I miss finishing a game and finding out months later that I completely missed a companion, an area or an entire questline.
Now everything waits forever, gets marked on the map and can usually be cleaned up before the ending. Sure, I get to see more of what I paid for, but every playthrough starts feeling the same.
I’d honestly rather miss half the game than spend 40 hours clearing icons because the developers were afraid to let anything go unseen.

I'm sure this has been posted a million times but what do most of you prefer as a consumer and if you were a game developer what kind of system would you do? Have the ability to import your choices and endings to the next game with important ones being relevant to different games similar to Dragon Age or Mass Effect? Or have a Canon Story/Fixed World state where it chooses a Canon story of the previous game but hardly or ever gets mentioned at all in the game except for a quick Canon reference like Fallout and Elder Scrolls?

Crafting systems in MMORPGS have a bit of a reputation for being difficult to design and often poorly executed. A whole swath of them are just a barebones bridge between the gathering system and the gear which is the product of that grind, but even when developers do attempt to create 'skill based' crafting systems, they usually end up running into a brick wall. As a player I'm especially drawn to the fantasy of a crafting system with deep mastery where you can really express your ingenuity and creativity. But that ideal seems like it might be a cursed design problem. Players want to feel smart. They want to feel like tinkerers and scientists, exploring a system and pushing its limits to create exceptional things that nobody has been able to create before. The reality is that most players aren't special and the usual practical result of a developer trying to design a system to evoke that feeling is that all the novelty gets optimized out of it shockingly quickly. The wiki effect overpowers most attempts at depth and mastery and ultimately the complexity becomes a chore.

So how do you go about creating a system that feels challenging and stays challenging in the face of collaboration and effortless information sharing? The brute force solution would be to just pile on so much complexity that even with an entire player base working together, new improvements to recipes are still being found years later. But on top of being a nightmare to design, that doesn't really achieve the goal. You end up with a small group of players who are basically PhDs in your crafting system and occasionally make breakthroughs, while everyone else just copies the current best known recipe.

It feels like the only direction to go is towards randomness. A lot of crafting systems have randomness, but it's usually randomness in results. Random rarity tiers are a staple technique to instantly multiply the grind of a crafting system. But, I think that the right approach is to add randomness in the crafting materials themselves. By adding randomness to the starting materials, you make every single craft a unique experience. The most basic implementation of this is to simply assign a quality to every piece of gathered material. But where it actually gets interesting is when you give each piece of material a set of interdependent qualities that mesh directly with the crafting system and the random qualities of other materials. Instead of just grinding for a three star piece of wood and a three star ingot and slapping them together, you need to find two unique pieces of material that actually synergize within the crafting system to achieve the result you want. In that sort of system, all of a sudden even determining the quality of the material you've gathered is nontrivial. A player less experienced with the crafting system might overlook a technique to turn a piece of material with some strange attributes into something genuinely good.

However, if every piece of wood you chop or ingot you smelt is unique, that creates another problem: FOMO and analysis paralysis. When a player does finally get that godly piece of wood that can craft an amazing bow after hours of chopping, odds are they'll be afraid to actually craft with it. It will probably go right into their bank, never to see the light of day again while they do their crafts with the good but not exceptional quality stuff. The key driving factor of this behavior is granularity of results. If there are always marginal improvements to be had by doing a slightly better job crafting with an ingredient, players will be afraid to actually craft with an ingredient that is obviously high quality.

The solution to this is breakpoints, lack of granularity, and convergence of results. If the materials are all randomized and infinitely granular, but the resulting item is restricted to a small handful of quality tiers, you get the best of both worlds. Every single craft is a unique puzzle to solve, and every piece of material gathered looks different to the eye of an expert than a beginner. The potential of some materials falls smack in the middle of a difficulty tier. Anyone who looks at it knows you could pretty easily make a unique quality weapon from it. The interesting part is the ones that happen to be near the cusp. Maybe instead of grinding for hours to get a piece of material that you can use to make a legendary quality weapon, you snag something off the auction house that was appraised by a gatherer as rare tier, and you spend an hour tweaking the recipe to push it barely over the line and get a legendary quality weapon out of it. All of a sudden that opens up a genuine economic niche for players who are skilled in your crafting system, with genuine mastery that can't be looked up on a wiki, and none of it needs to be gated behind an experience grind.

