Hello everyone, I wanted to ask about what you consider the most relevant and interesting game design theory that currently exists?

I also want to know what you would expect a game design master and doctorate level education to focus on and care about in terms of topics, areas of study etc. In other words what would you consider the next frontier in game design as a field of study?

(I currently work as an educator at a game design department, and the conversation came up and sparked intense debate between various different interests. My grounding is that this is best answered by practitioners and people who care deeply about the field outside of academia)

i'm a solo dev on a civilization sandbox where nothing is scripted. stone age bands of people learn, settle, trade and fight on their own, and over a long run some tribes climb the eras and some die out. the player mostly watches and can nudge the world.

the design problem i keep hitting: the interesting stuff happens, but it's hard to read. a tribe vanishes and you don't know if it was a drought, a war, a bad split or just bad luck.

what i have now:

• 13 map layers (borders, danger, food, wealth, moods, trade, history and so on)
• click any person for a card with their story, traits, relations, memories and recent thoughts, plus a life log and family tree
• a civ screen per tribe and a written chronicle of the world
• thought bubbles over people, so you can see what they're doing right now

all of that is information, but it's not an explanation. you have to dig.

so my question: in games like this (dwarf fortress, rimworld, that family), what actually makes a collapse feel readable? is it a summary after the fact, warnings before it happens, or fewer layers that each say one clear thing? i'd love to hear from anyone who's tried to fix this in their own game.

Hey guys, I’ve been working on a game that had a vision of mixing 2 genres that don’t typically come together. I’ve put prototypes for both games together and they look so different I’m not sure they will mix well.
Here’s the pitch: you dive into alien ruins to fetch tech; you then sell, research or use them to aid resistance. So one part of the game is very atmospheric action-stealth/horror, the other is a lite grand strategy (research upgrades, build up a base, conquer territories) with choices being: invest in tech that aids you underground or on the surface.
I envision it being a cross of X-COM, Alters and Aliens: Dark Descent. But while the parts work by themselves and share resources and some decisions, they just trigger such different parts of my brain and I’m not even sure there are players who can enjoy both. I love the idea and even appreciate mode-switching, but now I’m getting worried: is there even an audience for such a weird mix?
Help me out, folks, am I making a mistake and should just produce a normal specific-genre game? Or have you seen something like that actually working?

I am developing a game right now. For the time system, I am using the player's local real-world time. This means when it is nighttime in real life, it will also be nighttime in the game. Does this make sense, or is it a good idea? 

Check out the video here...

I love this spotlight effect over a photo you can do in Premiere. The 🟣🔴🟠's can give the impression of neon billboards and cars passing behind the traditional Japanese window. That's a picture I took of Shibuya station a couple years back, the rain is stock. Man, I miss Tokyo.

If you're interested in checking out my game it's a hacking adventure sim that takes place in a kids bedroom in Shibuya. It's proto cyberpunk or retro cyberpunk, basically an alternate timeline the world had to be in order to become cyberpunk eventually.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4179570/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=shibuya-lights&utm_content=r-gamedesign

We’re currently working on a puzzle game that has some dialogue sections in between, and we’re facing a dilemma.

During the SNF, we received two negative reviews from players who didn’t like having to choose what to say when those choices had no real impact on the gameplay. Branching dialogue wasn’t mentioned in any of the positive reviews, either positively or negatively.

So, I have a question: What would you prefer - fake branching or no branching at all, with dialogue simply playing out automatically? Each dialogue section lasts around 1–2 minutes.

Personally, I don’t mind dialogue choices having only a “local” impact in other games, like The Operator, for example. In my opinion, even if the choices don’t have any long-term consequences, they keep players more engaged and make them interact more with the game.

Please, help

Hey there, Ive been working on dozens of gameconcepts for the past 7 years. All they have in common is that they contain some sort of simple generator or are fully based on complex algorithms. With my newest project I am semi capable of generating not just how assets build up the map but also generating the assets. With each new entry I notice the issues that have been hunting me down for many attempts to get worse.

