in FAQ that indeed my question was misplaced. I just saw this thread and people were advising that ideas are worthless and execution is what counts. So I wondered where all the "worthless" ideas are, because I cannot seem to find any when I need it. Yes, the engine was targeted at one particular game, but I always envisioned it like "based on game X with additional features". So I added additional features but now I don't know how to use them in a funny and entertaining way. I could still finish the original game X, but it would only be unoriginal copy of the game X, which is just pointless. Anyway, thanks again for your responses, wish you happy coding.


How do I get rights to an game? I' looking to get rights to an game called Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS. I am a Nintendo 3DS Developer trying to make a remastered version for the Nintendo 3DS. How would I go about getting the rights for the game. Do I get the rights from Rockstar, Nintendo, or another party. I'm not sure.


Continuous running vs timed tasks? I've started making a browser based game, as a hobby, where users log in via a website and can manage a soccer team. I need to have some sort of process running to handle player development, running matches, age players, generally progressing time.. I've never done anything like this before and therefore I'm putting this out there to get some feedback from other people. So, my idea was that I could have a continuously running application which can handle all the "off line" processing. But, that got me thinking that another approach could be to have, f.ex. a "PlayerTrainingTask" running daily, a "RunMatchesTask", running on a fixture based schedule, et.c. Which approach is most appropriate? or is there another option I haven't thought of? What are your thoughts?


Is it worth having AI opponents step in for disconnected players in an online multiplayer card game I have an online multiplayer card game resembling spades bridge and I want to implement a system that autoplays when a client disconnects. Right now, there is a client and server. In the new system, there will be an autoplay server sitting between the client and the actual game server. The client connects to the autoplay server which in turn connects to the game server. If the client disconnects during a match, the autoplay server is activated. Both servers will reside on the same machine so communication cost should be minimal. Processing cost should be minimal as well as the autoplay will be programmed with limited skills only to keep the match going till the end. The idea is not to break the game flow once a player disconnects. But, I don't see autoplay systems in popular commercial games such as Zynga poker (maybe in this case because a disconnection can be easily be considered as a Check or Fold.) Well, is it really worth it to have an extra layer for autoplay? Edit Are there other drawbacks for having an extra layer for autoplay?


Is my understanding of designing games in layers correct? I have started explaining how a game is designed in layers to a friend of mine. I want to make sure that I explained things, correctly, so I wanted to verify my thoughts. Basically, the way I understand it, games are designed with the following layers, in the following order Rendering Engine Physics Engine Game Engine Scripted Game Is this correct? Am I explaining this right?


Methods for character design When one begins the character design process, what are good starting points? Are there well known methodologies or systems to help in this process? How does the design process work in game industry, and are there big differences between the approaches different game producers use?


Realistically, how long would it take for 1 person to create a 2D isometric RPG? Something I have been looking into for a while is developing my own PC game. I'm very into CRPGs like Fallout 1 and 2, UnderRail, Wasteland 2, etc. I have long desired to create my own game like this, with an emphasis on plot. While I don't have any experience in development, I use several (mostly proprietary) programming languages in my job, and have a natural aptitude for learning syntax etc. I have taken a few tutorials in Unity and Godot but generally I prefer to feel my way through software myself (tutorials rarely give you enough 'why and how') or reverse engineer an existing product. I plan for the game to be quite minimal on the asset front, at least to begin with. I've done some basic 3d modelling and mapping (a long time ago, in Source engine I built my school!) My question is, if I decide to dedicate the time to this, how long does it generally take for one person to create a game like UnderRail or Darklands? I'd like to know if it's a doable project or a laughable pipe dream for an inexperienced one man enthusiast!


How do videogames store information offscreen? I'm trying to make a videogame from scratch, but I'm really new to this and keep running into basic issues. Most importantly, how do videogames store offscreen information? What I mean is, how does the program know what to display next onto the screen? Or even, if the player changes the environment, how does this change remain for the next time it loads onto the screen? For example, in New Super Mario Bros, if you hit a ? block and then go off screen, and come back, it still remains hit. How is this information kept and then executed the next time the player loads the block? Why doesn't it just reset?


You've killed the enemy you needed to get across. Now you have to die and retry? I am designing enemies for a platformer, and want to have enemies which the player utilises to get through levels. I like the idea of jumping on enemies to platform across gaps, but it's problematic if they die. It feels really bad to put the player in an unwinnable state, having killed their means to platform across a level. It just feels messed up to be like, 'You've killed the enemy you needed to get across. Now you have to die and retry'. What are some ways of fixing that problematic game state?


Point system that is not competitive or has a clear goal I'm making a game in which the goal is to reach as much entries as possible and I want the player to see that he is making progress somehow. However the game shouldn't be of competitive nature (it co operative), so I feel that points might not be the right measure. I thought instead of a progress bar, so you work towards a goal of entries. However the problem with this is that there isn't a specific number of entries the user should aim for The more, the better. Is there a way of showing progress without assuming there is an end and without it getting competitive?


Kickstarter "last minute cold feet" today I scheduled the publication of a video on Kickstarter requesting approximately 5,000 in order to complete the iPhone shooter game I started 1 year ago after quitting my job. I invested more than 20,000 in the game so far (for artwork, music, legal and accountant expenses) and I am now getting cold feet about my decision of publishing the video. The game is "nearly finished", in other words the game mechanics are working but I still have some bugs to fix. Once I will have finished this (I hope will take me 1 or 2 weeks) I plan to start working on the actual level balancing (e.g. deciding the order of appearance of enemies for each level and balancing the number of hitpoints and strength of bullets that the enemies have). Reasons for not publishing the video are fear that the concept can be copied easily the game is a shooter game set in a different environment (its a pretty cool one, believe me )) and I am worried that someone might copy the idea (I know, its the usual "I am worried story.."). A shooter game is one of the easiest game to implement and hence there will be hundreds game developer able to copy it by just adapting their existing code and changing graphics (not as straightforward). It took me one year to develop this because I was inexperienced plus there are approximately 6 7 months of work from the illustrator and there are 8 unique music tracks composed. The soundtrack of the video is the soundtrack of the game which is not yet published and has not been deposited to a music society. I did create legally valid time stamps for the tracks and I am considering uploading the album on iTunes before publishing the video so I can have a certain publication date. But overall I am a bit scared and worried because I have never done this before and even the simple act of publishing an album requires me to read a long contract from the "aggregator company") which, even if I do have contracts with the musicians do worry me as I am not a U.S. resident and I am not familiar with the U.S. law system Reasons for publishing the video are I almost run out of money (but this is not a real reason as I should have enough for one more month of development time) ...I kind of need extra money as, even if I do have money for 1 month of development I do not have money for marketing and for other expenses (e.g. accountant) It will create a fan base I could get some useful feedback from a wider range of beta testers It might create some pre release buzz in case some blogger or game magazine likes the concept Anyone has had similar experiences? Is there a real risk that someone will copy the concept and implement it in a couple of months? Will the Kickstarter campaign be a good pre release exposure for the game? Any references of similar projects situations? Is it realistic that someone like ROVIO will copy the idea straight away?


what is the best way to eliminate grinding in games? This is a very persistent question in game design, especially in games where you need to hold retain players like MMO or social games. (On a side note grinding can easily calculated so its easy tool for engagement and timed progression). The question other than community building competition are there solutions that can replace grinding and still hold your audience for certain period of time (without adding large amounts of game assets and code)?


Pleasing isometric hexagons What angles and long side short side ratios give the most aesthetically pleasing and graphically regular isometric (squashed and flat side up) hexes, that additionally resolve to whole pixel sizes for several sizes when rendered?


Establishing if a tile is available to move into I'm working on a grid based game as a hobby project. Think of an ANSI game like ZZT. The grid is represented by a two dimensional array of objects which contain both the UI element which takes care of displaying the sprite image and also the data accompanying whatever is in that position on the grid. I'm having trouble working out the mechanics of elements on the game grid determining whether they are able to move into a neighbouring cell. Determining whether there is something in any given grid position is straightforward, as each instance of the class representing a cell on the grid has a property representing the sprite in occupation of the cell. Checking if this property is nil works fine in establishing if something static is there, but it becomes problematic if there are many objects moving from one grid position to another. The problems I'm having are Objects in grid cells will attempt to push objects out of their destination cell this is intended behaviour, so that the player or NPCs can move objects around. The object which is pushed will check if it is capable of moving in that direction, and if the cell into which it is being asked to move already contains another object. If it does, it will attempt to push that object, and so on and so on until an object either agrees to be pushed (into an empty spot), or refuses (because there is nowhere for it to move or because it cannot move in that direction). The return values for the attempt to push will then cascade back up to the originating object and the sprites all move (or not). This causes a problem, however, if there are several sprites moving in a straight line in the same direction. Rather than all moving forwards together (which they should), the last object in the line thinks that the next cell is occupied so tries to push the object in that cell, which is unnecessary, because that object will be moving anyway. This causes the objects to spread out with gaps between them, which is abnormal. Due to this, I considered having the objects check if the destination cell is occupied, and if so, check if the object in that cell will be moving out, and if anything else will be moving in. However, I'm concerned this could result in a condition where several objects may refuse to move because of each other's presence. I have considered looking at source code for a similar game, but I don't want to copy another implementation, rather I'm looking for guidance on how I can solve the problem. Thanks in advance!


