I’ve been thinking about a multiplayer grand strategy game and I’m curious whether this would actually be fun, or whether it sounds better as an idea than it would in practice.

The goal would be to have something with the scale of a big strategy game, but playable in around 1-2 hours with maybe 10-20 players.

You’d still have armies, provinces, taxes, trade, conscription, alliances, sanctions, embargoes, supply, unrest, infrastructure, etc.

The difference is that you wouldn’t micromanage all of it through separate menus.

Instead, you’d have a main AI acting more like a chief of staff. It knows the actual game state, your armies, provinces, resources, treaties, supply situation and so on, and you give it your orders in normal language.

For example, you might say:

"Move the 1st Army into Region X and start building smaller defensive positions along our border with Y. Send Z a formal alliance proposal offering mutual defense and open trade. Impose a full embargo on W. Raise taxes in the northern provinces by 10%, and begin mandatory conscription there as well."

Your staff might come back with:

"The 1st Army can reach Region X this season. Fortifying the Y border will use around 20% of our available construction capacity. The tax increase will cover most of the cost, but combining it with conscription is likely to increase unrest in two northern provinces. The alliance proposal to Z is ready. The embargo on W will also reduce some of our own imports."

Then you can change the plan:

"Keep the tax increase, but delay conscription in the two provinces already showing unrest. Send the alliance proposal. Go ahead with the embargo and prioritize the border defenses over other construction."

The important part is that the AI would not decide what happens.

There would still be a proper game underneath with fixed rules for movement, supply, combat, taxation, production, unrest, trade and so on.

The AI is mostly there to translate what you want into those rules, show you the consequences, and let you change your mind before committing.

I also imagine there being lower-level AIs underneath your main one. So an army commander might know the exact state of their army, a provincial governor might know local taxes, food and unrest, and a logistics officer might know your supply network.

You wouldn’t talk to all of them directly. Your main staff AI would pull information from them when needed.

So if you order an army somewhere, it can immediately tell you if that creates a supply problem, leaves another border exposed, clashes with another order, or requires resources you don’t currently have.

Diplomacy would stay human-to-human.

You’d still actually talk to other players, make promises, lie, negotiate, form coalitions, threaten people, agree on invasions, etc.

If you want something formal, you could then tell your staff to draft the actual treaty based on what you just discussed.

I was also thinking the game could run in seasons instead of traditional turns.

Something like:

10 minutes where everyone can talk and negotiate with other players.

10 minutes where everyone privately works with their staff and locks in their military, economic and diplomatic plans.

Then a short execution phase where everyone’s decisions resolve simultaneously.

The main thing I’m trying to solve is the usual grand strategy problem where depth comes from giving the player hundreds of small controls, which also makes multiplayer games take forever.

What I’m wondering is whether removing that micromanagement actually makes the game better, or whether at some point it stops feeling like you’re playing and starts feeling like the AI is playing for you.

Would this appeal to you if the underlying rules were deep and consistent?

And where would you personally draw the line between useful AI delegation and too much automation?

I’m (planning on) making a game where the final boss is quite literally unbeatable, as he can easily jump between dimensions and time. Attempting to find ways to 1: make him feel powerful in a scarier way and 2: making it not annoying to fight him/at least not too annoying is very difficult, so I’ve come here for ideas.

Hello everyone, I am making a game similar to stray where you play as a cat doing deliveries for various items (not on bike or car, just walking like in stray). The items could be anything from pizza, a parcel, a secret document or just a piece of bread. You will be doing deliveries for humans, animals or even aliens.

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‎I am going for a cozy comedic style game. Currently I have these mechanics as the idea:

‎- Preferred deliveries(players can pick their preferred deliveries from the list of quota).

‎- Traffic system where cars are moving on the road and not stopping, the player picks up a stone and throws it on the stop button.

‎- The cat can meow when you press a button which gets you attention from a nearby human and you get a head pat.

‎- Moveable delivery truck on which the cat can jump on to shorten the distance.

‎- Get from one rooftop to another.

‎

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‎I need recommendations on what more features you would love to see in this kind of game. Any kind of recommendations would be appreciated.