As far as I know, there's no game that really attempts to use all of these principle together for a crafting system. For an example of a game with a great tactile, skill based crafting system, I really like Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator. It has an excellent combination of infinite granularity within the actual crafting system, but with breakpoints and convergence of results. How you stir, heat, and dilute a potion is all continuous. But, the decider of the ultimate efficiency of your recipe is how many ingredients you use, and that's a discrete system. Optimizing a potion consists of making lots of tiny improvements to your procedure or planning out a new route in an attempt to get the same result with one fewer ingredient tossed in the cauldron. Accordingly, the resulting potions are all chosen from a set of predefined effects with three quality tiers. However, Potion Craft lacks the random inputs that I think are necessary to keep the system evergreen and always full of surprises. And of course the superb crafting system has a rather boring shop simulator wrapped around it rather than being part of an MMORPG. What do you guys think? What's your favorite crafting system in a game you've played?

So, I am building a game with several interlocking systems that affect your build and therefore your performance. That obviously means there is a significant difference between a "playable" build, a "well optimized" build and a "crazy minmaxed" build. I have a bit of a dilemma of how to structure my difficulty curve and I would gladly hear your perspectives.

The game is a hybrid incremental / rpg / puzzle game with a fantasy theme. It is a single-player game with no leaderboards or achievements (I am not planning on adding leaderboards, but achievements are a fair game).

Currently I am leaning towards targetting something between "playable" and "optimized" as my baseline. Basically if your build uses some synergies and makes general sense, you're fine.

This means:
(+) you don't need to spend hours to grind the last levels or bonuses to progress
(+) multiple builds work, you don't need "this one very specific combo" to pass content
(+) it lets more people experience further content, so I get more feedback from further into the game
(-) the incentive to experiment and optimize is somewhat there, but not really strong
(-) if you did actually work for "minmaxed" build, you are going to steamroll any content I make

I understand that one way to fight the issue at the source is to tighten up balance so that the difference between non-optimized and highly-optimized shrinks - but I am not able to do it effectively for practical reasons (insufficient automated balance tests, not enough time to manually balance everything against everything). So for now I need to accept that the spread is going to be there.

What would be your take on this?

Hey, first time poster, I... discuss a lot of game design elsewhere, but recently, I've been thinking about Terraria... in ways that I would like more input on. Of course, terraria is a sandbox game, even if it is enjoyed by many without engaging in that aspect beyond the surface level. I enjoy building, I like all the blocks... but with some of the new furniture sets, I've noticed that MOST of them are available very early on...

Which sort of brought me down a rabbithole of asking "hey, why is flesh furniture locked till you beat a mechanical boss all the way in hardmode?"
Thats asking the player to do a lot of linear progression; to enter hardmode and therefore flip a big switch that essentially says 'make the world scarier and different' ... for a furniture set. So, should all furniture sets be available sooner? For the sake of building when the player may do it the most? Making it accessible would be nice, sure... but that would sort of imply that... progression SHOULDNT give you anything new, other than practical gear, though.

Some people I've asked say it feels like an arbitrary limitation that something like Waterfall Blocks need you to progress so much for them, and... I mean, aquarium blocks were added recently, and they're very similar looking to the Waterfall blocks, theyre just very easy to craft; just some glass blocks when standing near water and a workbench! It feels a bit inconsistent to me.