How do I design very difficult games? I would like to design games with very high difficulty levels. I have read these questions How is game difficulty tested balanced? What is an optimum failure rate that will keep people coming back to my game? Yet they focus on general game design and balance, and not on the particular topic of increasingly adding to the difficulty of a game. I understand that difficulty is different for every game, so I would like to know if there are any general guidelines I could follow to avoid falling into common problems that there may be while designing games and levels on the hard side of the difficulty line, regardless of the genre of the game. Some sub questions that come to mind are How to ensure 'beatability' while designing insanely hard parts of game? How to know it is possible to actually beat my game? For instance, when designing a platformer, I could make a really hard sequence of jumping and dodging. Now, as developer, I know precisely how far the player character can jump, how fast projectiles are moving etc, but how can I ensure that the designed level is actually beatable? I know that the most obvious answer is to try and play it, but then, the game would be only as hard as how good at playing it the developer is. Does anybody with actual experience making hard games know of any tricks or guidelines I can use to successfully create a difficult game?


How to create characters randomly with a given skill and weighted abilites I am trying to create random characters in my game. Each character has 33 abilities and one of 6 jobs. For each job you need to skill increase other abilities. I am calculating an overall skill (from 1 to 99) by using only the important abilities for this job. For example one of the jobs is a healer. Here you need to skill ability1 to ability6, which have also different weights. Example Healer Ability1 has weight 10 (skill 70) Ability2 has weight 5 (skill 60) Ability3 has weight 4 (skill 50) Ability4 has weight 10 (skill 80) Ability5 has weight 5 (skill 40) Ability6 has weight 8 (skill 50) Example calculation (70 10) (60 5) (50 4) (80 10) (40 5) (50 8) 2600 (10 5 4 10 5 8) 62 Problem I want to create random characters with random skills WITH a specific overall skill in HIS job. Example CreateHealer(skill 70). It doesn t matter which values all the other abilities have. For example if ability7 is 1 or 99 the overall skill of the healer is always 70, but I want them to be random because the user has the opportunity to change the job, if he can see that this char would be a better warrior. My idea Create all 33 abilities randomly and calculate the overall skill in this job. If skill is on the right level stop. If skill is too low increase one of the weighted abilities and calculate again. If skill is too high decrease one of the weighted abilities and calculate again. Is there a better way algorithm to do this?


Skill vs. Luck, the ratio and its measurement Gamer buddies, is there a term to describe the level of variance in a game, in comparison to luck. The card game war would have 0 skill and 1.0 luck because the player cannot affect the game. I can't think of something that has 1.0 skill. At first I thought Spelling Bee, but the words chosen for each contestant is randomly chosen suggesting some luck involved... What ratios do different games have, and how can those ratios be accurately measured? What metrics could be used to accurately measure such a ratio? I'd also like to hear of any 1.0 skill games if anyone can think of one. To reiterate the question clearly does there exist such a measurement and if so what is it? Furthermore is there a term for the target of this measurement, so we can have a discussion using a noun. EDIT the term luck is used to describe the level of effect that chance, i.e. random events, have in affecting who the winner is. I appreciate everyone's responses.


How can I prepare the different difficulty levels for my game? I've though about creating the game for the easiest difficulty level, and from there scale up and create the other, more difficult difficulty levels, but I'm not sure it's the fastest way to go. How should I create the different difficulty levels for my game?


What are the advantages and disadvantages to using a game engine? How do I know whether or not to use a game engine? I want to make a relatively complex 2D game for Android. What factors should I weigh to decide whether to find, install and learn a game engine or just do everything manually?


How to calculate players engagement? What metrics could be used to know what certain people think about the game and how much they liked it? I would prefer parameters that don't need players to rate by themselves. Would hours of playing in a single seat be a good parameter about how much players wanted to spend time on game?


Is "forcing the user" to accept the terms an acceptable design in a smartphone iPhone game? I am about to release my first iPhone game, has been a long project and I involved several people. My lawyer strongly recommended me to add a "terms and conditions" page at the beginning of the app and to allow the user to continue to the game only if he presses "I agree". In the iTunes game description I will include a link to the EULA and a warning saying "DISCLAIMER The game will ask you to agree to the following EULA HTTPLINK EULA.". My main reason for adding this is that I got the license to use the name from relatively famous people and I need to put the terms and conditions in order to protect both my company and my licensee. Some developers suggested me to avoid this strongly as I will lose user base. From my perspective I think that including terms and conditions is a fair thing to do and non smartphones users are used to accept EULAs. It is true that on smartphones you rarely see this and can this really affect my game? Would you argue against my design choice to allow the user to play only if he accepts the EULA? Are there among you any smartphone game developers that have had similar concerns and have asked their users to accept the EULA?


Art style setting gameplay I'm looking for resources describing art style setting gameplay relationship (from game design perspective). For example, Fallout's colour palette most often is the dark one, models realistic and not cartoonish. Setting post nuclear holocaust. Auditory mature players. I could also take a different example like Borderlands. Art style is cartoonish, comic but not childish. Setting vault raiding monster killing on an alien planet. Auditory mature players, but still appealing to teenagers (I suppose 13 and up). Pixar and Nintendo games tend to be both cartoonish and childish. Setting simple or movie based. Auditory definitely kids, yet can be entertaining for adults for a limited time. GTA cartoonish, comic and somehow childish (especially the first one), yet auditory is definitely mature. Setting working for crime syndicate free roaming. Let's say I create and epic fantasy game (setting). How should I choose most appropriate art style for my game? Are there any canons in art style like there are canons in literature (western, eastern, etc...) How does art style alone suggest what kind of gameplay one should expect? One can release concept art, but setting is generally kept secret so that player could uncover it while playing.


How to make players be creative in a game, if the game cannot evaluate it? I am working on a prototype game with several funny visual effects that the player can trigger. The player can be quite creative in the way to use or combine these effects but it seems impossible to make detect evaluate this creativity by the computer. So, from a game design perspective, I wonder what could be the features to drive the players to be creative (experiment various combinations). For the moment i think about "Draw something" where the result is evaluated by other players. I think about levels designed by "Little Big Planet" players but this aspect is out of the core game. I think also about "Minecraft" but I do not understand really how this game encourages the people to be creative (except of the open world). Please tell me if you have any ideas, articles or references that could help me coping with this problem.


Time based movement Vs Frame rate based movement? I'm new to Game programmming and SDL, and I have been following Lazyfoo's SDL tutorials. My question is related to time based motion and frame rate based motion, basically which is better or appropriate depending on situations?. Could you give me an example where each of these methods are used?. Another question I have is that, in lazyfoo's two Motion tutorials (FPS based and time based) The time based method showed a much smoother animation while the Frame rate based one was a little hiccupy, meaning you could clearly see the gap between the previous location of the dot and its current position when you compare the two programs. As beginner which method should I stick to?(all I want is smooth animations).


Starting off in game development Recently I acquired a myriad of free time and have decided that I want to learn how to program. My question is what language should a newbie start off in? I understand that each language has its own pros and cons, but were could someone who is interested in making games start off?


How to compare different states of my game? (rpg) I'm working on a rpg, the battle system. I want to compare different scenario with each other. For example, what if I play move A then move B ? or two times move A ? or ...? I'm using a tree structure to generate all possible scenario that can happen during the battle. There is no movement involved, I'm using a battle system as in FF7, only skill choice matters. 4vs4 units Trick is, the battle is turn based but not static. There is an Action Point bar for each unit (filling at different speed based on the unit's stats) and the unit with the most Ap (only if 100) can play. If no unit is 100, a "turn" will happend and all unit will gain some AP based on their speed. If no unit can play, a new turn will happen...until a unit is 100 ap. Each skills takes a different amount a AP to use. At turns 0 for example, we may have a unit with 140 AP that will play two times in a row for 2 actions of 20 AP each. Then other units at 100 AP may play. It means that when I'm running a simulation of all possible outcome of a battle for my AI, I will have states (node in the tree), that will have a number a turns very different from other and from nodes at the same depth. I dont know how to compare these nodes at all. I was using Hp at first, but it is not enought. To prove it, consider the example 1 vs 1 match. Unit A (opponent of AI) has only 1 move, a small attack that requieres 20 ap. Unit B (AI) has two moves a small attack that takes 40 ap (and overall hit for very low damage compared to the opponent attack) and a second move that does nothing but consume 20 ap and that move can only be used during the 1st turn. I will then have to compare two states State 1 AI use its attack . Opponent his attack. Units are at 60 80 ap respectively. 20 game turns passes and they are now at 80 100 ap. Opponent use his attack. 20 game turs passes and they are at 100 100 again and we are at turn 40. State 2 AI use his move that does nothing. Opponent his attack. Units are at 80 80 ap. 20 games turns passes, they are now at 100 100 and we are at turns 20. If I compare only HP, In state 1, AI will have an overall score a lower than in state 2 since it got attacked twice in state 1 and 1 times only in state 2. If I only compare by Hp difference between AI amp its opponenent, I would choose state 2 since AI lost less Hp than in state 1. Running the simulation after state 1 and 2 will continue to show the same difference since after that point, both unit can only use one attack. In the end, it makes my AI choose a stupid move because she thinks she is less likely to loose selecting it. Granted both move will eventually result in the defeat of the AI since its main attack is weak but I'd like my AI to nonetheless select as its first move, her attack skill and not a skill that does nothing. I've tried weithing the overall gradient of score between the root state and the state I'm simulating by the number of turns but it does not work in all cases (it greatly depends on the number of turns and the difference between the root). I was thinking of adding Ap ratio to my evaluation of states but in that example, we can see that in State 1 amp 2, units are at the same AP anyway so it doesnt provide extra informations. Anyone got ideas on how to compares my states from different turns ?