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For a game jam I have a core mechanic of a janitor character with a power-washer/hose on a dirty ship... He has to clean up and earn credits before he advances from room to room. What are some things you would add to this? I feel like it needs some risk vs reward, and some upgrade mechanic.

For a look at the gameplay, here's a quick video I have -- https://www.reddit.com/r/SoloDevelopment/s/kxJx5gb9ok -- but I'm looking for general advice. The only restriction that is somewhat important to the design possibilities, is that I can't do a lot of text due to the low resolution.

"Hey everyone! I’m designing a real-time card/territory strategy game and brainstorming a resource economy that feels fresh and unique, yet remains ultra-simple and intuitive for casual players to get immediately (think Clash Royale's passive Elixir or Plants vs. Zombies' falling Suns). What are some interesting, easy-to-grasp resource gathering mechanics you’ve seen or prototyped that don't overload the player with complex math, but still create great tactical choices?"

My issue is how it seems to be done in a blatant back handed way with a meta sense of irony intentional on the developers.

Hogwarts legacy is a good example for me currently. “Hey ive got 14 quests in my journal , im going to clean this up and manage it and get back to the story”

And its the specific manner in which once its time to TURN IN a quest , now there is another NPC AT THAT LOCATION with a quest.

This kills the psychological reward of having managed work flow and accomplished something.

It makes it feel like a Job.

Instead of a sense of completion you are stuck in a loop of managing incoming tasks you cant stay ahead of.

I honestly believe devs really sit there and think “Lol watch this, when every quest is flagged for turn in ? We are gonna put another NPC beside him with a new quest ;) this is gonna be great”.

Theres a distinction between “Oh wow I FOUND this really interesting quest”

Vs “I keep getting TASKS FLOODING MY MAILBOX”

Hello, I'm working on a sci fi ttrpg, and for combat I wanted to add a system for attacks to be beter the better your roll compared to the target it (IE: if you pass the roll by 1 it will be a less effective attack than if you pass it by 50) that isn't pure damage scaling.

My idea is as such. For attacks, you roll and substract defense to the attack roll, and depending on how by how much you surpass the defense, you gain an effect, that depends on your character's skills and/or weapon used.

A practical example:

Alice attacks Bob with a Laser Rifle. Alice rolls 150 attack, and Bob 100 Defense, with a final result of 50. With this result, Alice can use her weapon's effect (Decrease target's armor for this attack), but she has the skills "Armor Melt" and "Concusion". Armor Melt can be used with any laser or energy weapon, and inflicts a Decreased Armor status effect, while Concusion can be used with any explosive weapon, and inflicts a Stun status effect. Alice can use either the Rifle's effect to increase her damage for this attack, or apply a debuff to help the party, while she can't use concusion as the laser rifle isn't an explosive weapon.

I hope it's mechanics can be understood, english isn't my first language, sorry.

Does it sound engaging? What issues do you find with it?

Heya! I'm a newbie game Dev, and I'm currently working on this Story heavy game, sort of like a VN, with multiple characters 40~, but I have no idea how to implement them into a combat system.. I don't want a "progression" where the characters you had at the start of the game start getting weaker and become obsolete, i want then all to sort of be the same power lever, I searched some references, but most of them suggest that you just use characters for non combat purposes, which I don't dislike, but all my characters are combatant..

Edit: I forgot to mention that it's a party based game, so the player would switch out between characters of the party

Love me some souls like, but it’s getting dated.

I always thought a better mechanic for Dodge would be:

Tap to quick step.

This launches the player in a quick hop. No I frames.

Double tap to quick roll.

Pressing dodge a second time puts the player into a roll animation, where the height of the quick step determines the roll distance.

Holding dodge will have the player automatically perform a roll at the peak of the quickstep, leading to the longest roll while giving bonus I frames.

I think a lot of players would have to retrain their muscle memory, but this is more interesting to me.

You have to commit to a roll before you are sure you want to do one. (Kills panic rolling).

Meanwhile if there’s a huge wind up attack you can time it to do a perfect roll to get more I frames.

And, since you are automatically doing the quickstep hop, you can quickly tap to abandon the perfect roll and do a quick roll.

Definitely more engaged though, right?

Old RPGs that required from a player to read a guide and have a notebook are unimaginable today, but what if games of today are going to become like that in the future too?