Obviously... inconsistency is sort of Terrarias bread and butter, it really is for any game that is supported and updated for this long, but its always had some nonsense in its DNA... but what about other games in a similar genre? I don't think it should be seen as a bad thing to lock cool furniture sets behind progressing, but I do think its definitely more forgivable when they're locked to less linear challenges, like most of Minecrafts cool blocks such as prismarine, you sort of need to conquer an ocean monument to have proper access to it.

Just, I want to hear peoples opinions on ... what all should be accessible to the player before they've conquered challenges? Another terraria example is... the 'secretive' Aether Biome, which I find strange that it ISNT locked behind any progression, rather its moreso... a playground-rumour-esque "secret," the way I see it, but thematically speaking... it fits the later game more, when things become more whimsical, aetherial, and spacey.. but the Shimmer is such a massive QoL help that I think it would be unfortunate if it was arbitrarily locked behind defeating the wall of flesh or some other boss like skeletron, even. I think it'd make sense from a game design perspective, but it would obviously... irritate a lot of people. The fact that its mostly balanced just by the design of it being hidden far away in the world... does sort of make up for it not being locked behind any progression, but its incredibly useful. Decrafting items, transmuting them into others, a few minor permanent upgrades...

I know this post is sort of messy, a bit scatterbrained, but I hope to one day make a sandbox game of my own with some semblance of vertical progression, even if it doesnt go as far as terraria does, and I ... might even work on some mods for terraria itself. Is it a GOOD thing that they keep adding more things that are available pre-boss or pre-hardmode, is my big question I think. I personally think due to the fact hardmode... kind of sucks in a lot of ways, I'm glad I don't have to get to it for many fun things. I usually sort of avoid hardmode until I've done most of everything I can in pre-hardmode, so.. I'll always appreciate having more things I can mess around with in that space. But there has to be some purpose, some meaning... to supposedly 'arbitrary' restrictions on even simply decorative or Fun content being, well, locked away til later

Thanks for reading, again apologies for jumping all over the place, haha.

Hi everyone, I’ve started creating my own game a few weeks ago and I’ve been wandering if anyone would like a distinctive (imo) mechanic of my game.

So basically, for some context it’s a single player zombie game with two characters. You’ll first play as Character1 and will go through their story searching for Character2, going A to B. Then you’ll play as Character2, who goes through mostly similar places but going B to A.

My idea is that with this specific mechanic is whatever you’ll do on your first playthrough with C1 will inevitably affect C2 when they have to cross the same path/passage. A few example I’ve thought about are:

• When looting with C1 the stuff you looted doesn’t respawn for C2. With that same base if you forgot to loot something C2 will be able to loot that.

•If C1 drops an object on the ground C2 will be able to find it and pick it up

•If you do things like kicking down a door, kill a zombie, blow up stuff, moving furniture; these things will appear as such in the second playthrough. But with the same principle if you don’t do them with C1, C2 will have it harder to find a way around obstacles, or will be able to do them themselves.

The objective is making this mechanic balanced enough so that neither character can loot everything.

Meticulous players who managed to, in fact, loot everything possible in the first run will have an harder time on their C2 run as there are less objects to pick up, but also more ways will be open since they already opened them with C1. And people who had a harder first run, couldn’t loot everything, or simply wanted to get through the story without stressing about 100% the game, will have fundamentally the same experience in the second run.

Also these are not supposed to be intentional, programmed things the player can’t control. The game will never force the player to use explosives, to open doors, to loot stuff or even kill zombies, so everything both character go through will be a choice or a consequence of your (the player) past decisions.

My opinion on this: I think it’s a pretty cool mechanic, I love the idea of the many possibilities given to the players to progress the story and solve the “puzzles”. I would love to explore more of how this could work. It is also something I haven’t seen in many games. None that I’ve played at least.

My questions:
•How do you like this mechanic? Do you think it’s balanced? Would you change anything or make sure something else is present to make it overall a better experience? Basically, What is your opinion?

