r/gamedesign

I'm making a roguelite autobattler, and we're currently working on a true final boss. Think something like the Heart in Slay the Spire or Heart of the Storm in Wildfrost.

To reach it, the player will need to make sacrifices during the run: units, rewards, resources, etc. So I'm wondering if the actual boss fight should be a bit easier than our regular final boss, since a lot of the difficulty already comes from reaching it in a weakened state.

The main thing I'm worried about is frustration. In an autobattler, most of the player's agency happens before the fight: building the team, finding synergies, choosing items and positioning units. Once the fight starts, there isn't that much you can do.

That makes specific boss mechanics tricky. A boss spawning lots of minions naturally favors AOE. A long fight favors sustain. A mechanic targeting one important unit can completely screw some builds while barely affecting others.

Of course, the player can lose once, learn the boss, and prepare better on the next run. But if they already struggled just to reach that fight, I'm not sure getting hard-countered by something they couldn't know beforehand feels great.

One idea is to make the fight feel harder than it statistically is. For example, the boss could be stronger while most of your team is alive, then weaken as your units die. Strong teams would still lose some units and get that "oh shit, I might lose" moment, while weaker teams could potentially scrape through at the end.

Another option would be making the true final boss always available and very hard, but completing the sacrifices gives you a passive bonus that makes the fight much easier.

Do you think a true final boss needs to be the hardest fight in the game, or can the main challenge be earning your way to it?

Hello,

I'm working on a puzzle platformer with **99 levels**, and I'm trying to decide how punishing the death system should be.

Which option would you prefer?

A) 3 lives for the entire game. Lose all 3 → start from the beginning.
B) 3 lives for the entire game, but you can collect extra lives on some levels.
C) Start with 3 lives, but completing levels gives you additional lives/chances.
D) No lives. Deaths are simply counted as losses/deaths and you can keep retrying the current level.

E) Two modes:
Normal: unlimited retries, deaths are only counted.
Extreme: life for the entire 99-level run. Die once → start from level 1.

Which system sounds the most fun to you?
I'm especially interested in whether a limited-lives system adds exciting tension to a puzzle game, or if it would just make you frustrated after reaching the later levels.

Tomek

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Bigger health bars and more damage taken isn't difficulty design, it's just tedium or frustration depending on which way you turn the dial. Real difficulty tuning changes enemy behavior, spacing, resource availability — things that require different skill, not just patience or reflexes.

Some games get this right by changing what enemies do on higher difficulties, not just their stats. More should do that instead of the lazy version.

Hey everyone,

I've been working as a Level Designer for around 8 years(in mobile casual puzzle games), and with over 11 years of total work experience but lately I've been feeling pretty stuck and I'm seriously considering switching into another area of work.

The biggest issue is compensation. My current pay is quite low(under 1k euros) for my experience, and although I have a relatively good chance of getting promoted, even with a promotion I don't think the salary would realistically allow me to support a family in the future. As well, as I literally cannot see any level design jobs that actually even look at my CV.

I'm starting to look at other career paths where my existing experience might actually transfer well.

For people who have made a similar switch, what career areas would be realistic for an experienced Level Designer to move into, or should I still hang in there?

What paths would you consider realistic for someone in my position, and which ones would you avoid?

So I'm thinking of trying to make a grid-based strategy game (think fire emblem) but the only game I can really find/think of that has a pc port is, strangely, South Park: the fractured but whole. Would you say that game is a good example? And are there any other games in your opinion that are good?

Hi

My game setup
Im designing an incremental game where you smash things and get resources (common incremental gameplay). I have 4 different things to smash and each one has 3 different value(high to low). I categorize my upgrades into three categories: 1- common upgrades like increase the time of session, increase the value of smashable things, increase the total number of them, and stuff like that. 2- gameplay mechanics like arrows shooting at smashable things, creature smashing things, special smashable that have unique behaviour etc 3- the tool use to smash things and their upgrades like strength or radius

My question
I can add all these upgrades to a giant skilltree or I can have one skilltree for first category and one(or possibly two) for other two categories

Which option do you prefer?

For example, maybe the current boundary is occupied by monsters that will eject an intruder (such as you the player) far away (perhaps somewhat predictably, maybe probabilistically random): this could come in handy when being chased, for instance (provided you got the means to survive impact).

hello!

