u/xephoid42

I am a software engineer so I realize everything looks like a coding problem to me so I wanted to see what normal people think about this. One of my struggles with game design is I get to a point where the game feels too fragile. Like if I make another change it's all going to fall apart. I do some playtesting and get some great feedback. Then I sit down and realize this is going to be a major chore. I need to think through all the ways this is going to effect play and there is no guarantee I won't miss something. I get tunnel vision about the playtesting loop. The programmer in me says build it in code. Run it through 1000 games and analyze the data. I know that isn't the whole solution, but it makes me feel better. What do you all do?

I've been dabbling in game design for about 15 years. Never published anything. Mostly just fooling around with ideas. I have made about four games that I think are pretty solid. Two of them I have done some playtesting with both my boardgame group and people at cons. I have gotten mixed reviews. Like all games they aren't for everyone so I don't take it too hard. I think I have established they aren't broken and I see players light up when they get how to win. However, I get this nagging feeling sometimes that they could be better. If I just spent more time tweaking the rules I can make it more appealing to everyone. I have also gone down that rabbit hole and just made a mess out of what was a pretty good functioning game.

How do you free yourself from being stuck at the finish line?

I'm constantly thinking about balance or more specifically is there some kind of hack that totally breaks my game. I have played fully published games where I stumbled upon a mechanics loop that let me run away with the game (I won't call it out here). This, to me, feels like a failure as a game developer.

Beyond millions of hours of playtesting what gives you the confidence that your game is balanced?

This is for those games that don't have a solo mode.

I have been fiddling with the idea of a digital player that can join a physical game. This is not just ChatGPT bumbles through playing Terraforming Mars with you forgetting all the rules and making dumb choices. We all know that doesn't work. The key difference here is that the game and the digital player are written in code instead of a prompt so it can't hallucinate and will always make (relatively) good decisions. The LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Qwen, etc) is just an interface between the programmed game and you. One key thing is that you have to have a physical copy of the game.

It works with text, voice and photos of text. It can't reliably discern things like icons, board spaces or figures yet.

The big drawback to this is I have to implement each game and integrate it with the system. I have been lucky and found open source implementations of some games that I can just port. However that list is short. I'm trying to pick which games to integrate next and also looking for some people who want to test it out and give honest feedback. Here are the games I have implemented so far (kind of random I know): Dragonwood, The Snallygaster Situation, Fractured Fist (Game I made), Arcs: Conflict and Collapse in the Reach (base game), Brass: Birmingham, Ankh: Gods of Egypt, Age of Galaxy

For the nerds:

Under the hood it is an MCP (Model Cardboard Protocol) server. Right now I am testing it with local models. Mostly to save on tokens while testing, but also since the model isn't doing any serious reasoning (the code does that) I'm testing how big it actually needs to be to work. I'm hoping to settle on a model that can run comfortably on an average computer.