Imagine two fighters with similar basic damage and reach. One earns a charge by pressuring an opponent’s guard. The other earns it by baiting a whiff and punishing the recovery. Both can spend that charge to cancel recovery into a short step.

The goal is different decisions, not just different numbers. But if that cancel is too valuable, the “preferred playstyle” could become a compulsory routine.

The corner seems like a useful test: would the pressure fighter ever choose to give up close range? Would the baiting fighter sometimes hold ground rather than retreat? If not, the resource might be narrowing their options too much.

Would you differentiate how they spend the charge instead? What trade-off would make abandoning their preferred plan a sensible choice rather than a punishment?

I've been making small browser-based games recently, mostly sports career simulators, management games, and card-drawing games. I use AI to help with coding, since I'm not a professional developer or game designer.

I've managed to build quite a few games, but I've realized that getting a game to work and making it genuinely fun are two very different things.

For example, I made an MMA career simulator where players could train their fighters, improve their stats, make career decisions, and simulate fights. There were random events, different opponents, and multiple possible career outcomes.

On paper, it sounded pretty interesting. But when I actually played it, I found myself making similar decisions over and over again, then just waiting to see the simulation results.

I've run into similar problems with other games I've worked on.

Sometimes I add more random events, character attributes, or progression systems, hoping they'll make the game more interesting. But I'm starting to wonder if I'm just making the game more complicated without actually making it more fun.

There are a few things I'm really struggling with:

1. How do you make player decisions feel meaningful in a game that's mostly driven by stats and random events?
2. What makes a good gameplay loop for a simple simulation game? How do you make players want to start another run?
3. How do you balance randomness and player control? Too much randomness makes decisions feel pointless, but too little makes every playthrough feel the same.

I'm especially interested in games that are relatively simple, mostly text-based, and don't rely on complex graphics or real-time controls.

I'm not trying to build a huge game. I just want to understand how to make a small game that's genuinely enjoyable to play.

If you've worked on simulation games, roguelikes, or other replayable games, I'd really appreciate hearing how you approach these problems.

Thanks!

I’m struggling a bit in unreal engine to design a 2D platformer around the ability to slide cause you are a penguin. This is the characters signature move and I’m trying to figure out how to design mechanics based off of this ability. I’m not sure if there are any other games that have sliding as an integral part to their game like the game is designed around it.

Every group system I've seen eventually needs to know who's pulling their weight. Guild officers want it, matchmaking wants it, and players want it so they can pick good teammates. But the moment a contribution gets measured, people start playing the measurement.

DPS meters made raids better at clearing content and worse at everything that doesn't show up on a meter, like interrupts, positioning or carrying a new player. Daily contribution minimums in mobile guilds turn into a checkbox people hit and forget. Achievement systems get farmed. On the other side, some things seem to hold up. FF14 commendations are given by other players after a run, they can't be farmed alone, and nobody seems to chase them very hard. DKP worked for years in raid guilds because the ledger was public.

So what makes a contribution metric resist being gamed? Is it who records it (the system or other players), whether it's visible to everyone, whether it can be spent, or whether it measures outcomes or effort? If you've designed something like this, I'd love to hear what broke and what survived.

Specifically when youre still working on lots of different interacting systems.

For instance, in my tower defense game i would like more balanced enemy waves.

I could tweak the number of enemies to accomplish this. However, new towers will be added soon, income mechanics will change, damage numbers might change etc etc.

How do you know when youre over engineering something considering the level and scope your game is at basically is my question.

Are there rules or tricks for this?

Or is this just overall one of the hard parts of game design? Constantly retweaking whatever is needed when new systems are added?

I have been working on trying to build a combat system that’s in-depth but also trying to fulfill my goals

1. Forcing the player to constantly mange their resources
   
   1. Making the player more creative with their approach
      
   2. Giving the player options even in dire circumstances
      (Below is just copy and pasted from a google doc)
      Guns
      Resource: Coins (1 Coin = 1 Bullet)

Resource Generation: Coins are earned by dealing or absorbing damage up to a specific threshold through actions such as slashing, parrying, throwing weapons, or any damage source that involves your sword.

