u/AdSlight4516

I don’t know which apartment it was coming from, but someone nearby was practicing the same part of a song over and over today.

At first it was kind of annoying because they kept messing up at the exact same note. Then after maybe an hour they finally played the whole thing correctly.

Before I could even react, someone from another balcony yelled “LET’S GOOOO” and the trumpet player played it again.

No idea who either of them are, but I felt oddly invested by the end.

A friend recently planned a weekend birthday trip and added me to the group chat. I said it sounded fun, but I couldn’t commit until I checked my work schedule and figured out the cost.

She booked a large Airbnb and apparently included me in the headcount. I never paid a deposit or clearly said I was going. Two weeks before the trip, I told her I couldn’t attend because of work and money.

The trip happened without me, but yesterday she sent me a payment request for $640. She said the Airbnb was booked based on the original number of people, so everyone had to pay more after I dropped out. She thinks I should still cover my entire share.

I understand that planning group trips is stressful, but paying $640 for a trip I never confirmed or attended feels ridiculous. The rest of the group has gone quiet, which makes me feel like they agree with her.

Should I offer to pay a smaller amount to preserve the friendship, or stand firm and pay nothing?

I’m 23 and recently moved into my first apartment alone. I gave my parents a spare key strictly for emergencies.

Last month, my younger brother asked if he could use my apartment between classes. I told him it wasn’t a good day, but when I came home, he was sitting on my couch. Apparently, my mom gave him the spare key without asking me.

Since then, he has let himself in at least four times. He eats my food, uses my shower, and once brought his girlfriend over while I was at work. I told him he needs to stop, but he said our mom told him it was fine.

I asked for the key back and now he claims he can’t find it. My parents think I’m being dramatic and keep saying that family shouldn’t need an invitation.

My landlord charges $180 to change the lock, but I’m seriously considering paying it and not giving my family another key. How should I handle this without creating a massive fight with everyone?

For reference I am building an open world mmo rpg!

Players usually notice pretty quickly when enemies get to ignore the game’s rules.

An enemy can attack through another enemy, rotate during an animation, track the player through a wall, or keep moving with zero stamina. Technically, some of these shortcuts might be necessary to stop the AI from becoming easy to exploit.

The problem is that difficulty starts feeling fake when the player loses because an enemy did something they were never allowed to do.

Perfect symmetry doesn’t seem like the answer either. Enemies and players have completely different jobs, and forcing them into identical systems could make combat less interesting.

Where do you draw the line? Which rules should always apply to both sides, and which ones are fair for enemies to bend if it creates better gameplay?

A lot of mechanics that sound annoying on paper can become a huge part of a game’s identity.

Limited inventory makes every item matter. Long travel times make the world feel large. Losing progress creates tension. Even slow animations can make actions feel deliberate instead of weightless.

But there’s obviously a point where friction stops supporting the experience and starts feeling like the game doesn’t respect your time.

The difficult part imo is that “remove everything inconvenient” isn’t a great design rule either. Follow that too far and inventory becomes meaningless, exploration turns into fast-travel menus, and failure has no cost.

How do you decide whether an inconvenient mechanic is creating meaningful tension or just adding chores? Is there a specific mechanic you removed, simplified, or kept after testing?

Common advice is to prototype the core mechanic first. Makes sense, because if the main loop isn’t fun, the rest of the project probably doesn’t matter.

But the core mechanic isn’t always the biggest risk.

A game could have fun movement while its procedural levels produce boring layouts. The combat might work, but the networking model could make the full concept unrealistic. Sometimes the feature most likely to kill the project is a technical system the player barely notices.

So maybe the first prototype shouldn’t represent the final game. Maybe its job is just to attack the most dangerous assumption as cheaply as possible.

When planning an early prototype, do you prioritize proving the fun, proving the technical feasibility, or proving that the project can actually be finished within scope?

Some mocap cleanup looks technically perfect but also loses the little weight shifts and timing differences that made the motion feel human.

Obviously foot sliding, clipping and broken contacts need fixing. But after that, where do you stop? There seems to be a point where smoothing every curve makes the character feel more robotic, not less.

How do you decide which imperfections add realism and which ones are just noise? Is there anything you almost always keep from the original capture?

A basic locomotion setup is fine, but then you add attacks, hit reactions, weapons, crouching, jumping, cutscenes and suddenly there are transitions going everywhere.

One approach is keeping the Animator mostly for visuals while gameplay states stay in code. That seems cleaner, but it can also make animation timing harder to manage when attacks and movement need to line up exactly.

Do you prefer animation state machines, code-driven animation, or a mix of both? Would also love to see how people organize layers without ending up with 40 random booleans!!

On paper, idle games seem simple. Make number go up, add upgrades, then reset through a prestige system.

But the hard part seems to be giving players enough progress to keep checking back without making every upgrade feel pointless. If progression is too fast, the game runs out of content. Too slow and it just feels like waiting.

I also think earning rate and decision rate are different things. Numbers can increase constantly while the player barely makes any meaningful choices.

For anyone building idle or incremental games, what do you balance first: upgrade costs, session length, prestige timing, or offline earnings?

I’ve lived in Toronto for years, but I still get confused whenever I try to use the PATH ( I lowkey feel like a rat in a maze LOL). I’ll enter thinking I’m taking a shortcut and somehow come out inside a completely different office building. Is the layout genuinely complicated, or have I just never learned how to read it properly? Please help!

Recent 3rd year studying finance in USC, been to a couple events this year and here are my thoughts...

Networking events are presented as opportunities to build genuine relationships, but most conversations seem focused on jobs, referrals, or gaining something from the other person. Does anyone genuinely enjoy networking, or are we all collectively pretending it is not transactional?