r/gamedesign

Perhaps I'm just doing a bad job of searching, but I'm having a hard time finding information about what makes a knowledge-based game, core design principles of one, what makes one good or bad, examples, etc.

For my Bachelor’s thesis I’m researching boss battle design and how different players approach combat situations differently, with the goal of creating player profiles/playstyle categories.

I already know frameworks like Bartle’s Player Types (Killer, Explorer, Socializer, etc.), but I’m specifically looking for literature or papers focused on combat/fighting playstyles in games — for example aggressive vs defensive players, risk-taking, tactical behavior, kiting, resource management, adaptability, and similar concepts.

I’m struggling to find academic sources that define or categorize these kinds of combat-oriented playstyles. Has anyone come across papers, books, GDC talks, or other resources about this topic and could share them?

Hello, I’m currently designing a psychological horror ARPG. The premise is that you play as a young knight whose goal is to protect everyone, but his own overprotective nature slowly leads him to destroy the very things he wanted to save. The game aims to create horror through isolation, paranoia, and reality breaking experiences.

Right now, I’m working on writing the characters’ psychological behaviors, so I’ve been studying topics like moral injury, apophenia, psychosis, and similar concepts.

My question is: how much is enough? How detailed do characters really need to be, and how deeply do you usually study psychology or related subjects when writing characters for your own projects?

Optimizing the fun out of games is a concept in multiplayer games, that can make them almost impossible to play for fun, but even when you're playing single-player games, you're often faced with the drive to optimize (and remove the fun).

We all know these games; city-builders or colony sims that have some ethical dimension to them, which you should completely ignore if you want to run your build smoothly.

From herding people in games like Rimworld to forcing the children into the mines in Frostpunk and even sacrificing squad members in Darkest Dungeon. Even Rollercoaster Tycoon is famous for having free soda and to-pay bathrooms. You cut corners on empathy, because in a simulation it just makes rational sense.

Your factory runs best on human grease. They're just numbers, after all.

But in some of these examples, the developers have tried to punish you for forsaking compassion. In Frostpunk you have narrative reasons not to crush human spirits by military police force and in Prison Architect you're rewarded with a peaceful prison population if you fulfil more than your prisoner's most basic needs.

All of these are kinda weak, though. In the face of harder levels, you're still forced (by rationalization) to go back to the most efficient, most soulless setups.

What games have great mechanics to combat this? How do they work?

I am sure this is an unconventional topic of discussion for r/gamedesign, but I wanted to bring it up anyway. Christian Freeling was a designer of dozens of modern abstract strategy games, his work spanning decades. He is certainly among the most influential individual designers in the history of that subgenre... apparently, he died yesterday of an accident in his home. It is a big loss.

Some of his more well-known games are:

• Dameo, a major evolution on Draughts ("Checkers")
• Havannah, a connection game in the genre of Hex.
• Grand Chess, a 10x10 chess variant, and in my opinion the only truly elegant "expansion" chess variant

But I would argue that Freeling's more obscure games are the ones that really capture his unconventional personality as a designer.

Abstract strategy games don't tend to find much purchase (literally) in the board game world because of how profit-driven and collectors-oriented the industry is. The vast majority of completed abstract strategy games are never designed as commercial products in the first place, including most of Christian Freeling's work. Some abstract games are celebrated as great achievements within the tiny bubble of abstract game enthusiasts, but this simply does not change the fact that they are not viable in the marketplace. Thus, they do not make much of a cultural dent in the mainstream or even in game design circles.

The reason I bring this all up, and the reason I bring it up on r/gamedesign specifically, is that I think there's actually an enormous treasure trove of strategy game design insights to be gained by the study of this genre, including the works of this specific designer. I started as an enthusiast of digital strategy games, yet some of Freeling's weirder games like Storisende and Hannibal work really drew me in and influenced me greatly.

So I want to point to Freeling's incredible games website, mindsports.nl, which remains the richest game design resource I have ever encountered for strategy games.

