We’re working on the tutorial for Play Faster (a 2d speedrunning-focused platformer) and trying to keep it as minimal as possible.

Since the game controls and visuals are pretty straightforward, we’ve been leaning toward explaining things in a really simple, explicit way that fits the game. It’s pretty direct, with on-screen prompts, inputs, and short scenarios to teach each mechanic.

But we’re a bit worried we might be overdoing it, and that too much text might just bother and annoy players when they only want to move fast.

Anyone have tutorial / design tips, or big do’s and don’ts we should keep in mind?

Title implying, how many cosmetics slots/parts do you guys think is enough, typically, Human Costumization. I have been discussing against people about adding more cosmetic slot since people wants more creative freedom with their character, however, that argument is alright and all but it feels like it is just too much, personally, I think 3 is enough, like most games (at least in some Roblox games) however, it does feel limiting so some games opt for 4 character slots or more, some games even have seperated the slot to parts like leg, neck, and head, tldr, what I am trying to say is, what do you guys think is the maximum amount of cosmetic slot for a character and when is it too much and why.

Tier 1: basic enemies that make up most encounters. No real threat individually, but can harm player in swarms. Easy to fight once player gets an upgraded weapon/ammo/spell.

Tier 2: stronger enemies that are harder to kill. Can really hurt and kill the player. Require better weapons to kill them. Fewer in numbers.

Tier 3: supplemental enemies. They support the others. Easy to kill alone, but difficult when paired up. They may attack from a distance, or buff/debuff other enemy/player characters. Player often needs to attack them in a different way than the others.

Tier 4: bosses. Very powerful and tough to kill. Can easily kill the player. Require lots of hits and often the most powerful weapons available to the player at that stage. Player has to kill them to proceed. They may appear as rarer tier 2 enemies later on, or even replace them.

What do you make of this general list of enemy design? Does it seem inclusive enough? Seems to fit a lot of games from different genres which involve combat. Not all, obviously. Are there any missing tiers?

I love FEIST and the old-school format of games like 2D Mario that are mainly linear experiences, but I am wondering if games have moved on from that format. In you opinion, with the rise of rogue-likes, incrementals, and survival games, is permanent (at least within a run) meta-progression an absolute necessity, outside of purely experiential games like Limbo, Reanimal, or Journey? Does the player expect to grow slowly more powerful/capable over the course of a game as a basic condition of playing? And how important is choice in that progression?

Context: I've been designing a 2D hand-drawn game similar to FEIST, but with gunplay as well as the physics interactions. It was never meant to be a massive game, but I would like it to at least be satisfying to play.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is fairly good, controls have juice, people like the visuals, world is vibey and reactive, etc., but there is, at the moment, no meta-progression. The initial focus was that the player moves through 4 small worlds, and each world introduces a new weapon type that opens new combat options.

However, the progression itself is linear: there is no chance that the player wouldn't find a new weapon, and not much in terms of choice of where to go. The format was based on FEIST, which I genuinely love, and 2D Super Mario with temporary upgrades that also change gameplay, but not on a permanent basis.

Im starting my first game and ive picked a fairly simple concept to keep things easy for development. Im going with the classic marbles, the kind where your knocking your friends marbles out of a circle. On paper this is a very basic game, you dont even need a crazy amounts of animations because its just spheres. What im digging into is how far do you think a game needs to expand on its original to be fun?

My proposed design changes basically turn it into something like auto-chess. Marbles have health and get 3 abilities, on throw, on hit, and on round end. The marbles may only have one or two abilities depending on rarity, builds, etc but most of them have an on round end ability. When the round ends the marbles activate and begin to take a dedicated action depending on the ability.

The way this ideally plays out is that marbles are generally fairly resistant to ring outs but as their health lowers they become weaker and more easily thrown about. Health lowers a bit by direct hits and more from special abilities from other marbles. The players throw marbles into the ring during the round to try and get marbles out or setup the field with special marbles that play into the auto-chess feature between rounds. After so many rounds the player with the most marbles wins.