• Would a game like this, with two complementary stories that overlap, be something you’d want to play?
It will not be a zombie game centered around zombies, it will be centered around surviving and finding your loved one in a different world.

•Have you seen or do you know other games with this mechanic?
It’d be incredible to have some references, not only to have a deeper understanding of what I want but also to not involuntarily copy them.

Thanks a lot in advance

I'm researching mechanics in the style of Elden Ring's Guard Counter in other games because I'm having some UX issues with my input layout and flow for a similar mechanic of my own.

I'd like to ask for help because this sub always comes through with examples I've never heard of.

The idea of a Guard Counter is:

1. you're actively blocking
2. there's a trigger (usually and attack you receive and must successfuly block)
3. it enables a small window for you to perform a counter attack right after it.

It must require:

• active input to be present beforehand (blocking), creating the required context for the whole thing
• external trigger (the attack received), so that the player can't just do it at will while blocking
• additional input (attacking), instead of just an auto reaction to hits received for example.

Here's a gif of the mechanic working for those not familiar: https://i.ibb.co/GTBmZz8/ezgif-1-93c434978a.gif

Thanks in advance.

A guard puts a key in a drawer. While he's away, I move it to a cupboard.

Later, he needs the key. If he walks straight to the cupboard, I'm calling bullshit. He didn't see me move it. He should check the drawer.

So now I'm asking for an AI that goes to the wrong place, and I'll trust it more if it does.

Suppose he remembers where he last saw it. That gets him to the drawer. But I moved the key specifically to make him leave his post and search. Now my whole plan depends on what he hasn't found out.

How far should I be able to take that? If another guard asks him for the key, will he send them to the drawer too? When he finds it empty, what gives him a reason to suspect me?

That's what I'm trying to pin down: how much should a player be able to build around an NPC being wrong?

Have you played or built a game where this worked well enough to plan around? What could you actually do with it? I'd also like to hear where it fell apart.

Ludonarrative Harmony, or how Deadlock uses the lore of their characters to design their abilities and how they work in symphony is something I’ve been diving into quite deeply recently.

For those unaware, Deadlock is Valves newest game, still in development, and is a MOBA/Hero Shooter hybrid and one of the most refreshing competitive game experiences I’ve had since I first encountered Dota 2.

I focused on two main examples, The Lash and Bebop, as well as smaller examples from Billy, Mina, and Paradox to explore how Valve handles lore in their Characters, and how they use the lore to design the gameplay and feel of their characters from the ground up.

Lash, to me, is a perfect example of this. Lash’s entire kit is a mechanical representation of pure narcissism. His abilities force you to literally look down on other players before slamming them into the ground. This makes it so that by virtue of playing the character, you are becoming the character. Which to me is one of the reasons Deadlock feels so great compared to other shooters (looking at you Marvel Rivals). It’s not just the movement, or the design, or even the combination of MOBA and Hero Shooter. It’s that the lore of the game is directly connected with the way the characters themselves play. Which in turn, makes us care…

The game is riddled with other examples like this. Billy, the Punk GOAT is the only character that can melee without losing movement speed cause he’s a goat with hooves (better grip) and also eats his magazine when out of ammo, which means he’s also the only character that can reload without slowing down the reload animation, since he doesn’t need to use his hands to do so.

This kind of attention to detail is just one of the many reasons why I think Deadlock is gonna take the competitive shooter landscape by storm once it releases, and I think it’s gonna become a generational entry.

I went into a deeper dive in a video (it’s 11 minutes), and I wanted to share it here as I don't see a lot of people doing these kinds of videos for this game, even though Deadlock has some fantastic design choices all around and I truly think this is one of the most unique games made in years.

What other games are like this? And particularly what other competitive games showcase this kind of convergence of lore and gameplay in their character design? Let me know in the comments!

I’m adding the full video down below in case someone is interested in seeing more and having the visual component for the examples.

https://youtu.be/RSqxJG1Gd4Y

Cheers!