creation of a meta game OK, I feel like this should be on meta, because it is a very meta question, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss here. it is relevant and it might provide a little break from coding. Using these sites you can essentially get a very good answer to any problem. In fact I think it would be safe to say you can pretty much get people to discuss the best algorithm for any given problem. I was wondering if it would be interesting to create a whole game this way. you would ask the first question for instance What type of game would be the best game to make if the project was going to be worked on by an unknown amount of designers and developers? The answer would be subjective, but people could discuss and after a time the answer with the most votes could be chosen and the question locked out. This would be the hardest question I suppose, because after that you would get more and more technical and the questions would become more and more like the questions you ask on these forums. What would be the best class structure for this segments of a game? What would be the best way of testing for collisions etc.. Do you think it would be possible to create a whole game this way? Sorry if this seems bizarre or annoying, but I think it might be worth a try! Think of this as the zeroth question. What do you think?


Does bad AI lead to more sales? Games like HL2 and FEAR are legendary for having excellent AI. Recent titles (as of 2018) leave much to be desired. With improvements in our understanding of probability related state machines, and general machine learning (or AI as it's called sometimes) improves, it generally feels many commercial titles forego the development of good AI. Anecdotally, I have personally experienced in recent titles (where the AI is dumb as per say far cry, wildlands, etc.). I feel having dumb AI may sell games more (giving a more accomplished feeling, pushing players towards multiplayer, etc.). So, let me pose the question, does any research show that bad AI leads to more sales?


Powerup Best practices In a turn based game each player has a set of properties, e.g attack, defence, speed and these can all be used to work out who should go first and how much damage should be dealt. That all works fine, but the problem I'm having is with edge cases where a player receives a power up for one turn that lets them move first. How should I handle this? Should I increase the speed value and then somehow remember to reduce it next turn or should I implement some sort of object which holds modifiers that is checked every turn? I'd also need to be able to scale this to different things like temporary poison etc. Basically I'm very confused and help would be appreciated!


Update function design patterns I started reading about game development design patterns and from my experience there are 2 options for update methods. The first one receive from the game loop and delta time of this update and multiple everything by it, for example position speed delta time. And this will happen in the game loop without delay. The second option is too set constant frame delay and use it. In the end of the loop function you use sleep(last frame time frame length current time). Does it matter what do I use? What's more common? I know unity use the delta time technique but it's the only one I saw that use it. I would like to hear your opinions on what to use for both options. Should I always use the first option? always the second? Thank you for your time.


How to make a market test for the game? I'm making a casual game on iOS platform. But I'm not sure Do the consumers like my game. How can I make a market test for my game?


Finding next experience level using the square root? I recently asked this question on how to calculate a level based on experience Algorithm for dynamically calculating a level based on experience points? I am using the following calculation to determine the players level decimal experience 1829 decimal rawLevel (decimal)(.06 Math.Sqrt(experience)) decimal level Math.Floor(rawLevel) For my test, 1829 experience points equates to 2.56600857364117M, which I floor to level 2. My question is, how can I figure out how many points it would take to get to the next level based off of the calculation above? I know the next level is 3, so I would need to figure out how many points equate to level 3 so that I can find the difference. What formula would I use, given the constant .06 above? Update Solution int experience 150777 decimal rawLevel (decimal)(.06 Math.Sqrt(experience)) decimal level Math.Floor(rawLevel) decimal nextPoints (decimal)Math.Pow((double)(level 1) 0.06, 2)


How does an ECS work for a world subdivided into chunks (example)? I am trying to use an ECS for my 2d game at the moment. Up until now I had my world subdivided into chunks (as minecraft does) of size 64x64. They are loaded and drawn when they come onto screen. I did this to reduce the drawing calls. How would something like this work in an ECS? I would say my Chunks have the following properties at the moment tile is water 64,64 , humidity 64,64 , sprite batch (the thing that is drawn) At some intervals I will need to call some kind of updatefunction which uses tile is water and humidity to generate a new sprite batch (but not very often, these change rarely). On every frame I need to draw the sprite batch. On every (or maybe every few) frame I need to check which areas are visible and set some kind of flag s.t. I only draw the visible ones. It would help me a lot of someone could explain to me what the components, the entities and systems would be in this case. Edit To clarify. I don't have this modelled as an ECS yet and I have problems modelling this particular issue. What I have until now is just seperated everything into components Components Is Water Area, HumidityArea, SpriteBatch Is Water Area and HumidityArea just contain the corresponding 64x64 arrays and sprite batch contains the drawable spritebatch. I also have a BatchDrawer system that draws everything that has a SpriteBatch. But where do I do the updating of the SpriteBatch for example? Where do I check which areas are drawn? For example I could just check this every frame or I could keep a list of drawable Areas and update that. But where would I keep such a list of the drawable areas?


Why don't game developers change game stories after launch? Game developers have shown willing to remove and add game features, change art assets and remake parts of their games in following updates, but why don't they ever change the plot? Some times parts are added to the story, but only as attachments, never revisions. Why is plot thought as a feature beyond editing, even if it would enhance player experience just as much as any graphical update or gameplay tweak? P.S. I would like to ask for a game narrative writing story tag, and they are just as important part of game development as game mechanics. P.S. This is as broad a question as why not to release source code. Therefore I think it is not too broad for answering.


How to make old cards still usable to players in CCG games? In CCG games, as the player progresses further and unlocks stronger cards alot of the old cards are ignored and not used anymore. Like for example a CCG with 1000 cards, 100 of them are very strong cards and the others not so much. All players will just use those 100 cards and ignore the rest 900 cards! What can be done in such case to make old cards still usable to players?


Bartle taxonomy formula Anyone knows the formula inside the Bartle Test of players taxonomy? I need to do the test, but I need the weight of each question to make something more accurate and trustworthy to the real test... Some links to the online test http matthewbarr.co.uk bartle http 4you2learn.com bartle


Is flowchart correct way to visualize gameplay? I made the following flowchart in draw.io. it's just a simple arcade shooter. cardboard zombie pops up, bang, or not. I don't have any official education in game production. So, are there other chart styles, or UML diagrams that would be better suited for drafting this type of simple game play?


Game window systems and internal frames I don't know if this is a valid question, but What kind of window manager do games use which have internal frames (Frames inside frames)? Does this differ between the programming languages (Are e.g. in Java the AWT Swing libraries used to manage these and other graphical elements, such as buttons,or is this to restrictive (speed, graphical possibilities?)) A special example would be EVE Online, where the client can use the ingame windows like on a normal desktop.


Can world depth be achieved in a side scroller? I tend to build games with strong stories, which usually involves quite an indepth world environment. Typically I develope typical 2.5 over head view JRPG style (think Zelda, Final Fantasy 3, etc) because I have it stuck in my head that you can only achieve world depth using this style. This question is limited to the 2D environment. Can this be achieved in a 2D side scroller? Can a user experience the world when only seeing it from the side? Can he she explore villages in this manner? Any examples would be great. The closest thing that comes to my mind at the moment is Castle Crashers.


How do Action RPGs make different weapon types feel unique? I'm getting feedback on my game which has Action RPG elements (think Diablo, Torchlight, etc.) but you control a team of heroes. When you kill enemies sometimes new weapons will drop. In my game the DPS of the weapon will be randomized but stronger the further you get. Each weapon type has a hard coded range and rate of attack, but it differs between types. As an example, every Pistol will attack once per second and every Machine Gun will attack 5 times per second. A common complaint I'm getting is The weapons needs more variety, there's not really many reasons to change weapons because they all have the same speed and small damage differences. I'm struggling to achieve this. I can vary speed and range for each type, and this seems like an "ok" solution but it's not good enough. This just feels like a sliding scale that looks like this range lt gt rate of attack dps 10 Here you can change the range and the rate of attack, but the DPS is still going to be based on the level of the enemies. In the end, it's still not going to matter which weapon you choose because they'll all have about the same DPS. If I make it so they don't have the same DPS, then yeah, there will be reasons to change weapons, but it'll be because some weapons suck and some weapons are good. I don't think this puts me in a better place. I want the player to feel like weapon type X has pros and cons over weapon type Y. How can I achieve this?