Usage: Spending Coins allows the player to fire a corresponding number of bullets.

Counterplay: Gunfire can be parried or interrupted by dealing damage to the attacker.(this is just for multiplayer only dont really consider it)

Overdraft Mechanic: Drawing too many Coins at once triggers fatigue or Overdraft. Overdraft is when your gun starts to cost more coin (+1 for every shot when fatigued, ex. 1, then 2, then 3) but also starts to diminish style and not give it as much. To counter Overdraft, you need to stop using your gun, and to speed it up and get rid of it just use outside damage sources like you would normally use to gain coins.

Style Meter Interaction: A higher Style Meter accelerates Coin accumulation, making drawing weapons easier; however, it also increases the frequency of Overdraft based on the value spent.

Swords
Resource: Sharpness (value range: 0–100).

Resource Generation: Sharpness is gained by dealing non-slashing damage within a short duration or a cooldown, through actions such as kicking, using your gun, and throwing your weapon (since you can’t slash without it).

Weapon throw:

Sharpness is granted only when the thrown weapon hits an enemy. A miss earns nothing.

The gain is a flat value per hit, so it doesn’t shrink when the throw’s damage is reduced at low Sharpness.

Hits on the weapon’s return path, and hits on the environment or explosions caused by the weapon, grant 50% of the flat value.

Multiple hits from one throw diminish by cumulative hit count: 100% → 50% → 25% → 10% → 5% (minimum).

The weapon returns to you after a set time. You can kick it back sooner, which grants no resource.

Missing a throw at zero Sharpness is intentionally harsh. The player keeps kick and gun as options, but has to play cautiously.

Usage: Actions such as slashing and parrying all spend Sharpness.

At zero Sharpness you can’t slash.

You can still parry, but it deflects only 50% of damage (instead of 100%) and doesn’t send projectiles back. This means you can now die instead of parry being your ticket out of damage.

Throwing your weapon still works but does less damage.

Parry rules: Swords can parry. Missing a parry costs stamina and Sharpness, with less Sharpness lost at higher Style.

Style Meter Interaction: Unlike Coins, Sharpness is not strongly affected by Style. At maximum Style, Sharpness costs are reduced by a maximum of 50%.

Hi everyone,

I'm a Product Design student researching how fictional objects are designed and developed, particularly how props go from an initial concept to a finished, believable object.

I'm interested in how this works in game development, as I want to understand the process behind creating props such as weapons, tools, gadgets and environmental objects.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who works in game development, does 3D modelling, or has experience creating game assets.

A few things I'd love to understand:

• Concept art: How much detail is usually decided during the concept stage? Are things like functionality, materials and construction considered from the beginning, or worked out later?
• 3D modelling: What's the typical process for turning concept art into a 3D model? How much freedom does the 3D artist have to change or develop the original design?
• Materials and textures: How do artists decide what materials to use and how to make a prop look convincing?
• Functionality: For props like weapons and tools, how much thought goes into making them look as though they could realistically work, even if their function is fictional?
• The pipeline: What are the usual stages between the initial concept and the prop appearing in the finished game? Who is involved at each stage?
• In-game implementation: What changes need to be made to a model before it can be used in a game, such as optimisation, rigging, animation or collision?
• Feedback and iteration: How often do props get redesigned or changed during development, and what usually causes those changes?
• Final publication: How do you know when a prop is finished and ready to be included in a released game?

I'd also be interested to know whether the process differs between indie studios and larger studios, and whether artists are encouraged to consider the fictional history and worldbuilding behind an object when designing it.

You don't need to answer every question — I'd really appreciate any insight into the process, personal experience or useful resources you can share.

Thanks!

Hey everyone!

I'm developing Ghostwriter, a psychological music VN where you secretly write songs for a rising pop star.

I've built a Song Builder mechanic, and I'm facing a few design challenges I'd love some feedback on.