The site compiles dozens of games designed by Freeling and others. It provides insights into the origins and design process behind each of Freeling's own games, going back decades--and since he's an abstract game designer, the analysis is inherently laser focused on what you might call "ruleset design" (rather than say, manufacturing, or marketing, or visual aesthetics). He also has written many fascinating articles, including a deep dive into the history of draughts variants, and various discussions of abstract game design philosophy.

If nothing else, the site is a great window into the obscure community of abstract strategy specialists, most of whom were influenced by Freeling in some way or another, and many of whom have games featured on his site.

---

Freeling became well-known for proclaiming his own retirement from game design, over and over again, since 2018. I want to end with a quote from him on his website in January 2025:

"I've said more than once before that I was done, and it turned out I wasn't. So I'll say instead:

It was fun, now I may be done."

Naturally, he went on to design two more games several months later.

Rest in Peace, Christian Freeling

In real strategy, how you win changes what comes next.

Burn a city to take it.. you have the territory and a degraded supply chain. Break a treaty to gain ground.. every other faction just updated their model of who you are.

Neither of those is in the score, but I think both of them matter more than the score.

The genre almost never models this. You win the tile. The calculation ends. Crusader Kings gets close - reputation is a real resource that closes doors downstream. Into the Breach gets close - every action has a cost even in a perfect turn. Both feel different because they model the aftermath, not just the outcome.

What I keep noticing: the games where winning feels meaningful are the ones where a bad win is actually worse than a narrow loss. Most designers never build that in because it's harder to communicate and players complain about it until they understand it.

The ones who get it never go back to games that don't have it.

Essentially, the former is something akin to Zelda, where bosses and certain enemy's are immune to everything but a certain item, forcing you to use it. In contrast, the latter means the player can experiment with their tools, allowing more creative strategies. Both have their pro and cons, like the former allowing more spectacle and controlled fights, but more limiting in options. The latter being more player freedom fights, though as the cost of making said fights feel kinda empty/bland. So, are there exmaples of ways to remix the system, or even ways to merge both of them together?

Hi everyone!

I'm making an FPS game and working on the final boss right now and I'm struggling with designing it.

basically, the Bossfight is sort of like a Gojo (from JJk type robot) hand/leg combat, can deny gravity and hover around the arena, uses magic (like fireballs to attack the player) and all other martial arts/magic.

Now I've learned once a good principle about designing characters with a triangle design principle, Strength, HP and Dexterty.

But the problem is If I make this boss character fast and lots of HP, I have to reduce damage, and I end up making it weak. If I make Strong, lots of HP but slow, Then the character just doesint hit, or if I make Strong and Fast but low HP, then the character is OP and defeats the player fast.

It's like, I wish there was a 4th element to this because I can't seem to find the sweetspot when balancing these 3 elements with a character.

Hence I wanted to ask for help regarding designing characters and how to find the sweet spot between the 3 design principles.

Thanks alot in advance for the help! :D

I was going to take game programming and game design as elective courses at my community college, but the game design course is not being offered this year. The only course that was available for complete beginners was programming, so I took it.

Can you please recommend a way to learn the fundamentals of game design independently, similar to what I’d learn in a Game Design 101 class? I see a lot of YouTube videos about game design, but most of them seem to be either devlogs or people using game design as a pretense to just talk about games they liked or didn‘t like. Right now, I’m just looking to learn the foundational stuff that all game devs have to know. I’m ok with spending some money for a program if it’ll teach me.

I've been on this train of thought and would love to hear what others think about it:

Im thinking about how to limit powerful moves and encourage variety in the action economy of my turn based game. I find that the most common methods of limiting powerful actions tend to be (please share If Im missing anything obvious):
-cooldowns (time)
-limited # of uses (frequency) ex: PP in Pokemon, D&D per rest actions
-a resource or energy cost (payment)

But as I think about it I find myself thinking that paying a resource cost is almost always going to be more fun. Im not sure if this is my own bias, but I find "paying" to be satisfying fit for real-world analogues. It empowers the player by giving them choices and allows for a whole system of collecting and managing those resources.

By comparison, I really like the elegance of the cooldowns and/or limited use approaches. And I keep trying to find a way to use them as dynamically. But I can't shake the idea that they feel articifical, in the sense that they still encourage you to use your strongest moves over and over as much as you can (big D&D fights can devolve into this), but then the rules just pop up a stop sign to keep it from endless repetition.