What is the best way to manage 'state' in Phaser? I have heard that this is not the best way to manage state in phaser var game new Phaser.Game(800, 600, Phaser.CANVAS,'YourGameName') game.state.add("Boot", Boot) game.state.add("Preload", Preload) game.state.add("MainMenu", mainMenu) game.state.add("Play", Play) game.state.add("GameOver", GameOver) game.state.start("Boot") so what is the best way to do it. I am newbie in Phaser game development.


Create ROI tools for analysis I want to create some ROI tools on my game for personal analysis. Let's say that I have 3 different level of special powers with a recursive cost and certain bonus. So, I want to see when certain level will start have income. 1st example 1000 coins for 10 uses. Bonus 10 on farming speed. 2000 coins for 10 uses. Bonus 20 on farming speed. Etc In this example, I know exactly what the bonus will do. I have the price of the farming per unit and I can calculate the income per use for each power level. So, I can tweak the numbers using the ROI tool to make the effect better. 2nd example 1000 coins for 3 power ups on a weapon. Bonus 1 attack power, 5 chance to destroy the weapon. 2000 coins for 3 power ups on a weapon. Bonus 2 attacking power, 10 chance to destroy the weapon. 3rd example 1000 coins per use. Bonus 30 heal, 5 chance to get injured. 2000 coins per use. Bonus 50 heal, 10 chance to get injured. As you can see, the first example is simple to calculate the income vs cost. However, the second and third example don't have an exact effect and both of them have a probability to either good or bad effect. How do you work on this type of ROI? How do you calculate the pros of each level?


How Could I accommodate Gender Fluid Players In My Game I'm world building for a fantasy MMORPG and I really want to have a safe and acceptable environment for all possible players. Of course I am going to be realistic and have prejudice in game, it wouldn't be believable if everyone got along. However I personally feel that if a paying consumer of my game feels like having a non binary character, why should I limit them and make them feel uncomfortable? They could always make two separate characters, but then there's a lack of sync and feeling that they are one person. My team also discussed having a feature that switched between avatars while keeping gear and skills. Another idea was a sort of illusion spell that would alter the players body to a set form based off of their original facial shape and general traits. I would like to hear more suggestions and thought of this topic in games, or if something like this has been done before, even if it was not intended for gender fluid people. In the end I would like to have a believable way for a player to switch between male and female in game. Previous Comments Do characters in the game have the possibility to beget offspring (male) or to give birth to offspring (female)? Otherwise, they are not male and female, but rather masculine and feminine which is a much simpler problem, and one that should have minimal impact, if it has any impact at all. Actually, what exactly would be the impact of switching the identifier of a character from Cao Pi to Guo N wang? (One of those names is feminine, and the other masculine which is which is left as an exercise.) We are working on a function for players to have NPC children. So if they had gotten pregnant they would not be able to change the sex of their avatar, that would cause problems. This is more of gender and appearance, not so much biological sex. Though I guess it would be plausible for them to be pregnant, and then get some one else pregnant after giving birth. If of course it wasn't illusion magic. It seems like you already know your answer. If it's about gender and appearance, then it's about how a character is physically portrayed. Right? So for example, in an typical MMORPG, you purchase a breastplate from the local armory, you'll have a 'male' version and a 'female' version. Perhaps just give an option to purchase a variety or degree of masculine and feminine armor regardless what biological sex your player is. For example, a male player can purchase a very feminine looking breastplate. we have plenty of possible answers. It's more of what would make people feel most comfortable. A lot of gender fluid people can have body dysmorphic disorder, and some of them play games for gender comfort. It's like a self applied therapy where you can be what ever you identify with, and others will see and accept you as that gender. So masculine and feminine armor would work and is probably an idea we will use, we don't want someone to feel confined to one gender. Especially because gender fluid people can change from masculine to feminine day to day. the armor also means they may have to buy multiple sets. also some one may feel strongly masculine one day, and strongly feminine another, making a gender ambiguous character a bit awkward.


Multiplayer matchmaking algorithm I'm building a game in which there are tournaments. During the tournaments we want players to play against each other in an efficient way. What I'm looking for is a generic algorithm that will match players together in an optimal way in order to Have the lowest amount of games possible Be reasonably sure that after all games are played, the highest ranked player is the best Tricky part Games can have 2, 3 or 4 players in a death match depending on the tournament. Tournaments have two or more players, no other constraints. Does such an algorithm exist? Note For the ranking, I will probably be using an ELO based algorithm (unless you have a better suggestion).


Does game development have its own types of modeling? In general computer science there are modeling "languages" (read standardized diagramming techniques) such as UML 1,2, in databases there are things like ERD3, in business there are other types such as BPMN4,5. Is there anything like these that are Game Design specific?


How to make a fun slot machine? We currently have a simple slot machine in our online virtual world game. You set the amount you want to bet (in virtual money) and pull the lever, and depending on the 3 figures (there's only one line) you get a reward, a free round, lose some more money, or most of the time, get nothing at all. You can instantly pull the lever again. The previous bet will be maintained. At the moment this slot machine isn't really fun to play. The chances of winning something are pretty low (though when you win, you can win a lot). When you pull the lever, the result is determined (though not shown) immediately, so there's also no way influence the outcome of the wheels. How can it be made more fun?


RTS Balancing for Units with Different Costs I am creating a space based RTS. So far, we have three units Fighters (cost 5 resources) Interceptors (cost 20) Rocket Ships (cost 40). I've designed this game in a Rock Paper Scissors format (Fighters beat Interceptors, Interceptors beat Rocket Ships, Rocket Ships beat Fighters), but the game is designed so that classes beat each other at cost (i.e. a single Interceptor will beat a single Fighter, but four Fighters (cost 20) will beat a single Interceptor (cost 20)). In this case, when I am using the Incomplete Wins technique to calculate the proportions of each ship that I would expect to see, should I calculate interactions using 1v1 interactions or "at cost" interactions? I believe the two will lead to very different results (for example, a single Fighter does 20 of damage to Interceptor before it itself is destroyed, but four Fighters destroy the Interceptor while only losing one ship the first interaction leads to a 1 resource advantage for the Interceptor player, while the second interaction leads to a 15 resource advantage for the Fighter player). I would think it I should do the latter comparison, but the linked page does a single unit comparison (one Knight vs one Archer, even though Knight costs half that of Archer) EDIT This RTS is partially derived from Total Annihilation Supreme Commander, so no projectiles hit instantly and the scale of the game is intended to be somewhat large. In that case, should I instead perform comparisons between armies that cost the same? For example, instead of comparing one Fighter vs one Interceptor or four Fighters vs one Interceptor, should I instead compare 40 Fighters vs 10 Interceptors? Would that be more accurate and also help reduce randomness of projectile hits?


Turning a board game idea into a browser based, slow paced gameplay Suppose I want to create a strategy game with global mutable state shared between all players (think game board). But unlike a board game, I don't want it to be real time action and or turn based. Instead, players should be able to log in at any time of the day and spend a fixed number of action points per day as they wish. As opposed to a few hours, game sessions would run over a few weeks. This is meant to reward good strategy rather than time spent playing (as an alternative, hardcore players could always play multiple games in parallel instead) as well as all kind of issues related to live playing like disconnections and synchronization. The game should remain addictive still have a low time investment footprint for casual players. So far so good, but this still leaves open the question of when to solve actions and when they should be visible. I want to avoid "ninja play" like doing all your moves just a few minutes before daily point reset to take other players by surprise, or people spamming F5 to place a well timed action which would defeat the whole point of a non real time game. I thought of a couple of approaches to that Resolve all events in a single scheduled process running once a day. This basically means a "blind" gameplay where players can take actions but don't see their results immediately. The thing is, I played a similar browser game a few years ago and didn't like the fact that you feel disconnected and powerless until there's that deus ex machina telling you what really happened during all that time. You see the world evolve in large increments of one day, which often doesn't seem like seeing it evolve at all. For actions that have an big impact on the game or on other players (attacks, big achievements), make them visible to everyone immediately but delay their effect by something like 24 hours. Opposing players could be notified when such an event happens, so that they can react to it. Do you have any other ideas how I could go about solving this ? Are there any known approaches in similar existing games ?


stats or profit give away result of game Think of a coinflip game, whose logic looks as follows Server sends websocket message (RESULT MESSAGE) to frontend with result of a game (won lost) Server sends websocket message to frontend with updated aggregated stats (STATS MESSAGE) (think all time profit after the new coin flip, or updated all time stats) Frontend reacts to RESULT MESSAGE by playing an animation (coin flipping). It also updates the all time stats and profit in response to STATS MESSAGE The problem with this logic is, responding to STATS MESSAGE (updating profit and stats) gives away the result of the coin flip before the animation finishes. Solutions I cannot use Merging RESULT MESSAGE and STATS MESSAGE together, and only updating the stats profit after animation finishes. Because those 2 messages are produced and sent by different services. Linking a particular RESULT MESSAGE to a STATS MESSAGE and only reacting to a STATS MESSAGE when its corresponding RESULT MESSAGE has been processed and its animation completed. Because in reality I have several kinds of STATS MESSAGES (trophies updated, stats updated, profit balance updated, etc), and it's just not practical for the frontend to hold onto all those messages until their respective RESULT MESSAGE is processed Solutions I've tried successfully before, but I'm trying to avoid Having the backend send STATS MESSAGE with a delay, to make sure it doesn't reach the frontend before the coinflip animation has finished. This sort of encodes frontend behavior (animation) on the backend. All ideas and suggestions appreciated. Thanks a lot! EDIT I made the coin flipping example for simplicity, but it's not precisely con flipping. It's a multiplayer game where dozens of games animations per user per seconds are going on. So queuing a bunch of stuff on the frontend might be less than ideal (I'm still looking into performant versions of this solution though). Pulling the STATS data via an API call when the animation finishes (instead of using websockets data) is another alternative that I've considered, but for the same reason described above it might not be feasible (dozens of API calls per user per second). Plus there's a chance that an API call is triggered by game 1 finishing, but while game 2 animation is still going on, giving away the result of game 2