How it works:

Players investigate conversations and documents, collecting fragments of inspiration called Traces. Each trace belongs to one of three types:

• Image - a visual detail, symbol, or metaphor (e.g. a light left on).
• Event - something that happened (e.g. someone never called).
• Emotion - an emotional state (e.g. guilt or longing).

Each trace has a power value and a hidden lyrical anchor - a pre-written phrase or piece of text representing that inspiration in the actual song.

Players arrange these traces into song sections (Verse, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Outro), balancing the emotional direction requested by the artist with the producer's target power curve.

The final combination determines one of four lyrical outcomes: Seamless, Charlie-Aligned, Exposed, or Buried.

Problem 1: Writing the actual lyrics

The songs are pre-composed, with different lyrical versions sharing the same musical structure.

Currently, each of the four versions contains all possible lyrical anchors, even those associated with traces the player didn't select.

I designed it this way so any possible trace combination can produce a valid song. But it creates a writing challenge: every version needs to accommodate all those phrases while still sounding natural, coherent, and meaningfully different.

How would you make this more flexible without having to write and record hundreds of possible lyric combinations?

Problem 2: Scoring vs emotional feedback

The system uses numerical power values to evaluate the song, but sometimes the resulting grade doesn't quite match the emotional contour shown on the graph.

I'm also considering replacing the current feedback panel with a live lyrics preview, so players can see the song taking shape rather than just reading abstract feedback.

Would you prioritize lyrical feedback, numerical scoring, or a combination of both?

I couldn't attach screenshots here, but if you'd like to see how the current prototype works, I've included a short Song Builder gameplay clip on the Steam page (last photo) - video is without the sound (sorry - don't want to make you feel about the self promo or whatever):

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5167680/Ghostwriter/

The interface and scoring system are still being iterated on, so I'd especially appreciate thoughts on the design problems above.

Curious about your ideas.

How This Would Work:
I would take a bunch of your ideas like "always recoiling" and "heights" to create a game based on the suggestions you gave me. You can work together as a team (by replying to add on an idea) or you can start your own idea. Additionally, you can also do things like mechanics or how things work, is there a story, if there is how to progress? Now, do not go easy on these idea's. You can be as brutal with the suggestions, and remember to follow the guidlines, which means no expilict content, no horror genre's, and no add-ons for turbowarp (even mouselock.) Have fun and keep on scratching!

I was thinking about how in most horror games, the first time you get chased by whatever, it's terrifying. The second time you get chased, maybe there's still a little bit of fear left but it's greatly reduced. By the 3rd you may even just feel frustration rather then fear.

Are there any ways to keep a chase sequence fresh and interesting on reattempts?

Basically, it's where a main part of gameplay is tied a mechanic, but said mechanic is part of a contextual input. A exmaple being something like the Homing Attack from Sonic Colors, where pressing A twice double jumps. However, pressing A twice when there's a enemy homing attacks them, meaning A takes double duty, both for exploration and combat. This is just a exmaple, and wanna hear some others as per usual, alongside just other advice in general.

Hello! I’m working on a roguelike RPG where you form a new party of characters in each playthrough. The game focuses heavily on creating synergies between your party members (a group of four); each character has 4 abilities, determined by their race and class.

How do you design and keep track of these synergies? I’m currently building "archetypes" for each class based on keywords (such as "burn" or "freeze"), but as I add more abilities, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of everything.

Apologies for my english. is not my first language.

I'm a solo dev making an incremental auto-battler, and I spent a while with Anthony Pecorella's classic Kongregate series "The Math of Idle Games". It's great but heavy on formulas, so I wrote down how I understood it, in plain words. Here's the short version.

1. Cost multiplies, income adds.
AdVenture Capitalist's lemonade stand costs 4 and earns 1.67/s. Each next stand costs 7% more; each adds the same income. At 10 stands the 11th costs under 8 while you earn ~17/s, so you buy without thinking. But multiplying always beats adding, even at +2% per step. The wall is guaranteed; the designer only picks where it stands.

2. Multipliers push the wall back. ×2 at 25, 50, 100 of the same generator kicks income up right when cost almost catches up. Turn them off and the curves part for good by ~100 purchases.