The main problem is how the math makes the games less enjoyable. Runs get less predictable than less I directly gamedesign myself and I still cant really figure out proper ways to get it work. Might be just a skillissue

Also with infinite amount of content the value and meaning of everything is basically 0. instead of a couple strong npcs you get a million. even if they had the same quality you couldnt get them to feel as valueable

These projects turned from real games to complex experiments that no casual player could understand to play. It turned from "yeah this part was fun, that could be better" to "this is so cool, but i couldnt play this for more than 2 minutes" and there the advices get complicated because to fix that it mostly requires to put the whole design in the trashbin and do the gameplay yourself.

most iconic games i play dont impress me by the artistic brilliance or awesome sound design but by the mathematical concepts it used. sometimes i just buy the games because of 1 concept im fascinated of. be it the random terrain generation that i thought was straight up black magic 10 years ago to procedual physics. sometimes just the fact that it was made on a custom engine or had technical limitations being developed 30 years ago is a reason i get hooked. in comparison to the more technical projects under my belt theyre actually enjoyable.

a game i made about the terrain being generated with noise, the textures generated with noise and the soundtrack made with bytebeat algorithms would be freaking cool but technically a bad game because the content unmeaningful, the textures soulless and the soundtrack primitive. even I myself hated to play all of my games but also loved them because of the concepts that they had implemented. while im capable of doing art and sfx I basically dislike doing it since i feel like i dont learn anything new of it.

would be happy about some opinions/advice, i might be wrong or have contradicted myself here and there.

I've been thinking about my time in Dragons Dogma 2 lately. I like a challenge but something I found was that the game didn't really deliver on it (for me personally), and it was in such a way that I lost interest in combat all-together at some point. Don't get me wrong, it's not like the game is easy, but I started to feel the difficulty was completely superficial once you learn a specific game mechanic.

The mechanic

This is not an actively explained game mechanic to my knowledge, but, if you take fatal damage, your character plays a short death animation before the "game over" screen comes up. In this time, you can actually use a consumable after you're already dead to revive your character.

Effect on gameplay

First, I didn't know about it and just accepted the "load from checkpoint". It was hard, a little tedious, but fun to put myself in the right headspace: avoid damage, manage your attack windows, ect. But after I learned about it, I thought, wow that's convenient. Death screens are annoying. So I would start popping a heal when I remembered to, or had one, after taking fatal damage.

But then, after a while, I got so good at spamming consumables it just made me extremely reckless. Taking damage was a non-issue for the most part, as long as you had consumables (and boy they give you a lot). And it eventually soured even the most epic boss fight victories. Nothing felt earned, it just felt inevitable and cheap.

And while consumable spamming is a thing in many games, most of them don't let you do it AFTER you died and you still have to care about your health bar and one hit kills.

My result

What's interesting I guess is that middle part. I started feeling like I don't want to go back to having to die and restart a fight, because it's kind of a waste of time, tedious, and I could just beat the boss after enough retries anyway. But it ended up making the game vastly less rewarding and fun in the end, and altered my playstyle.

A lot of people when faced with things like this just say "Well you can just choose not to do that if you don't think it's fun" (I hate hearing this as a game designer) And I often do, but its funny how hard it is to accept consequences and punishment when the game feels like it asks you every time if you would like to avoid them. As a player, I can't bring myself to do it, even if I know it would make the game more challenging and rewarding in a fun way.

I wanted to share this experience cause I think it gets at one of the more interesting parts of game design. We adjust difficult to make games satisfying and motivating to beat, not tedious or frustrating to play. That is the necessary side effect, and I always found the balancing act to be interesting and really one of the most difficult aspects of game design because there's no one-size-fits-all solution for every player.

And because of that, I can't even say this game mechanic is badly executed even though it did not work for me. A grace period for healing from fatal blows actually seems good out of context. It just really backfired in my case and I wonder how other players engaged with this mechanic and if it had positive or negative consequences on their playthrough. So please chime in if you used this while playing.

EDIT: I just have to mention, because another commenter brought this up and I completely forgot about it, but DD2 already has built in resurrection in the form of wakestones, a rare consumable. Being able to quickly heal after death and before the prompt asking if you want to use a wakestone actually seems like a bug or unintended action that stomps on what could otherwise be a deliberate game mechanic to allow a player to avoid being over-frustrated by loss. Very odd.

In my game, Pidgeon Pocket, you guide a few pigeons around a park to steal from tourists while cops patrol it. There are two penalties right now:

1. If you get greedy close to a cop, they confiscate part of the loot. 2. Cops can net your pigeons, and losing your last pigeon ends the round on the spot.

The first one feels fair to me: it pushes you to read the cops and pick your moment instead of grabbing everything. The second one is the one I keep going back to. It creates real tension near the end, but when the round stops at once, a newer player might read it as the game taking everything away in a single moment.

Softer alternatives I can think of: a netted pigeon comes back after a few seconds instead of being gone, or the last capture costs loot instead of ending the round.