How do you handle loss aversion in probability based games? The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion refers to how players feel losses twice as powerfully as victories. For example, Bite Fight's PvP is a simulation based on probabilities related on character skills, and players voice this feeling many times per week in the community forums. If you don't want to create a pay to win game, but you do want to let the worst players win often enough to feel good about it, how can you do that? The question has two parts How do you handle it technically? Do you use some kind of math techniques or a memory based simulation to avoid many loses in the row for a certain player? How do you handle it from the community point of view? What do you do about complaints like this on public forums?


Tiled game how to correct load background image? i'm a newbie. I'm trying to develop a 2d game (top down view). I would like to load a standard background, a textured ground... My "world" is big, for example 3000px X 3000px. I think it is not a good idea to load a 3000px x 3000px image and move it... So, how is the best practice ? To load a single small image (64x64) and repeat it for N times ? If yes, ok, but how i can manage the "background" movement ? Thanks Bye!


Drawing to create game drafts Man, I'm really bad at drawing... I feel myself really ashamed because I cannot draw even a little nice sword... ( The problem is, on game development (I will be on the programming part, relax!) I will need to explain some game ideas to game artists, like "I need that city like this" or "that character needs to have that look and feel". My idea is, I really need some BASIC skills on drawing some draft of what I'm thinking... I'm bad in pen paper drawing and photoshop corel drawing, but I'm convicted to learn photoshop or corel to draft something... Someone has passed that problem? What you recommend?


How do I get players to say "no" when they are afraid of missing out on sidequests or XP? In my RPG, I have a companion NPC who is overconfident in his abilities and lacks self control. I wanted to create a few situations where the player needs to reign them in and tell them quot no quot . One such situation basically boiled down to this Companion Hey boss, I want to do this really stupid thing that will almost certainly make things harder for us down the road and possibly jeopardize our goal. Is that okay? Player Choices Yes, go ahead! No, don't do that! My hypothesis was that the vast majority of playtesters would choose quot No quot . To my surprise, the vast majority chose quot Yes quot ! And then when the consequences played out and indeed made things worse, playtesters wanted to reload from an earlier save point and pick the other option (choosing quot Yes quot wasn't game ending, but it did mean that a perfect outcome wasn't achievable). When I asked the playtesters why they chose yes, they made it clear that they understood that saying yes was undesirable and saying no was desirable. They also weren't seeking a challenge or anything. Instead, the most common thing I heard was I was afraid that if I said quot No quot , then I'd miss out on a sidequest or XP. One of them even said that in other RPGs he played, the only way to get a 100 playthrough was to say yes at every opportunity, and so they assumed that was the case for mine. I don't want players to assume that saying quot yes quot is always the right answer, and for now, I'd like to keep the situation of having to tell the NPC quot no quot every once in a while. But I don't know how to overcome these player expectations and their fear of missing out of content, especially without just flat out saying quot this isn't like other games, you won't miss out if you say 'no' quot . So how do I get players to say quot no quot when they are afraid of missing out on sidequests or XP?


Algorithm for determining random events I'm struggling with coming up with an elegant solution to generating random events in the game that I'm working on. Say there are 4 classes of events that can happen, with varying events in those classes that may occur. So something along the lines of main events "common event", "not so common event", "somewhat rare event", "rare event" sub events 0 "common event 1", "common event 2",.. ... I have a somewhat kludgey solution in place that first just has a random number generated between 0 and 100, and if the number falls within a given range then a main event will be triggered. Then I'll do another random roll to see which sub event occurs. Is there a better solution than something along these lines? Like I mention, it doesn't feel very elegant, and I'd like to make it easily expandable for the addition of future events.


Good game design books? I have some experience in creating, however I like to have some well written reference material to help me produce better products. Are there any game design books that are not aimed at a particular programming language?


100 points between 0 1000 on an increasing scale Basically, it's for roleplay, I need to generate 100 points along a scale. Level 1 is the starting amount, and is at point 0 on the scale. Level 100 is the highest amount planned at this point, and it needs to be at 1,000 on the scale. My problem is generating points 2 99 between those two. I could do it cheaply and just go with one level at every 10 points. But that's not how I want it to function. Ideally, I'd like a sloping curve, so that in the early stages, levels might be only a number or two apart. Such as Level 1 0 Level 2 2 Level 3 4 But then as the level increases, the number also goes up. Level 98 960 Level 99 980 Level 100 1000 Can someone help me figure this out?


Approaches on 2D top down track racing visualisation I'm considering writing a very simple management style game with the theme being motorsport racing. I've got a good idea how to do the 'management side', but the issue I'm having is how to visually render cars and move on a track (something a bit like) The key points (keeping it simple) the user won't control the vehicle directly, they are the 'manager' (think football manager) they can decide on a strategy but cannot control the vehicle the car should stay on track (visually) they may 'crash' (along with other events) though the speed it goes around the track is determined by vehicle performance a car will be aware of other near by cars around the track for example, if they're about to be overtaken, they may actually do a slower lap as they are defending they may collide, along with other events My initial thoughts are there are two key design elements here, the track and the car. The track a track is composed of many segments each segment is stored in an array a segment (I'm not entirely sure here) but one thing it might contain is a 2D array (From this (https gamedev.stackexchange.com questions 149966 approaches on 2d top view racing game track design) answer gave an approach of using multi dimensional arrays) d d x x x d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d e e e d d d d d x x x d d d d d r r r d d d d d d r r r d d d d d d r r r e d d d d r r r e d d d d d d r e d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d Above is a straight and a 90 degree corner x exit, e entry, r racetrack and d dirt. Maybe I could create a bunch of these and create a track. Or maybe a simpler version where I define just an entry and exit d e d d r d d e d d x d d r e d d d The simplified version where I define an entry e and exit x. I can add additional points r and then construct a curve straight line based on the x, e and r coordinates? My idea is that the vehicle will then move across each segment and I can calculate the time it takes to complete that segment. I can then add up all segments which will give me the lap time. With this approach, I can also check the previous current next segment to determine if there are other vehicles it needs to defend attack against. The car store all vehicles in an array each vehicle will always be in a segment speed it completes the segment is determined by its performance (and segment characteristics) vehicle can 'see' if there are other vehicles in previous current next segment and decide whether to overtake defend. I think I could make this work, but I'd be really interested to know if there are better simpler approach bearing in mind it's mostly a visualization and the speed and events are determined by my program.


How does an ECS work for a world subdivided into chunks (example)? I am trying to use an ECS for my 2d game at the moment. Up until now I had my world subdivided into chunks (as minecraft does) of size 64x64. They are loaded and drawn when they come onto screen. I did this to reduce the drawing calls. How would something like this work in an ECS? I would say my Chunks have the following properties at the moment tile is water 64,64 , humidity 64,64 , sprite batch (the thing that is drawn) At some intervals I will need to call some kind of updatefunction which uses tile is water and humidity to generate a new sprite batch (but not very often, these change rarely). On every frame I need to draw the sprite batch. On every (or maybe every few) frame I need to check which areas are visible and set some kind of flag s.t. I only draw the visible ones. It would help me a lot of someone could explain to me what the components, the entities and systems would be in this case. Edit To clarify. I don't have this modelled as an ECS yet and I have problems modelling this particular issue. What I have until now is just seperated everything into components Components Is Water Area, HumidityArea, SpriteBatch Is Water Area and HumidityArea just contain the corresponding 64x64 arrays and sprite batch contains the drawable spritebatch. I also have a BatchDrawer system that draws everything that has a SpriteBatch. But where do I do the updating of the SpriteBatch for example? Where do I check which areas are drawn? For example I could just check this every frame or I could keep a list of drawable Areas and update that. But where would I keep such a list of the drawable areas?


Successful Elements to a 4X Game 4X games (That is, Xpand, Xplore, Xploit and Xterminate) like Civilization, Sins of a Solar Empire, and other top Strategy games, all seem to have the same addictive hook. I'd like to know what elements these developers incorporate into their games to make them Well paced (You can't beat the game in 5 minutes, but it wont take a week) Replayable (The first game isn't your last) Competetive (The AI doesn't play like a 3 year old) Not repetetive (Such as using the same strategy over and over, or spamming units) Economical (Not having 7 trillion metal and coins after 10 minutes of play) Not to much micro managing Exciting (Necessary?) combat You stil need to use strategy Intuitive interfaces (Civilization 5 is a good example) And any other important parts to the Strategy 4X genre Some of these seem pretty simple, but others look like balancing acts, and I'd like to have some opinions on how to make a game that is fun to play. I'd be grateful if anyone could answer tell me how you or another game developer has managed to successfully balance them together.