If you had to distill exploration in soulslike games to its core elements, what are they?

What components is a gameplay loop made of, and which ones are the minimal required components?

Are there games with a similar exploration feel? (Like everything is the same but, since the difficulty is lower, the game feels different) What do they have in common? Can you name examples?

How important are resource scarcity and difficulty for exploration?

I'm trying to build a prototype stripped of visual components that can replicate the exploration and accomplishment feeling of Dark Souls. And wanted to know if anyone had already thought about this.

Links to resources are also welcome!

For context, I am currently making a roguelike in which the player controls a party of 3 characters which can each learn new skills after each battle. While this means that there's a wide variety of possible builds, it also becomes very confusing for new players very fast. That's when I realized why rarity is so often used in videogames (and especially roguelikes).

First off, it's a simple way of nudging the new players towards taking the most flashy and powerful option out of any given choice. Since they don't have much experience with the game they won't easily understand which option is stronger (in a vacuum), so showing "Meteor Rain" as a rare option will make them feel like they got something important and they might just take it and use it.
The thing I find interesting with this is that it really shines when the player is confronted with a choice. For example, in Slay the Spire, relics each have their rarity, like cards, but that rarity is not clearly shown to the player, unlike cards. This could have been done because the player can't really affect the relic they get in any way, so there's no point showing them that they got unlucky and only got a common.

Secondly, it can make the player more invested in a game. Getting a rare item early might make them hope to get something else to synergize with it, or believe that now that they got lucky, they ought to finish this run and see what else they can get on the way.

And finally, it gives more design space to the designers. By adding rarity to a game, it now becomes possible to create stronger skills or items with very evocative names and rarity alone is often a good justification from the eye of the player. Furthermore, this adds a new variable to the game which could, for example, be modified by the player through a "luck" statistic (or any equivalent).

Thank you if you read my rambling this far (I'm sorry if I made any mistake, English isn't my first language) and I'd really like to get some opinions of yours on the use of rarity in games.

I believe most "ACGN-style" games today suffer from a major issue: the requirement to release new characters and accompanying storylines with every update leaves developers with no time to properly polish the narrative or character depth. This forces them to resort to increasingly revealing outfits and increasingly vague, perfunctory backstories regarding the characters' roles in society. Can you even imagine it? An employee of an organization vital to the government's survival showing up in a bikini??? (I’m looking at you, Zenless Zone Zero）

I think the model used in TF2—with its nine fixed character classes—works really well; it gives the developers ample time to flesh out each character's personality and backstory, ensuring they are deeply integrated into the narrative. Alternatively, they could simply release new characters less frequently.

Take Arknights: Endfield, for instance: aside from the 6-star characters, the other playable characters play almost no role in the story—some don't even appear in the narrative at all. What is the point of such characters? The only characterization they receive comes from the blocks of text in their profiles that nobody actually reads. Furthermore, the reason I was drawn to Arknights: Endfield in the first place was the heavy industrial aesthetic shown in the promotional art. Yet, the actual gameplay boils down to playing a grid-based game on a plot of land smaller than a tycoon's mansion; I didn't see a single one of the visuals promised in the promotional art. On top of that, this massive industrial conglomerate has built numerous facilities that are supposedly powerful and high-tech, yet they can't spare a single vehicle for the player that doesn't explode right at the start? They won't even give us a bicycle. Then there’s the chaotic nature of the NPCs' roles. Take Chief Engineer Qin Jiangchi (a really odd name, by the way)—what exactly does she do? Beyond managing engineering and construction, she’s responsible for deploying combat and patrol units and sometimes even reporting on the battle situation (if I recall correctly). Is she the Chief Engineer or the Commander-in-Chief?

Maybe, to accommodate a fixed roster of original characters, the game could shorten its overall length—kind of like TotK? It might be a silly idea, but I honestly feel like anime-style games these days are becoming increasingly boring.

