u/Luann1497

There is a lot of design discussion around negative reinforcement, friction, and punishing suboptimal play. But I keep thinking about the flip side: games that create genuine satisfaction not just from success, but from timing.

The grenade example from Halo is a good reference point. You are not just rewarded for throwing a grenade, you are rewarded for throwing it at the right moment. The design makes you feel that difference clearly. The feedback loop is tight and legible.

Most games do not bother separating those two things. You used the right ability and you won. Cool. But did you use it well? Did the game even give you a way to know?

I think there is an underexplored design space around rewarding execution timing independently from outcome. Not just did you use the tool, but did you read the situation correctly before committing to it. Strategy games gesture at this with flanking bonuses and zone control, but even there the reward is usually statistical, not felt.

What games do you think handle this well? And is there a clean design pattern for making players feel the difference between using the right move and using the right move at the right moment? Curious whether this is a feedback design problem, a tutorialization problem, or something deeper in ruleset structure.

Hey r/Decks, finally pulling the trigger on a raised deck for our backyard after talking about it for months. The spot is around 3.5 by 4.5m with a slope of maybe 700mm drop. Hoping to get some storage space underneath and enough room for the BBQ and some chairs for summer arvos. Been reading through heaps of your posts here and it's been a big help (especially the before and afters and the horror stories) me and a mate are gonna tackle most of it ourselves over the next few weekends. Tradie quotes were coming in at 16-21k which is crazy for this so DYI route it is. Aiming to keep it under 10-12k total.

Got a few questions if you don't mind:

• best way to deal with the slope without overcomplicating the footings?
• composite boards vs treated pine, is the extra cost worth it long term?
• nsw permit stuff, how strict are they for something like this in wollongong area?

Will try to post some progress shots if it all goes to plan and doesnt turn into a comedy show. cheers!

Sorry for the obvious post, but wow, a full day out on an exposed trail in Utah completely opened my eyes.

I finally wore my leather wide-brim instead of my usual baseball cap, and the difference is crazy (for context I bought this thing on a whim a while back but never wore it out because I felt too self-conscious, it's just so not my usual style, but man was I wrong). The sun is brutal out here, but for once, the back of my neck and the tops of my ears aren't totally cooked after a four-hour hike.

It gets so aggressively hot when you aren't under any tree cover, the heat just hammers your face the whole time. Walking around in this thing creates your own portable shade. So yeah, I fully see why people look like nerds in these full-brim sun hats now, lol. I used to think it was overkill, but after today, this thing is officially part of my permanent packing list for backpacking trips.

Always see people just rocking standard baseball caps on most weekend hikes and leaving with bright red necks, but I'm definitely not going back to that.

So I've been grinding on my topdown extraction game for about two years now. Got the core loop feeling tight, enemy vision cones are dialed in, and patrol routes actually feel believable. But the moment I started layering in dynamic obstacles like crates players can push and destructible cover, my collision detection basically started having an identity crisis.

Enemies clip through corners they should stop at, pushed objects occasionally phase into walls, and the whole thing gets worse the faster the player moves. Classic stuff I know, but fixing one thing seems to break two others.

What I'm wondering is whether anyone else has gone through this after getting the fun parts working first. I built most of the game feel before really stress testing the physics layer and now I'm paying for that decision hard.

Did you refactor your collision system middevelopment or just patch around the edges and ship it? I'm debating whether a proper rewrite of that layer is worth the time loss or if smart workarounds are the more realistic path for a solo dev trying to actually finish the thing.

Would love to hear how others balanced technical debt against momentum, especially if you were deep into development before the cracks showed up.

i am getting a proper security camera system put in at my house and planet security will be handling the installation. i want good coverage on the front, sides and backyard with clear night vision and easy remote viewing on my phone.

i am not sure about the best placement to avoid blind spots or glare from lights. also wondering how they usually run the wiring and if there are any common issues with weatherproofing in this climate.

has anyone had cameras installed recently? what questions should i ask the installer before they start? any tips on what features are actually useful day to day and what to watch out for with the setup?