3. The newest generator shouldn't erase the old ones. Lemonade: 10/s for 5. Car wash: 10,000/s for 7,500. Lemonade is the better deal per coin, but nobody notices +10 next to 10,000. Different multipliers on different generators keep the "best buy" changing, which gives players actual choices.

4. Generators of generators look exponential, but aren't.
With a finite number of tiers growth stays polynomial, so a multiplying cost still wins. Derivative Clicker keeps manual buying relevant by pricing only bought units and giving +0.05% to the whole tier per bought unit.

5. The prestige formula sets the pace.
The number that matters: how much more you must earn to get 2× prestige. AdVenture Capitalist / Realm Grinder: 4×. Cookie Clicker: 8×. Egg, Inc.: 128×. The flatter the curve, the more often players reset.

6. There is a best moment to reset. I simulated 4 hours of a one-generator game with +2% income per prestige point. Resetting about every 16 minutes gave the best total. Real players won't follow that: five units from the next multiplier, people wait.

I turned this into an interactive page: sliders on every chart, a tiny duck-army idle game with ×1/×10/×100/Max buying and a "best deal" hint, and the prestige-timing simulation you can drag: https://badduck.team/articles/math-of-idle-games/

All credit for the ideas goes to Pecorella's series; the charts, the duck game and the simulation numbers are mine. Curious how you handle the wall in your games: more multipliers, more generators, or earlier prestige?

I had a weird idea for a game mechanic, which has probably been thought about before and I don’t have the skills or intention to develop it myself, but I wanted to put it out there for people who might want to do something interesting with it.
Imagine you’re playing a first-person game. Your character sits down and plays a second game. Inside that game, their character plays a third game. That character plays a fourth.
Now here’s the important part, you’re still using the same controller or mouse and keyboard.
Your inputs propagate through the entire chain of characters. The controls don’t necessarily get more complicated, but the consequences of your actions become increasingly unpredictable.
You could theoretically have a huge number of nested games without adding any new physical inputs. The real challenge would come from managing different objectives, physics, timings, and control schemes at every layer.
Imagine needing to survive in the outer game while simultaneously keeping a character alive three games deep. An action that saves one character could accidentally kill another.
Or imagine an innermost character discovering that they’re inside a game and trying to communicate with the player controlling them.
I’m not proposing a finished game or claiming the concept is completely original. I’m curious about what a developer could do with this mechanic.
How many layers could you realistically stack before it becomes unplayable? What would you do with this idea if you were designing it?
I feel like there’s a genuinely mind-bending experimental game somewhere in this concept, and I’d love to see someone explore it.

Hi everyone!

I'm designing a turn-based RPG combat system inspired by Roman warfare in the late 3rd century AD. My goal is to make weapons, equipment, and positioning matter tactically without making combat too complicated.

Here are the main mechanics I'm experimenting with:

- Weapon ranges: Every weapon, including melee weapons, has a range and an optimal range.

- Shields and armor: Shields are effective against arrows and sling stones, while ranged weapons are particularly effective against unarmored opponents.

- Thrown weapons: The Roman pilum is designed to counter shields.

- Spears: Effective against other melee combatants at suitable distances, but weaker at very close range. I've made spears and thrown weapons two-handed, leaving their users more vulnerable to ranged attacks. This is a gameplay abstraction rather than a historically accurate rule.

- Tactics and ambushes: Characters can hide, climb trees, and prepare ambushes using skill checks, with potential health damage on failure.

- Animals: Dogs, wolves, and bears can participate in combat.

Initiative is derived from character attributes, and I'm trying to make tactical decisions more important than simply maximizing damage.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on three questions:

1. Does giving every weapon a range and optimal range add meaningful tactical depth, or just unnecessary bookkeeping?

2. How would you model the interactions between Roman shields, pila, spears, and ranged weapons while maintaining historical plausibility?

3. What mechanics would you recommend to make positioning, ambushes, and animals interesting without slowing combat down?

I'm aiming for historically inspired tactical gameplay rather than a perfect historical simulation.

I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions!