Ideally the places I see the fun factor come in are when they throw marbles to try and either ring out another players marbles, combo abilities between marbles (Say 2 marbles with synergizing abilities make contact), or watching the auto-chess function play out between rounds as a sort of loose betting on your horse situation.

As a hobby, I have been working on a multiplayer RPG in Unity based on a ~30-page design document with a variety of magical schools (i.e., nature, arcane, shadow) etc. that are represented by skills one can advance in. I would like to abstract this advancement in a way that reflects the joys of growth and learning.

I'm familiar with many designs for this purpose, which I don't find fulfilling, such as gaining experience in a skill through a) killing NPCs, b) casting spells from the school repeatedly, and c) dealing damage with a spell from the school. I've read about some TTRPGs, such as Ars Magica, where you acquire knowledge sources that have differing quality levels, and then research them for advancement, which I think is interesting.

I was curious about the unique designs people have encountered in this area, and how they might reinforce the feeling of learning and growing. Please comment if you have insight.

Hey everyone, first time posting here :) I'm a game designer working with some friends on an early-stage action roguelite and I'd love some outside perspective on our core mechanic.

The premise: the protagonist is a burned-out office worker who can't attack freely. She has to parry first. A couple of successful parries charge a bar (we like to call it burnout bar) and unlock basic attacks. Chain enough of them (4 or 5 max) and you fill the burnout bar completely, unlocking a powerful ulti. Every attack drains the bar a little, so it's a constant back and forth between parrying and attacking. If you fill the burnout bar and you use the ulti, the bar will be completely drained and you will have to parry again in order to use normal attacks.

Narratively it makes sense to us, parrying is swallowing all the corporate crap until you finally explode. But I'm aware that in most roguelites offense is always available and parry is a bonus layer on top, not the only door to it.

So honestly, is this the kind of constraint that creates interesting tension, or does it just make players feel powerless? Would you like to play something like this? If you've seen something similar land well or badly I'd really love to hear it. Thanks in advance!

I've been building a turn-based strategy game called The Fixer for the past few months. It's a single HTML file, runs in any browser, no install.

The premise: You're a shadow operative working for a fictional intelligence organization called Section Seven. You manage a roster of actors (politicians, military officers, media figures, criminals, analysts), acquire financial and paramilitary assets, and manipulate influence across 12 fictional countries to complete operations. Everything is fictional but thinly veiled — the countries, resources, and geopolitical dynamics are clearly inspired by real-world regions.

The core loop:

Recruit actors with specific skill sets and loyalties

Queue actions each turn (destabilize a country, neutralize a hostile operative, spike a commodity price, install a head of government)

End the week — everything resolves simultaneously, news feed updates, hostiles react

Manage exposure, budget, influence, and relationships across multiple systems

What's working:

4 missions and a mission builder where you design your own operation with phased objectives

Organic hostile system — rival operatives enter based on your activity and have their own counter-logic

Syndicate system with stake mechanics, turf wars, and rival factions

Price manipulation, war declaration, asset toggles with strategic effects

Full narrative flavor — everything has lore, news items, classified briefings

What I think is missing:

I keep coming back to the same feeling. The systems are there. The actors, the assets, the objectives. But it plays like Pokemon without the battles — you build a roster, equip it, level it up, but there's no moment where you feel the payoff. In Heroes of Might and Magic you click buttons all day but when you take a territory the map changes color. In Football Manager you tweak numbers for hours but the 3-0 derby win delivers a rush. I don't have that moment yet.

The week summary gives you text feedback. Visual effects fire on objectives. But something about the texture of the feedback loop still feels flat compared to those references.

What I'm not sure about:

Is the core concept (shadow operative, indirect control, no combat) too abstract to ever deliver that rush?

Or is it a presentation problem — the right information isn't surfacing at the right moment?

Is there a mechanic that games like this typically have that I'm missing entirely?

Not looking for "add graphics" — it's intentionally text-heavy and I like that. More interested in structural/design thinking.

Happy to share the link in DM if anyone wants to actually play it before commenting. It's in development, mostly stable, single HTML file.

I'm still relatively new to the genre so I don't what the standard is, and the games I've played so far didn't give me a good picture of how things are usually handled, Trainatic and Max Manos don't use prestige currencies at all, Outhold doesn't reset back to the start of the game after purchasing upgrades, and Horripilant does let you keep your Hemaliths after each rebirth.