So I am finishing up my partial hospitalization program next week, and honestly, I am absolutely terrified to step down to intensive outpatient. Going from six hours of structured therapy every single day to just a few nights a week feels like a massive drop-off. I'm so used to the constant accountability, and the thought of having all this unstructured free time is making my anxiety spike like crazy. I'm terrified I'm going to relapse back into my old coping mechanisms the second I'm left to my own devices. I've been looking into what the care team at CA Mental Health offers for their outpatient services since their whole focus is on structured trauma-informed care and smooth transitions. They run specialized virtual intensive outpatient program tracks that blend heavy DBT and clinical support, which seems like it might actually bridge the gap so I don't just crash. Has anyone else gone through the transition from a full day program to a less intensive routine? How did you handle the sudden lack of structure without losing all the progress you made?

Look, I fell into a really rough pattern of drinking heavily every single night for the last two years straight. It started during a super stressful period a while back, and man... it quickly started draining my physical energy and destroying my mental clarity. It reached a point where if I tried to skip just one evening, my anxiety would go completely off the charts and I'd get all restless and clammy, so cracking open a drink became an automatic routine just to avoid the physical crash.

I was constantly waking up feeling bloated, exhausted, and low-key terrified of what I was doing to my body. But then, a few days ago, something completely surreal happened. I was just sitting on my couch late at night, had this intense, quiet reality check with myself in the dark, and just... walked away from it. The weirdest part is I'm not climbing the walls with cravings or suffering through a miserable, white-knuckle phase right now. Anyway, I needed to put this into words somewhere to make it feel permanent, so I came to this sub since I've been spending a ton of time reading through everyone's self-improvement journeys here lately.

I've been working on a small action game for a few months now and keep running into the same internal debate. Core systems like movement, collision, and state management are functional but kind of boring to work on after a while. Meanwhile tweaking jump curves, hit stop frames, and screen shake is way more satisfying and honestly makes the game feel real in a way that raw functionality just doesn't. The problem is I know I'm probably procrastinating on harder architectural decisions by polishing feel too early. But then I read postmortems from devs who shipped and they almost always mention that early playtests responded to feel over features. So I'm curious where other devs draw the line, especially solo or small team situations. Do you intentionally lock yourself out of polish passes until systems are solid, or do you let feel work happen alongside core development because it keeps motivation up and gives better feedback on whether the mechanics are worth building out further? I've seen the argument that bad feel kills playtests before your systems even get evaluated, which makes early polish defensible. But I've also wasted entire weeks on juice that ended up getting cut anyway.

What's your actual workflow here, not the textbook answer but what you really do?

Something that keeps nagging at me: almost every combat system is built around the idea that faster, cleaner, more decisive wins are better wins. Kill faster, waste fewer resources, take less damage. Efficiency is the implicit north star.

But restraint as a mechanic is almost entirely unexplored. What if holding back, letting an enemy escape, or choosing not to use your strongest tool actually opened up more interesting downstream consequences than just winning cleanly?

Outer Wilds kind of gestures at this by protecting curiosity over challenge, but that's not quite what I mean. I'm thinking about systems where the quality of your victory matters in a persistent way. Not morality meters or karma points slapped on top, but genuine mechanical branching based on how you won, not just whether you won.

A few tactics games flirt with it through optional objectives, but those still feel additive rather than intrinsic to the combat loop itself.

Has anyone actually designed around this intentionally and found it worked in play? I'm curious whether restraint as a firstclass design value runs into fundamental problems with player psychology, or whether it just rarely gets tried because efficiency is easier to tune and reward.

Would love examples from any medium: board games, TTRPGs, video games, anything.

Salut! Am observat că în ultima vreme apar tot mai multe platforme educaționale care încearcă să digitalizeze pregătirea pentru examene, am văzut recent upper school că tot apare prin reclame.

Ca studenți, ce părere aveți despre genul ăsta de abordare? Credeți că ajută elevii să învețe mai eficient sau e doar o altă formă de a-i pune să tocească online? Mă gândeam să recomand cuiva mai mic, dar voiam să știu dacă vi se pare o investiție utilă sau dacă sistemul clasic de meditații rămâne încă de bază. Mersi!

Been thinking about this lately. I upgrade every 23 years and the depreciation on flagships is brutal if you're not careful. Pixel and iPhone hold value better than most midrange Android options, but even those drop fast after a new generation drops.

What I've found helps: sell before the next model is announced, not after. Timing matters a lot. Buying refurbished or secondhand is honestly underrated too, you get solid hardware for way less. I did and got from Phone Exchange and worked good tbh.