It might be argued that worrying about costs and resources is a bore and signifcant overhead, and perhaps that is the main reason to use simplified time and frequency based limitations. But, in my experience, even these simpler mechanics are either meaningless (the player shrugs when a move is suddenly unavailable) or anxiety inducing (the player never uses their best move because they never want it to become less available). In that sense, the resource based approach forces the player into reckoning with their own action economy, and requires them to think ahead so they are actually engaged with their choices. And so it feels like that is almost always going to be more fun and engaging for a tactical scenario.

As a side note: this is a single player game so that removes one downside of a resource system: in competetive games it can turn things into an escalating race that may not always maximize fun.

I'm making an open-world survival game where all biomes are accessible from the start, but I don't want crafting to be level-based like Ark or other survival games. I want a "discovery-based" crafting system, similar to Valheim: find the resource, unlock the recipe. But since Valheim's progression feels too linear for my taste, I want to mix the freedom of accessing biomes (like in Ark) with that discovery-based crafting system.

Does this make sense? What are the potential downsides or balancing issues of removing level requirements entirely? Player level will only be related to skill points and unlocking player abilities.

Fast travel is a shortcut for open-world designers who want to make an excessively open world without figuring out how a player would interact with it unless they're Marvel's Nightcrawler and could teleport to the important parts of the world and cut out the filler.

It's a convenience and "Quality of Life" feature for designers who don't understand how to make their worlds interesting to navigate.

I think the biggest win of "respecting a player's time" via Fast Travel versus player immersion and enjoyment of the game as presented is that Insomniac's Spider-Man on PS4 has fast-travel and has a specific trophy for using it 5 times. That number is important, because according to data tracked on psnprofiles.com, 66.43% of players got the trophy for PSNprofiles users, and 38% got it overall among Playstation players.

Like, how many times do you fast-travel in a typical open-world game with fast-travel? The answer is definitely a lot. I bet most players who played Skyrim probably fast-traveled more than five times before they finished the Bleak Falls Barrow quest for Whiterun.

So let's focus on that 66.43%/38% of the players who got that trophy, and compare it to other trophies that were nearly at or at a higher percentage of completion that players of the game received for completely optional content or end-game content.

• 66.41%/35.2% of players got the optional "Backpacker" Trophy for finding all of the hidden backpacks.
• 65.77%/35.8% of players got the optional "Hero for Higher" Trophy for getting to the very top of the Avengers tower and perching there for a second.
• 75.47%/47.8% of players got the optional "Amazing Coverage" Trophy for activating every single Surveillance Tower.

But more importantly...

• 83.05%/65.4% of players completed Act 1
• 76.75%/56.0% of players completed Act 2
• 71.91%/47.9% of players completed Act 3

That third one is especially telling for one reason: That is the number of players who went through the entire game's campaign, which takes around 17 hours per How Long to Beat and means that more people did that than used the fast travel system more than four times from beginning to end.

That is a staggering number to look at when you think about it. Once you unlock the ability to fast travel in the game after completing the mission "Wheels within Wheels", you can pretty much fast travel at any point from then on by clicking a point of interest from the menu map.

If you don't like the subway animations, you can even disable them to make the fast travel faster.

Yet a statistically significant enough amount of people chose to beat the entire game instead of fast-travelling five times during their entire run.

I'll admit, I'm one of them. Why would I fast travel for three seconds to get to a mission all the way across the map like 2km+ away when that's 2km+ of New York skylines to swing through and have a blast for five minutes while I catch up with the audio banter and maybe stop a few crimes along the way? Fast-Travel would have been a complete waste of the game's potential and the enjoyment of the traversal.

I still think that's an amazing statistic to consider. More people beat the entire game than fast-traveled. How many big, open-world games can ever claim that?

Take your favourite Open-World game and ask yourself how many times you've used fast travel before you got to the end. Was it less than five? Probably not.

Spider-Man is an exemplar of what the open-world genre should be. A game which gives you an open playground so fun to play with that Fast-Travel is an ignored option on the buffet.