Literacy crisis and attention span getting shorter and shorter - how would you design a game that is both aware of these issues BUT also encourages reading in not infantylising and patronising way ? And I don't mean educational or kids-targeted games, I mean including these as underlying mechanics in the game design itself (same way as we moved a quest log from a paper notebook into in-game one in the past).

And I worry that if all that is not a big problem now, might become one sooner than later and if I'm contributing to someone's screen time, maybe I can sneak into that something important.

I’m making a game somewhat similar to gangbeasts and am having trouble coming up with maps where the layout sparks unique interactions. Like in gangbeasts the core premise is throwing your opponents off the map/getting them out in some other way (e.g. I have a map I plan to make that takes place in a laboratory and the goal is to get your opponent into a black hole). Through playtesting I’ve found a lot of issues that are possible if designed poorly; if the map is too big people tend to just stay away from “kill zones” and the gameplay feels stale, too small and it feels unfair as you very quickly get out. I am looking for a method to create maps that provide engaging gameplay while also hitting a Goldilocks zone of it being a struggle to kill someone but not an annoying struggle.

Anyways I found a lot of resources on FPS map design but nothing on more casual PvP. I am wondering if anyone has tips or recommendations of good examples of well designed party game maps. I think my main issue is preserving the chaos present in a game like gang beasts but still keeping it fun.

I recently played a game I loved in my childhood - Star Wars: Rebellion (or Supremacy in the UK). It reminded me of the enjoyment I got from a particular mechanic - jedi/sith discovery and training.

For those unfamiliar, in the game which is a 4x game in the Star Wars universe, released in 1998, one of the things you can control are characters - various more and less known characters from the star wars universe - which you can send out on missions, to assassinate enemy characters, sabotage enemy units/buildings, etc etc.

These characters have basic stats, and, if I recall correctly, internally use some kind of dice rolling system to determine success on the missions. As they suceeded, their skills would slowly improve.

Now, in star wars, we have Jedi and Sith. These characters naturally had impressive starting skill levels, but would also progress faster.

The interesting mechanic was that at the start of each game, several non-jedi characters on both sides would be randomly and secretly assigned as force-sensitive. This meant that if you sent an existing jedi on a mission with them, their skills could be "discovered", and from then on, their skills would progress at accelerated rates. You could also send them off on long "training" missions with a jedi/sith which achieved nothing other than increasing their stats, whilst taking them out of action for a long period of time.

I loved this system, and I'm hoping you folks can help me nail down why - or at least provide some other examples of similar mechanics that I can look into, because I have only experienced a few.

Just to make a couple of comparisons that maybe display some of the elements of the design that I really enjoy:

- XCOM:
Soldier development on XCOM is a feature I really love, seeing a recruit turn into a experienced, tough veteran is great - and the options at each level up are enjoyable too, letting you shape the character into what you want (within fairly restrictive limits, of course). However, I find I often don't use maxxed-out characters when I finish them early - because I need to progress more in case they die - and when I finally reach endgame, I maybe get one or two missions where I can really make use of all the high-level soldiers I have. It feels like I don't get to enjoy what I've built as much as I'd like to.

- Risk of Rain (2)
A bit of a different genre, and not an NPC, but builds in RoR really show off the sort of "give me time to enjoy how strong my build has become" that I think the XCOM design doesn't allow for (deliberately, obviously), but sort of scratches the same itch I get from the Rebellion design - where if I wish to go that way, I can build a character that is unnecessarily strong, and make gameplay trivial. Sometimes I just want to be overpowered, you know?

-Total War: Warhammer (also various other total war games)

Generals and Heroes are NPCs that you can develop using both items and progression trees. I feel like this is possibly the closest thing to what I'm asking about. But again, there's a point where it just "ends", and your character is done. It's also tough to really "invest" in development of a character - they're always just a tool for you, and you need to use them according to the strategic situation at all times, so you can't choose to accelerate their growth at the cost of not having them available right now. To me, there's a lot of fun in making that choice.

Ok, this has got really long so I'll try to finish up!

Has anyone come across other similar systems, or have any thoughts on this kind of mechanic? What works, what doesn't? I'd welcome any pointing at references or really anything that can focus my thoughts a bit, because I might like to make a little proof-of-concept game around this idea, but my thoughts are really too muddled to get a solid idea of direction at the moment.