I'm messing with game dice math. I'm doing it in what i assume is the slowest and least efficient possible way. How do I do it smarter?

key information:

• Player versus Player contested dice rolls to determine win/loss/tie
  • I roll, you roll, and we see who won (or tied)
• Variable # of dice per roll
  • I can choose 1 die or 3. You do the same
• Dice have different values
  • i.e., one die rolls [0,1,1,2,2,2] versus another that rolls [0,0,1,1,1,1]
  • W/L/T is determined by total points on each side

need:

• I want to change individual die outcomes to see the difference in win %.
  • i.e., [0,1,1,1,2,2] versus [0,0,1,1,1,1] has a 50% win percentage. What's the win % if I change the first die to [0,2,1,1,2,2]? (it's 61.11%, in case you were curious)

attempt:

• I modelled out ALL possible outcomes for 2 dice vs 2 dice to get me the #s I wanted.
  • this means i made a big table with "1,1,1,1" then "1,1,1,2" and so on, to model all possible permutations of 4 dice rolls. Then I ascribed a winner for each permutation

help?

• I would LIKE to do this in a more sensible way so that I can have more dice involved without having 100k rows in excel.
• How can I calculate these win % without modelling everything?

****UPDATE-SOLVED******

Thank you for all the help!

Ended up using INDEX & RANDBETWEEN functions in excel to generate a big dataset of random rolls.
=INDEX(Dice!H$8:H$13,RANDBETWEEN(1,6)) . This calls the custom dice faces in H8:H13, selecting 1/6 random values from within that set.

I used that to create a big ol' set of rolls, and judged wins/losses/ties from that as functionally good for determining probability. So I just plug in my custom dice faces to see how they fare in the big set, and adjust them to see how they affect the win %.

In case you're curious, I first made the set ONE MILLION ROLLS. Which was fun, but made it lag, so I cut it down to 100k. It swings as much as ~2% each time it recalculates. But it MOSTLY stays within the same few tenths of a %, and it serves my purpose.

cheers,

As the title says, I wanna know your favorite single ability/mechanic in your own game. Maybe add a short explanation of the game and related mechanics for context.

I'll start: my game is a 5v5 hero shooter that focuses on physics and movement. I put a lot of time into thinking about the interactions between players, other players, and objects, and I also tried to really flesh out the variety of movement options that a player can use.

Every single map in the game has some specific area (important to the objective) where gravity changes - be it in a different direction, or have multiple points of attraction, or no gravity at all, these gravity altering zones are present all around.

And this created a particular problem, specifically in the no-gravity zones: How would players move? Yeah, recoil and collisions could impact it a little bit, but... you cant run or slide or charge midair.

So I added micro-jets - omni-directional boosters that can slightly push a player towards where they want. But the reason I love them so much is that I added the use of micro-jets in normal gravity zones, to boost your sprinting, sliding, charging, and other movement tech.

And I just love thinking about how micro-jets could be used to add to and complacate all sorts of movement, in tandem with the various universal movement options, item-specific movement boosts, and character-specific movement abilities.

Hey guys, I've been playing a city builder game and I've really fallen in love with the genre and want to build my own.
I want to make a city and country builder, starting from the medieval ages until a futuristic era. You build a city, later a couple of cities and later an entire country, you can appoint ministers and governors to run and build things automatically once it's too much for 1 person. You can also choose your economical ideology, a spectrum that goes from free market capitalism to state socialism.
Your country can be invaded, fall into civil war or prosper like no other.

I want to make a game where people can sink hundreds of hours into a single save file.

I've been thinking about a game setup where the main story beats are locked in ahead of time, but players still get to nudge certain things along the way.

Things like

• who ends up allying with whom
• what resources the group has on hand
• whether some private conversations even happen
• how ready a character is for the next big event
• which short-term plan gets picked

But the overall narrative arc stays authored.

The design question that keeps bugging me is if the ending is set in stone, doesn't player agency eventually start to feel like an illusion?

But if you let players change the ending completely, then pacing, character arcs, and story coherence get a lot harder to keep together.

So where would you draw that line?

Would you rather let players alter the actual ending, or let them shape the journey, relationships, resources, and fallout in meaningful ways while keeping the big picture intact?

I'm especially curious how people here draw the line between meaningful agency and just throwing in more dialogue branches for the sake of choice.

I've been struggling with a design question lately and I'm curious how other designers or players look at this.

I'm a developer designing around local co-op, partly because I'm incredibly nostalgic for the old SNES days when my brother and I would hunt for games we could play together on the same screen. I'd love to capture some of that again in a more modern kind of game. :)

But while designing around this, I keep running into a conundrum:

The more meaningful you make co-op mechanics, the more dependent players become on each other.

Which is great... until Player Two isn't there.

If you choose to remove that dependency, then suddenly the game is much more accessible, but you also risk ending up with a single-player game where another player just happens to be running around.

Go too far the other way and you can make some really interesting mechanics, but now someone literally can't play your game unless they find somebody else.

I've been thinking about D&D quite a bit in relation to this, which offers really interesting solutions to making players "want to play together".