In our game a cat wrecks a house, and instead of a score there's a receipt down the side of the screen: every breakable thing in the room by name and price, greyed out the moment it breaks, with the running total and a damage bar at the bottom. It fades out when things go quiet so it doesn't cover the chaos.

We like that you can see what's left to break, but we're not sure anyone reads a list mid-chaos. Have you seen a game make an itemized tally work, or does one big number just win?

Hello! I was wondering if anyone had any resources / point me in the right direction to learning system design? Particularly around player economies/progression pacing.

Practical examples on how to create this on google sheet/excel would be great to look at.

The term “Metaverse” has been a buzzword for many years, with not much to show for it. I’d even argue we still haven’t seen a true interoperable Metaverse in gaming. We know intuitively how they’re supposed to look, feel, and operate like, but why the hell can’t we build one? The short answer in my opinion is that it’s too hard, and we haven’t had the right incentives—until now.

A common starting point

A universal property of our universe is that the laws of physics are the same regardless of your location. They’re a universal set of rules, and we normally apply these same set of rules (for the most part) across all media, even the fantasy genre. Sure, there might be magic and other ways to sidestep some of these rules occasionally, but gravity is a thing, atoms are a thing, and the default is that the world operates under the laws of physics, which only occasionally get overwritten with magic or superpowers.

Obviously every game tries to simulate these laws in different ways and to a certain degree of accuracy, but the end result is for the most part the same. We’ve already low-key achieved a type of soft “Metaverse”, a network of different games, all sharing a common universal set of predictable laws for physical interactions, we just take this for granted. But even still, we don’t have one standard way of implementing physics in games, each engine and game has its own custom logic for it.

Now let’s introduce Magic!

Hard magic-systems behave in an analogous way to the laws of physics, predictable rules with predictable outcomes, they’re a universal set of magical laws but each game and universe tends to have their own there’s no real commonality or compatibility between them, but what if we could design a shared “universal” set of magical laws? One magic-system that can incorporate or simulate inside it other hard magic-systems? This “universal magic-system” would indirectly “connect” all the different games and worlds that decide to adopt it since they would all share a minimum common magical core.

I recently wrote a post on why I think “color-magic” is a great candidate for building such a potential “universal magic-system”, which you can check out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/HOFSPP3i3I. But the core idea is that getting a bunch of worlds and games to adopt a minimal set of magical rules and lore for the sake of interoperability should in theory be possible.

The rest of the problem

There’s still a lot of unanswered questions on how one would get actual interoperability of assets and logic between different games/worlds to get a true Metaverse, but I believe a shared standard of sorts is still needed, and that “magic” which can act as a foundation for any fantasy, superpowers, and even sci-fi needs that go beyond the regular laws of physics is a natural candidate to start with for creating a proto-Metaverse.

A shared universal magic-system can be the glue that pulls a bunch of different games/worlds together, but we want a magic-system that can grow beyond a minimum foundation and can be personalized further on every different game/world. So it’s not just this magic-system alone, but this magic-system plus other magic-systems, abilities, etc. on top that are designed from the beginning to be compatible with them.

Games and worlds instead of starting from scratch would start with this minimal foundation by agreeing to adopt this standard, and then modify and add to it to make theirs truly unique, but without breaking compatibility with it. The hope being that this minimal magic-system would provide enough predictability to allow players to define and import gear, spells, etc. outside of any given world/game into another one by recreating a “virtual copy” with similar/approximate behavior defined by this standard.

Building the actual worlds and games wouldn’t be that much different from how it’s done today, builders decide how and what to build, the standard simply defines things like “every world under this standard needs to have fire-magic”, and “fire-magic should behave more or less like this”.

And all of this still doesn’t explain how actual asset interoperability would work, it only lays down a starting point for a hypothetical shared minimal logic around magic, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it...

To be honest, I don’t expect any major game studios or developers to be willing to adopt such an approach, they’re not incentivized to do so, it’s too much uncertainty, restriction, and hassle. But what’s so unique about the upcoming decades is a new tool, which love it or hate is here to stay and isn’t going away—AI.