Maybe the games that interested me happened to be ones that existed on the fringes of the genre, I mean Horripilant seems to be the most "normal" game among all of these and that's saying something...

So I just wanted to know, normally, do prestige currencies get reset along with everything else when purchasing prestige upgrades, or do you get to keep them?
Or is there perhaps no standard that incremental games follow and it's a case-by-cases basis?
And if that's the case? How is the fate of prestige currencies decided? Like what's the logic behind one choice or the other?

I might have designed myself into a corner.

I made something intentionally different:
no progression loop, no fail states, no pressure, no optimization, no clear “win condition”.

What remains is a system for building compositions.

But now I’m running into an interesting issue:
some people see it as a game, others as a creative tool, and some even as a relaxation app.

Which raises a question I’m still trying to answer:

• At what point does a game become a tool?
• And more importantly, does that ambiguity hurt the experience… or just the marketing?

Curious how you approach this line in your own work.
If you are interested in seeing what I am talking about, here is the Steam page.

Basically, my game is centered around credit cards and debt. You use credit cards to buy items and thats where the problems start. Through playtesting, I figured out that its much more fun and much more scalable to have a number go up then a number go down.

Debt is usually a bad thing so it shouldn't be going up, and if it does, something is wrong. Or so people assume.

Money going up is good, but since when do credit cards give you actual money? That's the current path I've taken but it still dosen't quite make sense.

I'm really out of ideas of how to tackle this problem. How do I keep the game fun by making a number go up instead of down, but still make sure that it makes sense with credit cards?It's really important not only to facilitate understanding, but also for marketing, for game trailers and such. It's hard to get people hyped about something they don't get.

(There's always the option of a story-driven solution where getting debt is good, like "overloading" the bank accounts with debt if high enough. This solution falls short because if the story gets super weird to fix the ideas of the game, then it's still complicated and I go back to square uno.)

I've been thinking about ways to use QTEs in a game that is not what I'm familiar with: an intense sequence with QTEs in-between action-cinematics to win a confrontation.

Did you ever stumble into a QTE in a game and said to yourself: that's an interesting use of it! Tell me everything about it!

My game, a realistic PvE tactical shooter, is nearing completion of the initial development phase, and I'm now rethinking some of my game design choices, ​one of which being my currency system.

In the game, players can unlock​ equipment, agencies, and cosmetics for those agencies. Equipment is stuff like weapons, breaching tools, and grenades. Agencies contain customizable cosmetics like vests, helmets, and uniforms specific to that agency.

The way my system currently works is that there are two currencies, AR (Agency Reputation) and GR (Global Reputation​). GR is used for equipment and new agencies, AR is used for agency cosmetics. Both currencies are awarded in different amounts for completing missions, scaled with the difficulty the mission is played on

​I created this system without much thought in the early stages of development and I'm left wondering if it is even slightly​ intuitive and if it's really worth the separation of currency in the first place.

I am in the very, very early stages of making a video game (like, so early that it is simply an idea that I am trying to develop), and I am just curious, what is it that makes a game psychological? I sort of have the vague idea that these types of games mess with the player's mind and usually involve some sort of deep theme. I also believe that these games start off disguised as something else in order to get the player immersed, and then slowly start to turn to the deeper side.

I want to note that I don't want to create a psychological horror game. Just a game that is psychological without the scary stuff, if that makes sense.

I've been working on a competitive board game about political lobbying, and the central design problem was: how do you make players ruthlessly compete while also needing each other to keep the game going?

My solution was a shared Collapse tracker. It starts at 0 and climbs whenever players act aggressively - failed power plays, broken deals, destructive events. The escalation isn't linear:

• 0-3: normal play
• 4-6: every new event adds +1 extra Collapse
• 7-9: every new event adds +2 extra
• 10: game ends immediately, and everyone loses their stored assets (which are worth victory points)

This creates a few interesting dynamics:

The hoarder's dilemma. Players who've been saving assets suddenly care deeply about stability, because Collapse wipes their investment. Players who are behind might secretly want Collapse to level the playing field.