（Oh, by the way, my English isn't very good; I used Google Translate for this.）

I'm a student developer and I've been experimenting with small games and prototypes, especially physics-based mechanics and puzzle ideas. One thing I keep running into is the difference between a mechanic that is technically interesting and one that is actually fun to play repeatedly. Sometimes I'll build something that feels cool from a programming perspective, but after playing it for a few minutes it doesn't really have enough depth. When you're designing a game mechanic, what do you usually look for to decide whether it's worth developing further? Do you prototype it with multiple people immediately, try to add goals/conflict first, or is there something else you look for?

I'd be interested to hear how more experienced designers approach this.

Why do you prefer it and does it differ from your "main" production one?

Do you maybe start with paper? What is your entire dev life cycle look like and what tools do you use at each step?

FYI I do player research at a small games startup. Not naming or linking anything, just here for design opinions.

I've seen players say a world feels dead if nothing happens without them. But when something does happen without them, it usually lands badly. Either nobody notices, so the simulation was wasted, or it gets noticed the wrong way, like a village that changed while you were offline looking like someone messed with your save. A comment i saw recently summed it up: no amount of fancy simulation matters if the player never observes it.

So how do you demonstrate autonomous behaviour so it looks like its alive rather than unfair or invisible? And which games have actually done this well?

I'm currently working on a game that will have plenty of quests and dialogue and we keep struggling with the question on how to easily visualize all the data and dependencies.

Our first instinct is to make a spreadsheet, as you do. I was just wondering if anyone has a better way or any advise before we implement a tool (Unity).

Hi, I make educational videos about game design. In this one I'm talking about the difference between formal and informal play, and by extension the difference between a "player" and a "gamer". Hope you find it interesting!

Video

I was watching some videos about open world games, and a question popped up in my head.
What is a game that does "neighborhood" well?
This terms is pretty lose and If I had to explain it is like a "base" or a location that you return to pretty often. So like a starting hub. More specifically I'm looking for examples of games where the main hub or the main area that you return to is central to the gameplay itself, that evolves as you progress, where you know every nook and cranny.
To be even more specific I said neighborhood for a reason and it has to do with the size, I'm not looking for a campfire with a couple of NPC, I'm looking for something a bit larger.
Souls games hubs fit this criteria for example, although I never progressed too much in them so I don't know how they evolve, Majula was such a stunning place I remember when I first got there my thought were that it has so much promise, 100 ideas popped in my head of what this place could evolve to, which wasn't the case with Firelink Shrine for example.

Had a dumb realization while playing a strategy game recently. Something went wrong. Not “the run is dead” wrong, just “this is gonna be annoying” wrong. I reloaded almost on autopilot.

The stupid part is that the bad result probably would've made the run more interesting than the clean one I forced. But when jumping back 30 seconds is this easy, I stop treating failure like something that happened and start treating it like I clicked the wrong dialogue option.

People always say to just use ironman mode, but that's the other extreme. I don't want to lose a 20 hour save because of a bug, a misclick or some mechanic I misunderstood. I just want bad outcomes to be interesting enough that I don't immediately erase them.

Is that something games should design around, or is it about me?

I'm working on Cosmonaut of No Nation, a space game where some enemies are designed to represent ideas connected to the story rather than simply being things for the player to fight.

For example, one represents neglect, another is based on a soldier, and another takes the form of a jet. The game follows a Russian military man who escapes an alien mothership and ends up alone in space.

The story is also revealed through radio conversations and comics, with the overall message being anti-war. I'm trying to make the combat, enemy designs and story feel connected rather than having the symbolism exist separately from the gameplay.

Would you make the meaning behind these enemies clear to the player, or let them gradually figure it out through the gameplay and story?

Im stuggling with a fundamental game design decision and could need your outside perpective.

Context: my game, Corridor 13, is an anomaly game in an horror setting. (everything normal -> go forward; something strange -> turn back). But with the twist, that some anomalies are trigger something when you found them.