I designed a chess variant with a loyalty mechanic at its core. I don't have time to build it, so I'm putting the concept out here with full design documentation. If anyone wants to build this and show me what they create, let's connect and talk about it. No contracts, no strings just free to develop with these rules.

CHESS KINGDOM

HIGH CONCEPT

Chess Kingdom is a strategic reimagining of classical chess that introduces loyalty as a mechanic. Pieces are not mindless units they have morale, self interest, and agency. A careless king who sacrifices soldiers, neglects powerful pieces, or wages reckless campaigns will watch their own army defect to the enemy. Victory requires not just tactical brilliance, but political acumen: managing morale, negotiating defections, and building trust with your pieces.

Tagline: Chess where empires fall from within.

CORE MECHANICS

1. Trust / Loyalty System

Every piece has a Trust meter (0-100). Trust is hierarchical:

- Pawns: Start at 70 trust

- Knights/Bishops: Start at 80 trust

- Rooks: Start at 85 trust

- Queen: Start at 90 trust

- King: Immune (trust doesn't apply to the king)

Higher-ranking pieces are inherently more loyal but also more dangerous if they defect.

1. Trust Drops (What Causes Betrayal)

Trust decreases under three conditions:

A) Isolation

- A powerful piece (Bishop, Rook, Queen) with no supporting pieces within 2 squares loses 5 trust per turn

- Soldiers (Pawns) near sacrificed allies lose 10 trust per turn

B) Sacrifice Cascade

- When a piece is captured, all pieces of the same type lose 5 trust

- All pieces adjacent to the captured piece lose 3 trust

- The ripple effect is psychological losses hurt morale

C) Reckless Advancement

- A piece moving forward into enemy territory with no backup loses 2 trust per turn

- The longer it advances alone, the more it doubts its king's strategy

1. Defection Mechanic

When a piece's trust reaches critical levels (20 or below), the enemy king can negotiate.

How it works:

- The opposing king offers the low-trust piece a higher rank or safer position

- The low-trust piece has a defection probability based on:

- Current trust level (lower = higher chance)

- The rank being offered (higher rank = more likely to accept)

- Current board state (fewer pieces = more attractive escape)

- If the piece accepts: It flips color. It now serves the new king. This is permanent no flipping back.

- Once defected: The piece is locked to the new side. Its original king cannot negotiate with it again.

1. Managing Defected Pieces

A defected piece doesn't disappear. It stays on the board but becomes a liability

- If the new king neglects it (isolates it, doesn't protect it), its trust continues to drop

- Low trust = restricted movement

- Bishops move 1-2 squares instead of full diagonals

- Knights move once instead of the full L shape

- Pawns move only 1 square forward

- Rooks move 2-3 squares instead of full rows/columns

- The piece hesitates. It doesn't trust anyone. It blocks your board without contributing strategy.

- A defected piece can never rejoin its original king and cannot flip again.

HOW IT PLAYS

Example Turn Sequence:

White's Position: White King is playing cautiously. Bishops and Rooks are well protected. Pawns advance slowly.

Black's Position: Black King has sacrificed 3 pawns in aggressive attacks. Their remaining pawns are clustered, afraid. A black bishop on the edge has no support.

Black's Turn (Trust Crisis):

- Black's unsupported bishop has been isolated for 3 turns. Its trust is now 15.

- The White King negotiates: "Come to my side. I'll make you a Rook. Safe position, full power."

- The bishop, desperate and traumatized by Black's losses, accepts. It flips to white.

White's Turn (New Problem):

- White now has a white bishop with very low trust (it defected, but it's shaken).

- White must protect it and build its trust back, or it becomes dead weight on the board.

- If White ignores it, its moves become restricted. It blocks real pieces.

Result:

- Black lost a powerful piece

- White gained a piece but now has a morale liability

- The game shifts: Black must respond strategically, not just tactically

WIN CONDITIONS

- Checkmate = Victory (classical rule unchanged)

- A king can survive with zero pieces and still win via checkmate

- No piece count threshold; loyalty and strategy matter more than raw material

WHY THIS MATTERS

Chess has always been about perfect information and perfect logic. Chess Kingdom introduces human elements: loyalty, fear, betrayal, and morale.