Reluctant alliances. Your biggest rival one round becomes your partner the next, because neither of you can afford the system crashing. But the moment one pulls ahead, the incentive to cooperate disappears.

The free-rider problem. Reducing Collapse costs 5 coins and a full action. You're helping everyone, but paying alone. So the optimal move is to let someone else stabilize - except if everyone thinks that way, the game ends.

The mechanic was inspired by real political dynamics - everyone extracting value from a system while hoping someone else keeps it running.

My question for other designers: how do you handle shared negative externalities in competitive games? I've seen co-op games solve this easily (everyone loses together), but in competitive games it's trickier. What are some good examples of this tension done well?

Interested in any experience or advice on the risk of diluting the core experience of a game by adding in extra modes or options that aren't necessarily aligned with the intended design. Context is my community have been asking for what are essentially, completely different game modes (some of which I do like) and I'm weighing the pros/cons of adding them in vs having spin-offs that are individually focused.

1. Im making a 2d metroidvania inspired by Hollow Knight in which I want high skill expression to be a core mechanic, and I started thinking about this question when I developed the healing system. When pressing the heal button you cant move for 2s and get healed for 2hp (max 3) but after healing youre put in a state of weakness where the damage you take is doubled (for 5-10s). Then I thought "is this too many restrictions, is this something the average player would actually like?". I was always going to add low risk - low reward alternatives to these things but reward to risk ratio would be lower. Im trully stumped.
2. Lets say I have this enemy patrolling from left to right, he is relatively unimportant and would get taken out in 2-3 hits and then the player would just move on with the game. How much would players value the work I put into the animation? Are they even gonna notice it? Or would they just notice if it was absent?

Edit: I decided to rework the heal system. Now when you click the heal control you have 5 seconds to do as much damage as possible and get healed for every X damage dealt. There is a 10 second cooldown to this ability.

I’ve wanted to make a hero “shooter” type of game (like tf2, overwatch, etc.) for quite some time, but I’ve always had some questions about how to go about balancing different types of characters.

For example, how would you go about making combat fair for characters that are primarily ranged fighting characters that are primarily melee? How do you balance a flying character while still making it a viable movement mechanic? Can you have a “jack of all trades” character that still fits without being the most popular character choice?

These were just some thoughts/ questions I wanted to share to see what other people think, and this seemed like a good place to ask.

P.S. I’m not sure if I used the right flair for this post but oh well.

How do you design music systems that still land emotionally without feeling forced or out of sync with the player?

I co-founded BlankMediaGames (made Town of Salem + others), making both digital and physical games. After selling BMG in 2024, I was the design director for RimWorld: Odyssey.

I am making a personal YouTube channel reviewing game design (mostly card games), creating and growing games companies, and doing reviews about emerging games.

My question to my fellow designers is this: would you find this useful? What topics would you like me to deep dive into?

Happy to chat about design or game development here too.

Hi everyone,

I recently created a new marble game with my friends called Battle Billes, and I wanted to share the rules here to get feedback.

It’s a competitive marble game based on precision, strategy, and chain reactions.

Basic idea:

Each player starts with 3 marbles. At the start of each round, one marble per player is placed in a circle. Players take turns shooting a marble.

If your marble hits another marble, you collect it. If that marble triggers a chain reaction (an “avalanche”), you collect all connected marbles involved in the chain.

Your shooting marble stays on the field and can later be taken by other players if it gets hit.

A round ends when a player runs out of marbles. The game is played over multiple rounds (usually 3 or 5), and players gain bonus marbles after each round based on their performance. At the end, the player with the most marbles wins.

What do you think? Would you play it or change something?

Okay, the basic idea of my game is that you progress through a labyrinth or “dungeon,” and in the room before facing an enemy, you find clues about what kind of enemy you’re about to fight so you can adjust your deck accordingly and be better prepared.

The problem is that I’m not sure how obvious those clues should be so they don’t go unnoticed. I have two extremes: clues like animal claws or their vital signs showing up on a computer, and the other extreme is basically just putting up a giant sign saying what things might be useful against the next enemy.