What kinds of conflict resolution can be fun beyond combat in an RPG? As someone who grew up on the single digit Final Fantasy games and AD amp D, there are few ways of solving an rpg problem as fun as a fight. Different streams of accomplishment (object acquisition crafting, skill trees, puzzles, player strategies, team combination synergies, etc) all go into a few minutes of frenetic action, allowing for the feeling of accomplishment and progress via stat increases as the game progresses. That said, we tend to characterize rpg players as murderhobos for good reason. When you incentivize killing things, it's not long before all problems start looking like something to hit with your sword. And when you're able to steal anything not nailed down, why not do it? While other kinds of conflict resolution can be fun when in their element (farm Civ Sim games for the sense of building something, spy ninja assassin games for deftness and exploiting situations, social games for roleplaying a character or out thinking the other guy), they're often not fun outside their very narrow venue. And because we're limited to conversation with a computer (at least in single player games), social games can't even explore the whole of their venue. I'm racking my brain trying to figure out how to properly gamify the societal ideals of don't kill, don't steal in such a way that attacking or stealing becomes a conscious choice, not just a default means of action...but at the same time keep the same diversity of fun inputs that fighting stealing games have. Most games just code in consequences the town guards are sent after you and or some faction is less willing to deal with you. But this feels unnatural, and only invites further gaming of the system, producing better murderhobos at the end. My reason for doing so? The main theme of my game is a heavily philosophical one(think a halfway understandable Xenosaga) on how morality might play out in the post post apocalypse. While killing and stealing would be a part of that, I feel that our natural tendency as gamers wouldn't allow this question to play out 'fairly'. Any idea on how to put killing and stealing on a truly equal playing field with other forms of conflict resolution?


Explicit difficulty selection without breaking the game flow According to the flow theory, in short, if the challenge is too hard, from flow state the player will go into an anxiety state, and if the challenge is too easy, he will go into a boredom state. This is fixed with dynamic difficulty, where a system tracks the player's performance and adjusts the difficulty. But what about explicit difficulty selection which is often seen in shooters (Easy, Medium, Hard)? With such predefined difficulties, the challenge will always be either too easy or too hard, won't it? Therefore we cannot achieve a flow state, and following that, an immersion into the game is less likely. How do we fix this?


How do I go from a general idea to a specific draft of a design? Before starting planing your code, the data structures, the class hierarchy, you need to have a clear idea of what you want for your game. I came across with an idea for a game, but it is too general. I think every game starts with a general idea, but how did they take that general idea and then the came up with games like Imperium Civitas... I'm refering to the actions you can or can't do, the events, in game materials etc. I wonder how you should engage a blank paper. Where you should start? Is there a chain of steps that you have to follow? Thanks. (My idea is much more simpler than Imperium Civitas)


How can I reward dungeon masters that take risks? I am working on a MORPG project featuring essentially two major roles adventurers and dungeon masters. My concern is about balancing the two roles. For those who have heard of it, the principle is inspired from the French comics Dungeon. The business model of a dungeon, as stated in the comics, is the following dungeon masters place treasures in heavily guarded dungeons, to lure in adventurers seeking fame and fortune. While some of them succeed, most die in the process, dropping valuable items which joins the pile of treasures of the dungeon, further attracting more adventurers. Dungeon master make a living by collecting the right amount from these drops to create new rooms, pay mercenaries, fetch new creatures, breed dragons and whatnot. Adventurers are quite classic they are combat oriented characters that can attack monsters or fellow players and earn XP, items and money in the process, gradually making them stronger. Dungeon masters are trade oriented. Their difficulty is balancing budgets treasures and dragons are expensive. Now, I already expect a sort of equilibrium among dungeon masters because dungeons that are either too hard or too easy are naturally penalized (low attempt rate or low kill rate, respectively). DM vs DM balancing check. Since PvP combat is enabled in dungeons, there is also a competition among adventurers pushing weak players to stick to easy dungeons that offer little reward to more advanced players. Adventurers vs advanturers balancing check. However there is one specific imbalance between the two roles that I am trying to solve adventurers have a bias toward attempting dungeons above their league, because even if they die (dropping some items and respawning outside the dungeon), they will have gained some XP in the process. This is good because it rewards risk takers. On the other hand, dungeon masters do not have any advantage of this kind if an adventurer completes the dungeon and escapes with their share of the treasure, nothing is gained. This would be a pity if it lead dungeon master to be too cautious about their defenses, killing the probability of ever completing the dungeon. Adventurer vs DM balancing problem. Hence my question what reward mechanism could I introduce that incitates dungeon masters to maintain a small but non zero winning probability?


How can I handle a bunch of achievements in a game? Take for example Team Fortress 2. There are a huge load of achievements, and I'm wondering how the manages all of them. And since there's a lot of achievements, I'd also like to know how it "knows" you've achieved one. Basically, how can the game handle a huge achievement system? Is there some special process? Are there hundreds and hundreds of boolean variables all over the code, waiting for certain conditions to be met, then ,Bam, achievement? If there are several approaches, what are they?


Game ideas for a platformer I have created a platformer which currently has the features listed below. I would greatly appreciate any further ideas which I could implement! (I don't play a lot of games which is why I require help) Walking jumping movement player can shoot lasers enemies also walk, fly, and shoot lasers water (you can swim in this) mud (slows you down on contact, and stops you from jumping) ladders damage when falling from a large height, unless falling into water moving platforms springboards (jumping on them shoot you into the air) growing platforms (allow you to reach new places) key and door system gem and coin collection system teleporting turrets


class diagrams design for an adventure game (rooms, objects, inventory)? Any links to existing design (e.g. class diagrams, database ER diagrams) for a basic adventure game i.e. that has the aspects of rooms locations (which you move between) objects which you collect use (which may have behaviours) inventory (i.e. items which you carry) rules (e.g. if you to want to open Door X, then you need Key Y)


How complex should enemy AI be in a dnd alike? I'm writing a text mode (python ncurses), turn based rpg based loosely on 3rd edition D amp D and Neverwinter Nights (the PC game) rules. It's not going to be a full implementation, but 'in the spirit' of them. I already have quite a bit of the basics in place movement, a few base classes and races, rule based encounters (shop npc monster X shows up when condition Y is true), dynamic generation of monsters, player and enemy stats and random, levelled equipment etc. It's enough to start moving around a basic world, talking to people, examining objects and location and now I'm moving on to (melee) combat. I'm interested in what people would expect of an algorithm that co ordinates the computer controlled attacks of an enemy party against the player. How smart should the computer controlled enemy be (in my implementation the player will take control of each of his own characters in turn, and they wont be AI controlled, but the enemy party will attacking, spell casting etc at will). For example if an enemy character initially chooses a random pc from the players party on round 1, should that enemy continue to attack the same target in subsequent rounds. How about if another pc then attacks that enemy? What if the enemy is unable to cause damage to that pc (ie say the pc has something crazy like damage reduction 100 5 should the programme know in advance?), should they switch to another in the players party? Has anyone implemented anything similar and would be able to provide any pointers?


How to create an illusion of movement in space? I am currently making a space game. The player's ship is stationary at world origin while things come towards it. However, the player is supposed to move towards the next destination. To create the illusion of movement, I have particles moving backwards while my ship remains stationary. However, the particles seems to get lost visually during complex battle scenes. Is there any other way to give the illusion of movement where there is an absence of stationary reference points? Here are some screenshots of the game The referenced question that has been identified as a duplicate does not answer my question. It is somewhat unclear what some of the implementations are. I seek a tried example that is used in other games if possible. Most of the implementations suggested is more relevant to a first person perspective. I am looking for 3rd person effect where the player cannot "Visually Feel" the effect through a jolt.


How the game sends force feedback to the steering wheel How the game will be some of the information feedback to the steering wheel, such as bumps, bumps, vibration and so on. View MSDN, which are introduced from the steering wheel to get the relevant information and control the steering wheel of the force feedback, but how to get from the game inside the type of force feedback?