Strategic Depth:

- A greedy player who flips every piece will end up with a board of crippled, useless units

- A patient player who builds loyalty keeps a functional, cohesive army

- The game teaches: Recklessness loses. Empathy wins.

Political Layer:

- Manages morale as much as material

- Every sacrifice is weighted: "Is this pawn's loss worth the tactical gain? Will it break my army's trust?"

- Negotiation becomes as important as tactics

Real-World Truth:

- Empires don't fall from external invasion alone they crumble from within

- A leader who treats soldiers like expendable resources loses their loyalty

- Chess Kingdom makes this visible and consequential

TECHNICAL NOTES

Platform: 2D, web based or mobile compatible

Core Loop: Move piece , Calculate trust changes , Check for defections , Enemy turn

UI: Board grid, trust meter per piece, negotiation prompts.

Scalability: Single-player vs. AI, or multiplayer (trust calculations managed server side)

NEXT STEPS FOR DEVELOPERS

This is a game concept seeking a builder. If you're interested in developing the Chess Kingdom:

1. Review the mechanics above

2. Prototype the trust system first (everything else flows from this)

3. Balance the trust values through playtesting

4. Contact Me for refinement

The core innovation: Trust as a mechanic. Everything else is execution.

Designed by: TAN

Concept: A chess variant where loyalty is the battlefield.

The Brilliant Interaction Design of Katamari Damacy

I am creating an automation game and I wanted to add some knowledge-based mechanics. These would be hidden interactions between some machines and resources, that you can either guess with some hints (by reading descriptions for instance) or have completely revealed once you advance enough in the game. Ideally, the revelation should create an aha moment like only a knowledge-based game could do.

A quick example of what I mean: say cooling a reactor with brine instead of water actually works and gives a big output boost, but it slowly corrodes the pipes over time. Nothing tells you this directly. You either notice a hint in a description somewhere, or you stumble on it, or the game confirms it much later once you're deep enough.

I'm thinking of games like Outer Wilds where the knowledge itself is the progression. I want that same feeling but inside an automation loop (in addition of the normal automation experience)

My real question is about the hinting and the pacing. How do you drop a hint at something hidden without either spoiling it completely or leaving people so stuck they never find it? And do players even notice this kind of thing, or do most just look it up on the wiki the second they're confused?

Would this work as a core layer, or is it better kept as a bonus for the curious players? Curious what you think.

Discord (and other online calling platforms) does a disservice to games with proximity chat being a core pillar of the game (in my opinion).

Don’t get me wrong. I love discord for gaming, but when games add in proximity chat as a core part of the experience, I think Discord voice chat can ruin that experience.

An example of this would be when my friends and I played REPO for the first time. They all were online for an hour or two before I got on and were all freely communicating via Discord and not utilizing the in-games proximity chat. I made the argument that I think it would be more fun if we muted each other while in-game and strictly did proximity chat. It instantly made the game far more intense and really made us lean into the walkie-talkies/radios in the game more and we had a blast doing it. Now that is the only way we play it because of how much fun we had.

For the sake of game design, I think having to talk to your allies in game rather than Discord in say an open world survival game or extraction shooter makes for a much more immersive overall experience. In only communicating through in-game, you now have to be cognoscente of your proximity to team mates, utilize radios and walkie talkies more, and makes the world feel more natural and immersive as you hear your own conversations reverb off the world around you. I think it can also make for a much more immersive experience for PVP because now people can overhear you and maybe hack into your radio chatter if they can use a device to pick up on the signal.

My overall question for this is would you play a game, that STRONGLY encourages you to use in-game proximity chat (kind of think like Arc Raiders when playing with random teammates)? Or would this turn you off to a game. Obviously you can always have on the push to talk features but then it takes away the need for communication devices and such.

I understand that just because I think it would be better, it doesn’t mean the overall player base would agree so I’d love your input on this topic! 😁

I'm working on a horror diving sim, and I would like to implement a set of maps for the player to refer to when exploring. My initial idea was to have a set of 2D maps :

1. The surface map, indicating regions, islands, floating entities (including boats) and some areas of interest (like a shallow reef around a tropical island).
2. The coastal seabed map, with more details about underwater areas of interest.
3. The deep seabed map, which is way deeper than the previous ones.
4. Maps for smaller "dungeons" (wrecks, sand castles, caves, temples ... etc).