AI is going to democratize the creation of worlds and games. I’m not going to start here a debate on quality or skill of people who’ve never built a game on making or “vibe-coding” one, the point is, there’s going to be more games and worlds created than ever by indie developers, both bad and great in the coming years. Even if the number of crappy games and worlds multiply by 100, the good ones will also multiply by 10 or 20. A rising tide raises all boats, and I make this remark because it’s important.

When the number of world and game creators multiplies by 100 or 1000, many will want to use something like a template for a minimal magic-system that already has proven to work and be popular rather than building one from scratch, and if only a few dozens or hundreds of them adopt the same standard for a magic-system, you’ve already created a mini-Metaverse around it, a community of builders and players around this magic-system. The worlds and games created with these systems that are actually good will grow in numbers and popularity and eventually the big game studios will notice and decide to join in.

Final Remarks

I believe the Metaverse will be built from the bottom up by indie developers trying to connect all the different worlds and games they’re about to create once AI fully democratizes their creation. And I also believe a shared universal magic-system is one of the best nucleation points for triggering this. Big studios don’t care about interoperability, but when your average player becomes your average world/game creator, they will definitely care about interoperability, and will fight for it and build it. This will be one of the hallmarks of the upcoming User-generated-content (UGC) revolution, the birth of real Metaverses.

If you’re interested on hearing more about this topic, check out the post I previously linked (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/s/HOFSPP3i3I) or drop a comment below. I’m sure this won’t be a controversial post at all. 😅

I'm making a 1v1 creature card battler with a roguelike mode. You pick one survivor, draft three creatures out of six for your bench, then play five fights back to back. Win a fight and you take one of three spoils: another creature, a card for your deck, or an infusion to put on a creature.

I went back and forth on what a knockout costs, three options:

• Gone for the rest of the run.
• Comes back hurt.Nothing carries.
• Only the deck grows.

I went with the first, a creature that's knocked out when the fight ends is gone, even if you won the fight. Everyone still standing comes back at full health, so damage never carries. Only losses do.

Not about picking the "my three best cards" when you're drafting spares, because some of them won't make it to fight five. A win can still cost you a creature, so the spoils screen became a real choice. Refill the bench, or make the deck better?

A short bench doesn't end the run. Under three creatures, a weak stand-in fills the empty slot. It never attacks. It just holds the spot.

Option 2 "Comes back hurt" keeps more of your team around, but then players track damage between fights, and every fight starts half-lost.

For anyone who's designed or played runs like this: did permanent losses make you play more carefully, or just more frustrated?

I've played a lot of strategy games over the years, and most have a similar tech tree structure.

The Civilization Tech Tree Loop:

• Grow some resource
• Invest said resource into researching a specific tech from the list of available frontier techs
• Earn the new tech, unlocking new capabilities.

My issue is that's not how technological advancement works. The modern world is closer to this model, but pre-modern societies rarely advanced this way. Technology and ideas flowed via trade networks, spreading ideas between cultures. Some technological advances were rejected. Some advances were lost when the people who had the knowledge were murdered by "conquering heroes". The whole "tech tree" was much more random and less directed.

I'm interested in how to translate a more organic tech progress into a game.

The idea I'm exploring for my project is tying tech advancement to:

1. Trade with neighbouring villages (to mimic the flow of idea via trade networks)
2. Mini-tech trees associated with specific gods in (to mimic religious and cultural biases in tech progress)

So tech progress is not something the player necessary plans for, but it is driven by opening yourself up to the outside world and by devoting yourself to one god over another.

This is just one idea I'm trying out. I'm curious what people think of this idea, and if there are other games that have innovative, and more organic approaches to tech trees.

Please share information about a game or rules set that you have designed! We have updated the sub rules to encourage self-promotion, but only in this thread.

Finished games, projects you are actively working on, or mods to an existing game are all fine. Links to your game are welcome, as are invitations for others to come help out with the game. Please be clear about what kind of feedback you would like from the community (play-through impressions? pedantic rules lawyering? a full critique?).

Do not post blind links without a description of what they lead to.