It has approx 100 card like topics about game design that you should look and think about one of them each day. It used something like a yugioh/MTG card layout.

Sorry that is all I remember.

Something got thru your defenses and hit your base. Ok, now what?

I'm building a pressure management game set in deep space where you command an Outposts defense while you mine ore from asteroids to upgrade the Outpost. To make damage mean something I built a quadrant system as the outer layer of the Outpost. Each quadrant is tied to a critical system like shields or turrets. Damaging a quadrant causes a state change in the system its tied to. Shield integrity drops, turret fire rate falls and other more unique states. These states are gated by threshholds and have varying levels. Example from %100-%70 normal then from %69.9 to %50 minor degradation and so on. Quadrants can be repaired. They repairs are automatic and begin after five seconds of a quadrant taking no damage. And for every five seconds beyond that there is an increase in repair rate up to a hard cap. So I'm wondering is this in any way a smart or elegant solution to making damage mean something more than just a lower number on an HP bar or is it too much.

I’m thinking about a game design problem around AI-assisted text adventures / dynamic gamebooks.

The issue is this:

If a player can type anything and the AI simply continues the story, the result may be entertaining for a few minutes, but it is not necessarily a game. It often lacks structure, friction, rules, failure, pacing and meaningful state.

So the design question is:

what systems are needed to make an AI-assisted text adventure feel like a game rather than a chatbot?

My current thinking is that the AI should not be the core system. It should be constrained by game systems such as:

• authored scenarios;
• clear objectives;
• persistent game state;
• inventory;
• character stats;
• risky actions with probability;
• partial success and failure;
• consequences that persist;
• NPC memory;
• small details that can return later;
• chapter/session structure;
• limits on what the AI can invent.

A possible core loop could be:

player choice
→ classify action as safe / risky / impossible
→ resolve risky actions with probability or checks
→ update state
→ generate narrative consequence
→ introduce new objective, complication or choice

The main concern is control.

If the AI has too much freedom, it drifts, forgets, contradicts itself or gives the player whatever they want. If the system is too rigid, the AI adds little compared to a traditional gamebook.

So the design question is:

where should the boundary be between authored structure, mechanical rules and AI-generated variation?

Questions:

1. In a text adventure or dynamic gamebook, what should remain fully authored?
2. What should be handled by mechanics rather than AI?
3. What is the minimum rule system needed for choices to feel meaningful?
4. How would you prevent the AI from turning player input into wish fulfillment?
5. Should the game use open-ended input, fixed choices, or a hybrid?
6. Is “dynamic gamebook” a better design frame than “AI GM”?
7. What failure states or constraints would make this feel more like a game?

I’m especially interested in the design boundary: AI as narrator, AI as oracle, AI as content variation layer, or AI as GM.

So I got this whole dynamic fire system in my game, but it's a challenge to design obstacles that my players can't just burn their way through.

Fire destroys shields, some consumables, and non-platemail/chainmail clothing. But then, I made the lore notes, and I was like... These are made of paper. Paper burns, you know?

I'll have a checkbox to turn burnable notes on and off. But, it would be pretty funny if I left it on by default, right?

Maybe if I just had some text pop up at the lower middle section of the screen saying something like "Note destroyed, lost forever". That way players wouldn't just miss all the notes that got burnt on accident. They'd know they messed up.

Hello! Greetings from South America.

I'm a professional industrial designer with a lot of experience in 3D modeling and UX design. As a designer, I usually find myself thinking deeply about my customers' needs and how to deliver the best product possible. For me, this is not only fun, it's my passion. However, as a gamer, I often feel that industrial design can be a bit flat. Mass production is often sterile, and with the current economy and China manufacturing everything so cheaply, I’ve started to feel like there is more room for true design in gaming and animation than there is in the physical world.

On the other hand, I’ve always had this fantasy of storytelling. Thinking so much about consumer needs, and paying close attention to philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, has made me realize there is so much that can be told through video games.

So, to keep it simple:

1. How difficult would it be for me to start? What software do you recommend?
2. Do you think Game Design is what I should aim for?
3. Do you find yourselves telling stories in your roles?
4. I understand game design is a huge field. Where do you see me fitting in the most?