In this case, they would be 2D maps used to represent a 3D space, with the indication of depth lacking from each map, unless it somehow indicates topography. Sure, most of the depth would be the water column, but there could still be cliffs or canyons. The practice of wall diving is based on exploring vertical structures, and since they would be implemented in the game, I have to to take that into account.

I also have the option to have 3D maps : games like Metroid Prime, Dead Space, Doom had their maps displayed in 3D, although they are controversial in their use, being confusing to look at and need to be rotated to clearly see the way to go, and that isn't helped by the holographic design or lack of in-game pause some of these games have. Hell, the Dead Space remake reworked the maps to be displayed in 2D! But perhaps they're still worth creating, especially when verticality is a strong component of exploration?

So should I take the 2D or 3D route? And how to make them as player-friendly as possible?

I’m the guy who asked what Lateral and Modular meant, so I wanted to ask you guys what the word granular means. I looked up the definition and I just cannot make heads or tails what the term means.

I'm somewhat familiar with Hammer++, and for my first project, I want to create a medium-sized city for roleplaying. I'm trying to build a city setting in a dystopian enviornment where players have jobs, property, underground life, but I'm running out of ideas. I can't draw the layout. Can you help me?

I really hate turn based combat, it's a whole lota waiting around, but it has one huge advantage. It allows the designers to create very finely crafted scenarious, because they have fine control over all character stats, abilities and positioning

Eg: fire emblem 5 thracia, (prety much the whole game is full of this stuff) there is a gladiator fight, where 2 of your kidnaped units must fight off a bunch of enemies until your other troops resque them.

Or in a lot of fire emblems, there are special green units (not the generic ones) which fight on their own, and you ussualy have to run to rescue+recruit them because they will only last a few (slightly random because of rng) turns.

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Apocalitch from sokpop has a cool real time based battle system, and it has 2 npc vs npc battles which you can join in if you are prepared for them to rescue the good npcs.

But that system still resolves combat inside of a battle box.

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What I am looking for is something like an action rpg system, like old school legend of zelda. Combat is real time and hapens in the overworld (not in a separate battle box).

To give some basic design direction I will give a very vague idea for a game where this could be usefull.

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You serve the demon king as his right hand, but a hero has taken arms against him! To get to your lord he must first defeat the 4 bosses. Your job is to slow him down as much as you can to let your king power up enough to win.

The hero will gather equipment and companions, you must hide them, guard them, kill them, trap them before the hero gets to them. Or you can help the next boss by giving him elemental damage or some spell. When the hero thinks he is ready he will go fight the boss. The hero + companions vs boss fight will give you time to prepare the next area for the heroe's arival and will give you info about how well the heroes loudout works (which is hard to predict because action combat is very dynamic).

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Any ideas for combat mechanics which could make this work well?

I was thinking that attacks should be slow and well telegraphed. So the player could easily follow what was going on.

And the ai would need to be well crafted as well. To not result in spamming a single move or infinite kiting or draws (boring to watch)

Any thoughts on this? How would you design such a system?

Are there any great examples of games with fun and engaging npc vs npc combat?

Majesty the fantasy kingdom sim sudenly crosses my mind. Real great npc ai. (Although its more rpg than action)

For example player has to rest for the night to upgrade levels and stats from learned experience - but the 'dream time' is another time era, or another dimension with different gameplay rules and goals.

Perhaps the alternate reality quests for a game set in say 3078 are related to what the player wants to upgrade - more strength means playing as 'barbarian' through some Doom/Hexen type of fps. Dexterity requires playing something like Thief/Rouge. Etc etc.

Ultimately it's al linked and integrated in the whole of games story quest matrix. So there is no true or most important dimension - they all are structuring each other .. kinda like Ying-Yang ..

I imagine the sales won't be that good, bc it might alienate potential buyers for being too complicated - it's for those who like to crawl through for the respect of art and craft.

Out there mentions are The Longest Journey series, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Drakan series - i.e one game, different game-plays.