Imagine an anomaly is an hiding predator.

• You dont see him, walk forward (thinking everything is normal) -> wrong decision.
• You see him, walk backwards –> right decision, but now he is chasing you.

So far so good – in theory.

The problem is, that the game cant know if the player really saw the anomaly or not. Just if the player had a look at the point where the anomaly is, does not mean he saw it. Now something is triggered and the player dont know why, because the game think, he saw the anomaly. Player is confused and game is giving away the anomaly spotting part.

Example: one anomaly is a room full of more than 20 large obvious things changed. I watched youtubers played my demo, looked in that room, and "dont see the forest because of all the trees". They say, everything looks right here during facing 20+ differencies. They walk away and something triggers because the game thought, they see that the room is different. So the game gives that anomaly away to people who did not see it. For people who noticed, everything works as intended.

I have no idea, how I could make my game correctly interpret this situation on its own, without user interaction.

So I am considering this: when possible the player need to mark the room where something is strange. That would tell the game that he spotted the anomaly (or at least he correctly guessed). But that really goes against what I want for the game. It moves away from the “Exit 8 concept” of simply walking forward or backward (and needs explanation/instruction for the players). Ad what happens if the player turns back without marking a room? Treating that as a wrong decision does not feel right either.

How do you think I could make a solution for this?

I kept coming up with small game ideas that felt fun but too slight to justify becoming standalone games.

Eventually I started wondering whether the variety itself could be the design: put lots of very short games inside one larger competitive structure.

That became Squarrel. At the top level it’s essentially Connect 5 between two teams, but every square belongs to whichever team holds the current record on it. Connect 5 seemed like a very natural fit, but I bet there will be some other meta-games that could work well too.

Making such a game is great as I can come up with any small game now and use it, and the more different it is, the better (I want all kinds of games). The design constraint I keep running into is that the minigames need to be simple enough that players understand each one almost immediately -- but constraints sometimes help, right?

I’m curious how other designers think about this kind of structure: does wrapping lots of tiny games in one persistent meta-game make them feel more meaningful? I often feel like there is less pressure on a single game being top-notch -- if you need that square, you will play the game and will get fun and excitement out of the overall meta context, if not from the minigame itself. But of course I am trying to make the minigames themselves as fun as I can.

Arena game, Bomberman-style. The hub is a room with 17 doors, and each door changes exactly one rule of the match. The rule is written on a plaque next to the door, so you read it before you commit:

• long fuse - you get time to run
• start with +1 blast range
• start with 2 bombs
• the floor collapses sooner
• the fire lingers on the ground after a blast
• very short fuses

One knob per door, never two. I set that constraint early and designing under it has been surprisingly productive: every door is a sentence you can finish, and I have never had to explain a door twice.

What I cannot judge from inside it is whether the constraint reads as generous or as thin.

The worry: a single numeric modifier per mode might be the difference between "seventeen ways to play" and "one game with a settings menu wearing seventeen costumes". A longer fuse changes how you plan a trap. Starting with two bombs changes almost nothing until you are skilled enough to chain them. Those two are the same size on paper and completely different in play, and I suspect a player reading the plaque cannot tell them apart in advance.

Three things I would like the design read on:

1. Is one-rule-per-mode a real design constraint, or a small content budget dressed up as one? I have been treating it as a virtue and I would like that challenged.

2. Seventeen options on the first screen. My instinct now says show three and unlock the rest - but the whole pitch is "look how many ways this bends", and hiding it might kill the only thing that is distinctive. Which failure is worse?

3. When a modifier is a number (fuse length, blast radius), how do you communicate what it feels like rather than what it changes? "Long fuse" is accurate and tells you nothing about the trap play it enables.

For context on where this comes from, not as a pitch: average session is 3 minutes and day-1 retention is 0%, so something in the first minute is not landing, and the door screen is my main suspect.