Appropriate database schema for heroes' skills in a Tower Defense game? In a Tower Defense game, each hero (or character) has some skills. Each skill has some quot chance of appearance quot (CoA for short) when attacking enemies and if appeared it has some quot hit accuracy quot (i.e. hit on enemies) (HA for short) and has effects on the enemies (if hit by the skill) (EoH for short). Examples Skill 1 Frost 1, CoA 50 , HA 100 , EoH (1) slow enemy down for 4s and (2) yield 200 damage points. Skill 2 Frost 2, CoA 100 , HA 50 , EoH (1) make enemy frozen for 8s. I first tried to breakdown skills into quot atomic quot effects and come up with tables as below All looks good? But now we want to update Skill 1 a bit to make it more complicated Skill 1 Frost 1, CoA 50 , HA 100 , EoH (1) slow enemy down by 40 for 4s and (2) yield 200 damage points. (Please pay attention to the 40 here!) Or even coming up with more complicated skills Skill 3 Frost 3, CoA 20 , HA 100 , EoH (1) frozen enemy for the first 4s then slow enemy down by 50 for next 4s and (2) yield 200 more damage points. Skill 4 Frost 4, CoA 10 , attack enemy 3 times continuously, each time HA 50 , EoH (1) frozen enemy for the first 2s then slow enemy down by 50 for next 2s and (2) yield 400 more damage points. Each effect now has more parameters to be specified which makes my current schema not fit anymore. Please help deal with this!


How can I know how big my game "world" should be? here is the world map (randomly generated) for a game I'm making The green rectangle corresponds to the size of one screen. Each pixel represents 3x3 tiles in my game, this makes the whole map be roughly 7,9 km (2,3 x 2,3). How can I assess if the game is too big or too small?


2D pathfinding finding smooth paths I was trying to implement a simple pathfinding, but the outcome is less satisfactory than what I intended to achieve. The thing is units in games like Starcraft 2 move in all directions whereas units in my case only move in at most 8 directions (Warcraft 1 style) as these 8 directions direct to next available nodes (they move from a tile to next neighboring tile). What should I do in order to achieve the result as in Starcraft 2? Shrink the tile size? On the picture you can see a horizontal line of rock tiles being obstacles, and the found path marked as green tiles. The red line is the path I want to achieve.


Why do Monsters drop things? Why do Monsters drop things in so many games? It creates all sorts of problems, including in game gold hyper inflation questionable moral implications, if there is a strong incentive toward killing things but no incentive not to Monster killing giving XP is equally bad you rename an ingame currency to XP, the mechanics stay the same. Here you have something like quot fighting force inflation, quot so after some levels you have to have giant giants attacking your small figure or it stops being interesting. This is just hyper inflation written a different way. Is it enough reward if a monster stops killing you? What benefits of monster killing rewards make up for these problems, or how can we compensate for those problems?


two part dice pool mechanic I'm working on a dice mechanic resolution system based on the Ghost Echo (hereafter shortened to G E) tabletop RPG. Specifically, since G E can be a little harsh dealing with consequences and failure, I was hoping to soften the system and add a little more player control, as well as offer the chance to evolve player characters into something unique, right from creation. So, here's the mechanic Players roll 2 separate d12 against each of the two statistics for their character (each is a number from 2 11, and may be rolled above or below depending on the nature of the action attempted, rolling your stat exactly always fails). Depending on the success for that roll, they add dice to the pool rolled for a modified G E style action. The acting player gets two dice anyhow, and I am debating offering a bonus die for each success, or a single bonus die for succeeding on both of the statistic compared rolls. Once the size of the dice pool is set, the entire pool is rolled, and the players are allowed to assign the rolled dice to a goal and a danger, one to each. Assigned results are judged as follows 1 4 means the attempted goal fails, or the danger comes true. 5 8 is a partial success at the goal, or partially avoiding the danger. 9 12 means the goal is achieved, or the danger avoided. My concerns are twofold Firstly, is the two stage action too complicated, with two rolls to judge separately before anything can happen? Secondly, are the statistics involved going too far in softening the game? I've run some basic simulations, and the approximate statistics follow 2 dice (up to) 3 dice (up to) 4 dice failure 33 25 20 partial 33 35 35 success 33 40 45 I'd appreciate any advice that addresses my concerns or offers to refine my simulation (right now the first roll is statistically modeled as sign(1d12 1d12), where 0 is a success).


Loading enemies in a 2d platformer What would be the best way to load enemies in a level. For example take Mario, are enemies rendered at their x,y positions as the game is loaded or when the player walks past a specific x value. Wouldn't this mean that you would have multiple if conditions checking whether the player has reached a specific x value to spawn an enemy this doesn't seem like a very good solution to this problem at least to me. What would be the recommended way?


Games for Facebook, iPhone, Web if I want to build a game for web, facebook, and iphone, do I need to build 3 completely different versions? I know there is a new company that is "build once, launch anywhere," but I'm asking about current best practice and methodology in doing this.


What are the differences between random encounters and permanent mobile enemies? Random Encounter A player has a 10 chance to encounter an enemy. while moving through a 5x5 grid. Permanent Mobile Enemies There is one enemy that constantly moves through the 5x5 grid and only encounters the player when they land on the same grid. Also, both the enemy and the player cannot see each other until they meet. Obviously, the random encounter will give better performance, but are there any benefits through implementing the second option?


What does 'Discretizing Space' mean in the context of paper prototyping I was browsing some lecture slides by Eric Anderson for his Cornell course CS 4154 (Analytics driven Game Design). In a series of slides he mentions discretizing space as a way of paper prototyping action games. As an example he illustrates with a screen shot of Super Mario with a grid overlay (shown below). Unfortunately the slides do not expound on how this technique is used. How is discretizing space used to prototype platform games or action games generally?


Intellectual rights to game concepts For a client I might be making a small puzzle game about getting a item out of a puzzle. The concept will strongly resemble this game http www.alibaba.com product gs 355972089 Car Park Game Brain Teaser IQ.html But will not be about cars or parking, and we will make our own "levels". The game will not be a board game, but a smartphone game (iOS Android devices). But does ThinkFun sit on the concept so heavily that I can't make a game like this ? And where does "the line" go to what is acceptable? The game will be free, and we are a non US company (based in Denmark, Europe) if that makes any difference.


How to make a fun slot machine? We currently have a simple slot machine in our online virtual world game. You set the amount you want to bet (in virtual money) and pull the lever, and depending on the 3 figures (there's only one line) you get a reward, a free round, lose some more money, or most of the time, get nothing at all. You can instantly pull the lever again. The previous bet will be maintained. At the moment this slot machine isn't really fun to play. The chances of winning something are pretty low (though when you win, you can win a lot). When you pull the lever, the result is determined (though not shown) immediately, so there's also no way influence the outcome of the wheels. How can it be made more fun?


Expected numbers for user engagement I run a free to play online game that involves collecting creatures and simply clicking on a button to give them a small amount of EXP. The idea is to do this for other people and they're likely to return the favour and help you make your own progress. The initial tutorial guides you through the basic idea until you've successfully obtained a full Party of 6 before leaving you to your own devices, to make your own objectives and stuff. I've noticed that players who make it through the tutorial tend to stay quite engaged with the game, but I also found these numbers 25 of users join but never complete the first step of the tutorial, that is they never hatch their very first Egg. A further 25 of users drop out of the game before finishing the tutorial, so having hatched only 1 5 Eggs. Barely 50 of registered users actually complete the tutorial. The problem is that I've never run this kind of game before. This is my first real project, but it's been going for several years now. I don't have any kind of baseline on what numbers to expect. I can only imagine reasons right now, such as it being quite jarring to people that, in order to make progress, they have to help others make their progress and hope they return the favour. So we have about half our users leaving before the tutorial is complete. Is this kind of thing normal? Am I worrying too much about this?


How do I model diagram turn based combat? I'm developing a turn based combat system for an RPG, and I'd like to know if there is any kind of best practice around diagrammatically modelling something like this. The ideal modelling paradigm would capture quite a few things, including entities (and their stats status) entity actions interactions positioning terrain effects temporal effects Do I use something from UML? BPMN? A combination? Do I home bake something? To clarify I'm not looking for any advice on designing the system. I'm already quite far along with that. I'm looking for a good way to diagram the model.


Explicit difficulty selection without breaking the game flow According to the flow theory, in short, if the challenge is too hard, from flow state the player will go into an anxiety state, and if the challenge is too easy, he will go into a boredom state. This is fixed with dynamic difficulty, where a system tracks the player's performance and adjusts the difficulty. But what about explicit difficulty selection which is often seen in shooters (Easy, Medium, Hard)? With such predefined difficulties, the challenge will always be either too easy or too hard, won't it? Therefore we cannot achieve a flow state, and following that, an immersion into the game is less likely. How do we fix this?


Where does game logic belong? I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around the 'high levels' of game logic and where how large components, such as collision detection physics, rendering, and user input, interact with one another. What I'm asking is how you deal with these higher level interactions. Here is what I am doing interface Stage() or a "scene" as many call it. Manages the logic for Actors init() update() update this stage render() render this stage StageManager() implements Stage a stage that manages stages ) var stages array lt Stage gt init() create a MainStage amp other stages that may be used in this specific game update() logic for checking which stage should be active render() tell the active stage to render getActiveStage() MainStage() implements Stage var mainCharacter var actors array lt GameObject gt var ... init() create the player, game world, other initialization stuff update() collision detection, check mainCharacter state, etc render() render all the Actors on this stage handleMouseClick() handleKeyBoardEvent() Main() created on game start var manager new StageManager() updateGameState() manager.update() loop renderState() manager.render() loop My main gripe with this is that the StageManager and all other Stages will become enormous and unwieldy as the game scales over time. Off the top of my head, some components can be delegated out such as a Stage uses a PhysicsManager, but there would still be all the keyboard events and what not. I was thinking of making individual Actors listen to events and giving them an update() method, thus encapsulating what an Actor should do at any given point. However, I would run into complications when an Actor needed game state information (game time, a "power up" Actor needing the player's speed) and I would no longer have Stages as Actors are now managing themselves.