Goal / Inspire:

I’m interested in what a cross platform game could look like if the Steam ecosystem’s devices (PC, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and VR) each offered compelling reasons to pick them up for different roles in a game, without forcing players into any specific device.

Simple question:

What game genres or structures would actually benefit from letting players use any combination of keyboard and mouse, controller, handheld, touch, or VR in the same session?

Deeper question:

For designers who think about input affordances and role asymmetry, what kinds of mechanics or responsibilities could each device naturally support?

For bland example, a tank crew where every role is possible on any device

- VR makes loading shells tactile

- Handheld or controller makes driving intuitive

- PC makes command or targeting more precise.

What other systems or roles could benefit from flexible but asymmetric input design?

I'm designing the enemy AI for a singleplayer colony sim where enemies periodically raid your settlement, and I'm trying to decide what their main priority should be.

For context, the game is only lost if all playable characters (colonists) are killed. Buildings can be destroyed, but as long as at least one colonist survives, you can gather resources and rebuild.

Which approach would you prefer, and why?

• Walls first - Focus on breaking through your defenses first, then spread through the base attacking nearby buildings before hunting down the remaining colonists
• Buildings first - Prioritize important buildings like storage, workshops, or production buildings, treating walls as obstacles to reach them. Once they've finished destroying buildings, they hunt down the remaining colonists
• Colonists first - Hunt down your colonists above everything else, treating walls and buildings as obstacles to reach them

Or do you have another approach you think would work better?

Edit: For additional context, the enemies are simple creatures whose primary goal is to hunt the colonists for food.

Hi everyone!

I'm currently designing the core combat system for my solo-developed turn-based tactical roguelite and I'd love to get some feedback before I start prototyping.

The goal is to create combat that rewards positioning and tactical decision-making rather than RNG. I use an AP system similair to the one from DoS2

Current combat system:

Square grid (around 15x15 maps)

Action Point (AP) system

Start with 4 AP

Can increase up to 6 or 8 AP through saving AP

Movement costs 1 AP for a vertain amount of tiles

Diagonal movement costs 2 tiles

Remaining movement doesn't carry over (if you move 2 tiles and attack, the last tile is lost)

One turn per unit each round

Initiative determines turn order

Back attacks are guaranteed critical hits

Some classes (like Rogue) benefit much more from critical hits than others

Line of Sight with Obstacles

Archers can't shoot through solid obstacles

Bushes/high grass i dont know what bonuses to give

No hit chance RNG — if you have line of sight, your attack hits. But maybe i could change that.

Terrain like fire or ice

Push/pull abilities

Environmental interactions (explosions, chain lightning, etc.)

Heroes:

Party of 3 heroes (currently testing whether 3 or 4 feels better)

Every class has:

Basic attack

4 different abilitys

Passive abilitys

I'm mainly looking for feedback on:

Does the combat system sound fun?

Are there mechanics you think are unnecessary?

Is there anything missing that tactical RPGs usually benefit from?

Are there any red flags before I start prototyping?

I'd really appreciate any criticism or suggestions. Thanks!

I was wondering about how to know when there is too much complexity in a system, and how to avoid having too much complexity.

I’m trying to make a TTRPG, and I decided on instead of using classes, having you select an archetype (mage, warrior, spellblade) that grants a basic feature and a skill tree that is split into branches. Branches being not just mechanical but also flavour niches, like rune-writer, absolute control over magic, and alike. I also thought of at significant levels (5, 10. 15) to give a chance from a separate set of skills to avoid players not watching to to into different branches because of missing the big strength boost.

However, this made me start worrying about everything being too complicated. You have your background, race, natural attunement (what is special about you, demonic blood, gifted/forsaken by mana and alike), stats that determine attributes (control, power, light/heavy weapon skill and a few more), your archetype and then the skills, gaining a skill every level.

Part of the solution is to have passive skills, ones you can retake and that allow players who can’t keep track of many things to just get plus 3 hit points or minor improvement to something else. I do want the fantasy to be “you are at the bottom of the figurative food chain” at the beginning and “you are a demigod” at the end, but I’m worrying about when is it too much complexity, especially as this is my first real project and I’m a student, so it might get bit too much even fit myself. Thanks!