For those of you who have designed short rounds with a hard fail state: how did you decide between a hard stop and a softer penalty? Where do you draw the line between tension and frustration?

I've recently realized (part of) why I struggled with Hollow Knight/Silksong, Doom Eternal, and Mirror's Edge while loving the Metroid Prime series and feel that I've identified a "cursed problem" that lies at the root. You can't analytically explore a space and maintain constant, flowing motion at the same time. You're either moving or you're not. These are different kinds of play even if a game might switch periodically between them. It's the difference between a puzzlebox and riding a bike. Even if your can do both simultaneously, one of these games has to slide to the back of your brain and run on autopilot, which in some sense means you aren't actively playing that game.

I approach games (at least my first time through) wanting to step carefully through, teasing the game apart and learning the mechanics individually. I didn't realize how important it was to me to be able to control the pacing on my first run.

To specify, I am referring to Momentum tests that require the player to perform an action while their character is moving and punish players for interrupting the flow to get their bearings. There usually isn't a good way to reset after a failure, because you need to let the player back up, build momentum, and then take the test again. If you reset them in motion, it's not just confusing and unfun, it's not really testing their control of the motion.

The games that I feel best handled the tension are the Ori games, the Portal games, and the Astrobot games (demo and main title). The key design choice I can see is these games have an extremely low failure penalty and a very small loss of progress on reset. They intentionally allow the player to push themselves at their own pace. This allows the player to set momentum control more comfortably to the back of their brain and train muscle memory with minimal pressure until late into the games after they've built proficiency with the movement controls. Practicing is quick and failure is relatively painless.

We're making a deckbuilding game and have run into a UI/UX design question.

When a card's effects involve complex mechanics or chance-based outcomes, would you prefer to see every detail spelled out directly on the card, or have a simplified description with tooltips that explain the specifics when you hover over certain keywords?

For example:

Example 1: Chance-based effect

A. Detailed description

20% chance to deflect any incoming damage to the character.

B. Simplified description with a tooltip

Low chance to deflect any incoming damage to the character.

(Hovering over "Low chance" reveals the exact probability: 20%.)

Example 2: Scaling effect

A. Detailed description

Deal 1 damage. Permanently gain +1 damage for each enemy killed. Resets upon entering a new area.

B. Simplified description with tooltips

Deal 1 damage. Grow. Saved.

(Hovering over "Grow" reveals that the card gains +1 damage per enemy killed, while "Saved" explains that the bonus persists until entering a new area.)

We're trying to find the right balance between readability and giving players enough information to make informed decisions.

So when I am creating tile sets I am struggling to figure out how to design seamless patterns for the tiles that fit together well and also take inspiration from games like SMB3 without it being too much like copying. When I look to tutorials it’s often tough as they don’t go into detail about how to craft a tile pattern that works as a pattern if that makes sense. Sometimes my patterns are pretty much just a copy of like a tile set that exist like the grass tiles of SMB3. Not sure what to do.

For those who don't know, HUD means Heads Up Display.

Are HUDs a bad thing in games? Do people dislike HUDs? Personally I've never had a problem with them as long as they don't cover up so much I can't see the game.

It's not that I ever see people complaining about HUDs, that doesn't happen often, but rather whenever I see a game that doesn't have a HUD it seems like those games always get praised for it. Or whenever somebody recommends a certain game that doesn't have a HUD, they bring that up as a reason why that game is good and why you should play it.

I'm confused. I never see a game get criticized for having a HUD, I never see somebody saying "Man, do I wish this game didn't have a HUD", or even having a HUD being used for telling you why you should not play that game.

Okay, so people don't hate HUDs it seems, but then why are people so quick to praise a game that doesn't have one? If a game has a HUD, good for it. If a game doesn't have a HUD, good for it. If the game works around having it or not, why should it make the game better or worse?

I'm developing an RPG and have been testing the early-game combat loop. One thing I've learned is that changing enemy damage affects much more than difficulty: it changes potion use, retreat decisions and how many enemies players can safely fight at once.

For developers who've balanced RPG combat, which metrics do you find most useful? Death rate, consumables per encounter, time-to-kill, or something else?

There’s lots of videos that are probably faked of people doing this, but all the components are there.

The biggest hurdle I see is 1) it would probably add a couple hundred gigs to install and 2) it would eat up the GPU.

The GPU seems less of a big deal because if it chugs while you’re having a conversation, who cares?

And I can see people being OK with a couple hundred gigs install, but it seems like it would be smarter to have one system across multiple games.

And I don’t know if the market can ever sustain that.