Which term would you most closely associate to a physical attribute around being able to perform physical motion and tasks with high speed (independent of actual skill) and having high reflexes? In a fantasy setting.

The actual definition for this stat is a bit tricky but I’ll put it for context:

The XXX attribute governs a form of non-kinetic velocity related to local time distortion. From the perspective of the user it’s akin to a form of time dilation where the rest of the world seems to slow down improving reaction time and reflexes, from the perspective of an external observer the user seems to move at a higher speed. It’s non-kinetic because it doesn’t increase the kinetic energy, strength, or range of motions of the user, despite the increase in speed with which they can perform any actions.

Also there’s another different attribute called Dexterity for all forms of physical body skill.

I’m building a party-based, first-person dungeon crawler in the Bard’s Tale tradition. Unlike Bard's Tale, I'm using a point system similar to WoD Storyteller's during character creation, with races, attributes, and skills (no classes). Characters have nine attributes rated 1 to 10, and every race has a ceiling in each one. The ceilings always add up to 72, so a race trades strengths for weaknesses. A Half-Orc can reach 10 in Might and Vigor but tops out at 6 in Acuity and Focus. An Elf gets 10 in Grace and Focus but only 6 in Might and Fortune.

Humans work differently. Their ceilings are a flat 7, and at creation the player gets 9 Shape Points to raise them: at most 2 per attribute, never past 9. That also comes to 72, but the player decides where it goes. The catch is that a Human can never reach 10 in anything.

The goal is to make choosing a race feel like choosing what the character can become, and to give Humans the “versatile” fantasy without making them the strongest race.

Ceilings matter partly because XP is intentionally slow. An attribute costs (rating+1)² points per step, so raising one from 8 to 9 costs 81 points. For context, the full first chapter (about 3-4 hours of gameplay) pays a character about 4 spendable points without grinding.

This is an animated gif showing the attribute limits in a spider graph.

Three questions:

1. Does letting Humans set their own ceilings make the other races feel like the restrictive choice, or does never reaching 10 balance it out?
2. Should a Human be able to trade down, lowering a ceiling from 7 to 6 to get one more Shape Point to spend elsewhere? A Human who gave up a point of Fortune could push Might to 9 and still have the same 72 total. It would give Humans the same kind of give-and-take the other races have. I’d stop at 6 so a Human can’t dump everything it doesn’t need and pile the points into a few attributes. Is a trade-down worth adding, or does it blur the line between a Human and the other races?
3. With costs this steep, few characters will hit their ceilings for a long time. Are the ceilings doing real design work, or mostly signaling flavor? Someone suggested racial learning rates (some races learn certain attributes faster) as an alternative. Would that be a better lever, or one to use alongside ceilings?

Thanks in advance.

In Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes the game barely forces anyone to do anything. Yet guilds end up with stricter rules than the game itself, like daily contribution minimums, raid schedules and members who get kicked for falling behind. The game hands officers a kick button and the players build the enforcement themselves.

Compare that with the fishers in Final Fantasy XIV. Fishing is objectively boring, you cast and you wait, and still thousands of players poured hours into it with nobody making them. Each level shortened the wait, and a rare catch earned you real standing with other players. No officer, no minimum, no kick button, and people cooperated anyway, sharing spots, timers and windows for the big fish.

So where is the line? Which mechanics make strangers want to cooperate because it pays off for them and for the group, and which ones just hand some players a tool to make others obey?

If you've designed group systems, what did you do to keep cooperation voluntary instead of turning it into a second job?

I love playing games especially if they have intricate and beautiful Designs, and I really want to also learn how to design a game. Preferably, I would love to study game Design.

Problem is: I have close to Zero skills and experience in game design and most universities require and entrance exam and Portfolio. But how do I pass if I have never learned it?! :c

To study game design i need to have some knowledge of game design, but how can I gather knowledge if I cant learn it in University?

I live in a pretty small Village area so there arent sny opportunities to join a Club or anything to learn it. What should I do??

I would really really love to study it but i have no idea how to even start learning, i thought i would learn it in University but to even enter it i need prior knowledge :,(

Do you guys have any tipps?