We're at a point where proving you're a real human online is becoming an actual problem right? like between ai bots, fake accounts, deepfakes.. Sometimes i genuinely can't tell if i'm talking to a person or not, even on reddit and it's only getting worse

So when i heard about apps/services that let you verify your identity as a human (not your NAME, just like.. this is a real person) i thought ok that actually makes sense. But then i actually went and tried World where they scan your iris with this orb device to confirm you're human, and you get some crypto tokens for doing it. The whole thing took maybe 4 minutes at a kiosk near me. They claim the biometric data is deleted right after and only a uniqueness proof is kept. Walked away with around $43 worth of tokens and a verified human badge or whatever, and now i feel.. fine? like i expected to feel weird about it but i don't really.

I've been working on a small project for about eight months now and I keep running into the same wall. Playtesting sessions give me mixed signals. Some people say the core loop feels satisfying, others lose interest after ten minutes. The mechanics work on paper and technically everything functions, but something feels off and I can't tell if that's a real problem or just developer blindness after staring at the same systems for so long.

I've read the postmortems. I know the classic story of someone spending five years on a game that doesn't land. I also know people who nearly scrapped projects that went on to do really well. The hard part is that both outcomes exist and there's no clean formula for telling them apart early.

So I'm genuinely curious how experienced devs here handle this. Do you have a specific milestone or test you use to evaluate whether the fun is fixable or fundamentally missing? Is there a point where you decided the core wasn't working and either pivoted or moved on? How much of it comes down to honest selfassessment versus external feedback?

Not looking for motivation, just practical frameworks or honest stories from people who have faced this decision before.

Hey guys, just picked up a new stock rig and looking to get a complete custom build done from top to bottom. I want to do a full bar work setup, snorkel, upgraded exhaust, and a comprehensive off-grid electrical package to make it completely adventure-ready.

Instead of buying parts from five different places and trying to piece it together in my driveway, I’d rather hand the keys to a dedicated workshop that can handle mechanical, body protection, and high-end 12v integration all under one roof.

I've been looking at one shop, they seem to do everything from custom trays and bull bars to full power management systems. For anyone who has done a complete scratch build in WA, did you go with a single specialized shop, or is it better to separate the bar work from the auto electrical stuff?

weekend project turns into two-year slog. design docs and "maybe later" lists help, but don't solve it.

what actually works for you? How do you cut features without killing motivation or creativity?

if you shipped after scope creep: what clicked? Brutal prioritization or a mindset shift?

my water heater has been struggling to keep up after the recent storms with lukewarm water in the shower and some odd popping noises. i checked the thermostat and flushed it myself but it didnt improve much and now im worried about a bigger issue in the lines.

i had sunny bliss plumbing & air come out and they said the sediment from rain runoff can build up in older units causing exactly this so they did a full flush and inspection. is this common in south florida homes with frequent storms and what preventive maintenance actually helps long term?

thanks in advance for any tips on keeping it running smooth without constant repairs.

For the longest time, I thought my iPhone was more than good enough for business content

Whenever someone suggested hiring a professional video crew, I'd immediately write it off as an unnecessary expense. Phones shoot in 4K now, stabilization is surprisingly good, and honestly, most of the videos I made looked perfectly fine to me

Besides, I’ve read so many posts about how professional video makers were making content even on an audated iPhones

That was my mindset until recently

I watched a professionally produced video for a business that was pretty similar to mine. Out of curiosity, I also looked into some local production companies, including Phoenix video production, just to see what they were actually offering

The difference had almost nothing to do with the camera itself

The lighting was better. The audio was cleaner. The camera movements felt intentional. The editing had a rhythm to it. Everything looked polished without feeling overproduced

More importantly, the business just looked different

It looked established. It looked trustworthy. It looked like a company that had been around for years, even though I knew it wasn't much bigger than mine

Spotted that people arent paying for a camera itself. They're paying for the stuff like storytelling, experience, and all the little details that most of us don't even notice until we see them done well

Don't get me wrong… I still use my phone all the time for quick updates, behind the scenes short clips, and social media posts

But after I saw the difference I completely understand why some businesses invest in professional video production. It's one of those things that seems expensive until you actually see what you're getting