A good DM doesn't necessarily stop players from splitting the party. Instead, they keep giving players reasons to come back together. For example:

1. Different strengths. An encounter can be tackled alone, but another character's abilities suddenly open up much better options.
2. Information. One player discovers something that becomes relevant to what another player is doing.
3. Danger. You can wander off on your own, but sometimes getting yourself into trouble makes having the rest of the party around very useful.
4. Story. Individual character stories overlap, so players become invested in things happening to someone other than themselves.
5. Opportunity. Something appears that isn't impossible alone, but becomes much more interesting when the group is there.

The interesting part to me is that none of those necessarily require the DM to say "you must stay together."

So I've been wondering how far you can push that idea in a video game.

For example:

1. Let both players explore independently, but design the world so they regularly discover things worth calling the other player over for.
2. Give characters abilities that work perfectly well alone, but can be combined in ways that create completely new possibilities. Basically: 1+1=3.
3. Allow encounters to be solved solo, while another player might introduce a completely different solution rather than simply making the same solution easier.
4. Let players get themselves into situations where help is useful without immediately throwing up a "waiting for Player Two" gate.
5. Have information, discoveries or even storylines found by one player become relevant to what the other is doing elsewhere.

Ideally I don't want the game constantly telling you:

"You need Player Two to continue."

I'd rather have someone playing alone occasionally think:

"Damn... I wish X was here to do this with me."

But that's also where I keep running into the same problem: the more optional you make that second player, the easier it becomes for co-op to feel superficial. And the more meaningful you make them, the closer you get to simply requiring two players.

So I'm curious how other people feel about this.

Would a more open adventure designed like this actually appeal to you? Do you know games that already handle this particularly well? And where do you think the sweet spot is: fully committing to requiring multiple players, or preserving solo play without reducing co-op to "single-player + Player Two"?

So I’ve started planning out what the first game I want to make is. I have mostly everything down on paper but I’ve never done coding in my life so am sure what would be the best option.

For the context I want the game to be a sort of turn based roguelike where you control up to 4 characters going to a dungeon kinda like if monster hunter had the more tactical rpg dnd/fire emblem combat.

Standard tutorial: movement, core mechanic, one combat encounter. Testers get through it fine in the moment, then forget a key input the second something stressful happens later.

Not sure if it's teaching too much at once, or not reinforcing the mechanic again shortly after. Anyone solved this and what fixed it?

I'll start - Plants vs Zombies 1.
The tutorial so good you don't even realize there's a tutorial.

Some weeks ago i released the demo for my game. After some thousand demo-runs i see that the average play time of my demo is 38 minutes. (and also the wishlists start to grow, so the demo is at least not too bad)

"Corridor 13" is an anomaly spotting game and the Demo ends after Corridor 8 / 13. (It was 6 / 13 for the first hundreds of runs, than i changed it, because some players had too much luck with just try and error and finished the demo very fast without even saw anything interesting)

the full game will be about 1.5 or 2.0 hours i think. thats what i expect to achieve when its done. 2.0 would also be good for preventing people to play, end and refund it.

So, is 38 minutes of demo content good? or too much for a game with that limited amount of gameplay? What do you think?

Thinking about that 38 minutes, that may mean that some people just play it a few minutes and others play the demo waaay longer than 38min. But i dont have detailed statistics about that.

Some of you with good memories may remember a post I made several months back about combining genres. I was given great feedback about how that was a pretty bad idea and I quickly pivoted to something else. That went on to be quite successful as my first game partially thanks to the feedback I was given from this sub.

I'm back with a larger idea, a procedural police simulator similar to LSPDFR, and a significantly larger problem; it is so dynamic it seems impossible to design a proper progression system that works for these four factors:

1. Players need to be able to play how they want. One of the things that makes LSPDFR so fun is that it mimics the immense amount of agency police officers have in real life
2. It cannot be biased more towards one play style than another. Some players may want to focus on writing tickets and responding to basic calls, whereas others play like a Hollywood-style action movie and make arrests engage in use of force constantly. Another player might want to be proactive and try to identify and seize illegal weapons
3. It needs to be fair

Reputation is a currency-like system which can go towards equipment, vehicles, gear, agencies/assignments, new in-game abilities, etc

Police Simulator: Patrol Officers has a very tightly controlled progression system that analyzes the exact legal correctness of every action the player takes. This is one of the many things that makes this game bad. It actively harms one of the two main things that a police game has going for it regardless of the actual execution of the idea: fantasy. A good progression system should balance fun from realism in what cops can and can't do with the power and importance fantasy. Police Simulator: Patrol Officers often gets the realism right, but makes the player feel like they are being quizzed with every decision

The progression system doesn't need to be super rigid, so it could be based on different things like milestones or general competencies, but I'm struggling to think of a good idea

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do here? I'm open to something that might give players a little room for abuse as long as it works for the most part, but the main goal here is to let players play how they want as well as having fair and fun progression