To me, it's all about variety and style. Games like Dead Cells and especially the Kirby series handle it beautifully. Your constantly trying out new options, with each one feeling unique in terms of how you use them.

It's not a card game where you outthink the foe during the match. It's a game where you set up an unbreakable board turn one from a single card combo starter designed to search anything and special summon half your deck and your foe surrenderd unless he got lucky and drew hand traps.

It's a game decided by luck except when it's decided by who bought better cards. They banned The Geriatric Sentry since 1996 and they still sold Kewl Tunes Bass Boosted Reverb Fart with the exact same effect plus ten more. The card is 1255 words long at .1 point font. World record.

Is it possible to fix the fundamental game design flaws of Yugioh or is it simply destined to always be this way?

Don't talk about what Konami might do, we know what they might do, they'll get worse. Instead say high IQ smart theoretical game design stuff, if you can.

As a player, if something urgent comes up irl I can just pause a game. But if it happens to be a cutscene, I can usually only skip it or let it play in the background. Either way I'll miss the cutscene.

Are there any concrete reasons for that? Maybe it would be confusing for players since they're not used to it? Or are there other reasons?

I'm making a cutscene system for my game and I made it so that players can open a pause menu as usual with "resume" and "skip" buttons. It wasn't a big task to implement so I thought why not. But maybe I'm missing something?

// edit

So from the comments it seems nowadays this feature may not be universal but is actually more common than I realized and there arent really any specific design reasons to not do it. Thanks for the answers

how do you decide on keeping one safe zone, or multiple?

sometimes it feels related to art(RE4), and sometimes a mechanic(Control), or sometimes both(AW2)..

in Hitman BM, they had an entire map as a dedicated safe zone where you could test out weapons

what are your thoughts on this?

Hi, I’m developing an urban fantasy CRPG about wizards (something like Mage: The Ascension), and I’m unsure about the combat. I want it to be real-time, action-based combat, and my biggest inspirations are The Matrix, Madness Combat Animations (yes, that’s right), and the game Oni. The problem is that since I plan to make the game isometric/orthogonal, this comes with some limitations, and I’m not sure how I could implement combat that requires the player to be strategic when facing enemies and to think quickly. The game's combat can involve both magic and melee combat using bladed weapons or punches, or it can involve firearms.

I am making location based game with elements of collecting the "Memes" in AR(Gamified approach for crowdsource, same as Pokemon Go. But my game is focused on checking accessibility of places, through camera). However I am unconfident in the hunting mechanic the memes through camera, because main objects(ramps, lifts, signs and etc) can be unseen by camera or low quality of data from crowdsource. So what I can do in this way?
P.S. I also do survey, you can help me by answering. Link

I'm a solo dev. My first game is a train-routing puzzle. Coloured trains come out of a tunnel. You flip track switches so each train reaches the house of its colour. You can make three mistakes. The fourth mistake ends the run. There are 12 levels.

My problem: I can't finish it. My best is level 10, and I only got there by spending coins to continue. Nobody else has reached level 12 either. Most players so far are people I know, so the sample is small.

Three settings make the levels harder, and I raised all three together:

• Houses: level 1 has 3 houses and level 12 has 14. More houses put more switches between the tunnel and each house.
• Traffic: level 1 sends 22 trains and level 12 sends 56. Each level starts with a 15-second warm-up. The last trains of each level leave close together.
• Planning ahead: in later levels you set the switch for the next train. The current train is still moving.

I can't tell if this is a difficulty curve or a wall. I have two questions.

1. Do continues hide a design problem? I can only see the last levels by spending coins. That makes me think the final levels need retuning. How do you decide when "hard" has become "only beatable by spending"?
2. Should most players who reach the final level be able to beat it? Or can the last level be one that few people clear, if every earlier level feels fair?

For levels 10 to 12, I would reduce traffic and keep the boards complex. Reading the board is the interesting part. Raw speed only adds pressure. How did you tune your endgame, especially with lives or continues?

Tech note: I use Flutter and Flame. Each train car is a small procedural 3D model that turns with the track. The game is free on Android. I can post the link if anyone wants it.

I’m creating a 2D platformer using blueprints in Unreal Engine. Something I’m struggling with is when I design game mechanics or enemies themed around a certain world theme or level type but I then want to possibly use those same assets again in multiple stages throughout the game they may not fit to those world themes so they may feel out of place. I’m unsure how to go about this as it might be a bit tricky to have to design a unique design variation for each world theme. I wasn’t sure if there were any examples of what to do here sorry if this is weird question.