Is there a rule of thumb to scale up the environment by 33 ? I was reading an article on Gamasutra called A Rational Approach to Racing Game Track Design, and I found the following A commonly acknowledged rule for third person games is that the environment should be scaled up by a factor of around 33 percent (on page 2) I am just curious has anyone else heard of such a rule, and if so, where else could I find references to it?


How to make players be creative in a game, if the game cannot evaluate it? I am working on a prototype game with several funny visual effects that the player can trigger. The player can be quite creative in the way to use or combine these effects but it seems impossible to make detect evaluate this creativity by the computer. So, from a game design perspective, I wonder what could be the features to drive the players to be creative (experiment various combinations). For the moment i think about "Draw something" where the result is evaluated by other players. I think about levels designed by "Little Big Planet" players but this aspect is out of the core game. I think also about "Minecraft" but I do not understand really how this game encourages the people to be creative (except of the open world). Please tell me if you have any ideas, articles or references that could help me coping with this problem.


Lag compensation with networked 2D games I want to make a 2D game that is basically a physics driven sandbox activity game. There is something I really do not understand though. From research, it seems like updates from the server should only be about every 100ms. I can see how this works for a player since they can just concurrently simulate physics and do lag compensation through interpolation. What I do not understand is how this works for updates from other players. If clients only get notified of player positions every 100ms, I do not see how that works because a lot can happen in 100ms. The player could have changed direction twice or so in that time. I was wondering if anyone would have some insight on this issue. Basically how does this work for shooting and stuff like that? Thanks


How much is too much? From a game design perspective, I've got the following idea Traditional Tower Defense game. an open, mazeable field as monsters approach the castle. "Towers" consist of ground pounding units like foot soldiers, moats, and other things. yawn However, I'm adding the following features "Town" a separate screen for upgrading units and buying new abilities. "Tap Defense" There are archers sitting on the wall with excellent range tap monsters to shoot them. RoF, Damage upgradeable in town. "Tap Defense " for cash purchases, you can buy wizard spells that deal mega damage (think Eagle in Angry Birds). "Underground" the paid version will come with Dwarven Sappers, which give you an additional screen of "mazing" and towers "underneath" the current map, so you can build defenses in at least 2 levels. Is mazing, tapping, and 2 z levels too much? What kinds of things should be considered? I already know that pausing while placing structures will probably be needed (or wanted). Anything else?


Why do modern games not feature extra lives? In the late 80s and early 90s, most games had an extra life mechanic. The player started with limited lives (often three) and dying depleted one of them. If they still had some remaining, they would respawn at the last savepoint. The game would end once all lives had been used and they had to start from the beginning. Players could obtain additional lives during the game. This mechanic was so widely used that it was rather the exception when games didn't use it. It was and still is one of the most recognized video game clich s (the above image has been printed on countless shirts). Nowadays, this mechanic seems to have been forgotten. Almost every modern game gives the player infinite retries from the last save. Many even let the player make their own savepoints with a quicksave mechanic. Those few that try to be different tend to go for the other extreme The "roguelike" mechanic gives the player no retries. What happened to the middle ground of having extra lives? What game design revolution caused the game industry to abandon this feature? When proposing an answer to this question, please try to back up your answer with citations and factual, objective evidence as much as possible so as to avoid dragging this post into the territory of being "too opinion based." Focus on "what" happened and "when," which specific examples.


Web single player 2d top down RPG background image, sprites, and new level loading I'm making a web single player 2D top down rpg using JavaScript (create js library) and have a couple questions. For the background image, I've currently loaded a 1000x1000 bitmap to represent the background for my rpg world (per level). It's drawn in relation to the camera (aka the canvas 500x500) so not all of it is on the screen at the same time. If it's not on the screen, is it still using resources to be drawn? I eventually want to have a much larger "world", which will require a much larger bitmap... What is the best way to load a background image? And what about sprites? I'm assuming if I create several sprite objects with bitmaps... even if they aren't on the camera, they are still using resources? This may slow down the game. Level loading If I walk to another level, or go inside a building, I'd like to load that bitmap... Is there a specific way to architect level loading? Thank you!


What is a game mechanic? I am trying to understand exactly what defines a game mechanic, and whether it is the same as a gameplay mechanic. There are many different sources online that try to define this but they appear to be quite inconsistent. Two that go into quite a bit of depth are below https en.wikipedia.org wiki Game mechanics (game context) https badgeville.com wiki Game Mechanics (gamification context) I understand the concepts of objectives, challenges and rules in a game, but exactly how do game mechanics tie into these? For example, are game mechanics simply abstract ways of motivating users (eg. points, achievements, discovery etc)? Or are they more practical aspects of a game such as a cover system, or how a character moves, jumps etc?


Player Ranking System Already posted this on another forum but I'll repost it here because I'm curious if this is a good forum for game design questions. I'm looking to design a player ranking system for my game. The game is similar to a racing game where you get a score for individual tracks you play (based only on your own performance). Beside the score for tracks played I want a player rank. The purpose of this player rank is to Make you feel like you are progressing and getting better Encourage you to play more Encourage you to play better and improve your skill Be enjoyable Another way to state it is that I want to encourage playing more levels (increasing amount of play) as well as improving skill (getting higher score). It's not necessary for the rank to actually reflect your skill. Although, I suspect some amount of accuracy is needed for the score to feel meaningful. The only ranking system I'm familiar with is the ELO type ranking system which I feel is lacking in some ways. Although it accurately reflect the skill of the player it has the problem of not being enjoyable in my experience it punishes bad plays, gives no rewards for trying experimenting with new plays. It also puts a lot of pressure on you to perform well in every game which discourages casual play. Any ideas? Thanks


8 Directional Character Spritesheet Generator I've searched for the past hour and didn't find anything worth looking. I'm creating a game, and I'm just starting. I found this site to help me create my characters, but I want something to create characters with 8 directions, instead of just 4. Are there any of these online? I don't need the animation part for now, just the 8 direction sprites


what are the essential things to be looked upon in game design I've made a couple of games now. Starting from basic hobbyist projects like snake , I advanced into platform based games, board games, turn based games. While doing the latter of these projects I had to spent a lot of time redesigning certain concepts, sometimes even throwing away certain logic. So always I've felt the time wasted could have been avoided or at least reduced, if I had properly planned each and every stage of my game. Though i can try to do it on paperwork or by a word file with bulleted points. I think there ought to be some other way of game design. Do help me with suggestions and other game design patterns being followed, either as an indie game developer or as a game company. I can learn from both. I am not looking for game design e books, since there is already a thread for that. I would like to get suggestions and game design patters. Thank you.


Tips on thinking of a good game mechanic? I am trying to make a turned based rpg and I really want to know how can i make original game mechanics like Undertale with it's sparing system.I am not really that creative to think of a good game mechanic,I just need tips on how to improve my creativity for game dev because it is really hard for me to think of something original. Thanks!


How does UNO determine how often do 4, 2 other special cards occur in a deck game? For UNO like card games, what factors would one consider when they wanted to set a reasonable proc rate of receiving a special card (for example in UNO's case 4, 2, color wheel, reverse, skip)? What factors should I consider when designing a similar game? I understand probabilities etc. are involved in this. I would appreciate if someone can demonstrate the mathematics concepts behind it.


Why don't game developers change game stories after launch? Game developers have shown willing to remove and add game features, change art assets and remake parts of their games in following updates, but why don't they ever change the plot? Some times parts are added to the story, but only as attachments, never revisions. Why is plot thought as a feature beyond editing, even if it would enhance player experience just as much as any graphical update or gameplay tweak? P.S. I would like to ask for a game narrative writing story tag, and they are just as important part of game development as game mechanics. P.S. This is as broad a question as why not to release source code. Therefore I think it is not too broad for answering.


Is the city of the GTA, L.A. Noire, Assasins Creed or Saint Row games considered a level? I'm trying to figure out whether or not the worlds in which these games take place are levels or not, for the sake of level design. I consider the world to be one big level and all the missions and such being levels as well. While most levels in other games have specific goals, there are pretty much no objectives tied to the "mega levels" of these games. I just wanted to get some opinions.


Would studying psychology give an advantage to a game designer? I've recently read The Art of Game Design and am currently reading Why Reality is Broken and am wanting to learn more about the psychology behind game design. I'm a computer science student but I'm intrigued by the subject and have thought about minoring in psychology. For the veteran game design people out there, would academically studying psychology give a huge advantage to a game designer? There is one class in particular called Sensation and Perception that gets into what goes on in the nervous system when we are stimulated through our five senses and how these stimulations creates certain perceptions. So, basically is this over doing it for someone who wants to create games become a game designer? What originally caught my interest in this subject was reading about how zynga hired a psychologist to help design the mechanics for farmville.