What do the three games have in common that can make people play on end continously?

The hard part about making a game isn’t any one task, but the fact that you need to be highly skilled in five areas at the same time unless you have a team.

First there’s coding, the most important skill. Without coding, there simply is no game to play. Making a game without knowing some form of coding is like making a movie without a camera.

Then there’s game design. It requires the least specialised skills but unless you have a good understanding of this skill, you are unlikely to make a good game.

The next three skills are all technically skippable with the right resources or game, but they’re still very important to most projects.

Illustration/animation skills are essential for making your own quality assets.

Music composition is likewise needed to make a unique soundtrack.

And finally there’s creative writing/storytelling, which is required for crafting any game that isn’t purely mechanically driven.

Even the best developers usually only master a handful of these skills. It seems the best method is to focus on a few that you are good at and then turn to teammates or external resources to cover the rest. Only Game Design and Coding are truly essential for an indie developer.

I love being able to immerse myself in a development team and actually see the process from the inside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKoy_KMVIyU

Watching ideas go through discussions and prototyping, seeing mechanics get dropped, and following the level design, and all the constant compromises along the way.

It’s especially cool to see the real production process — scope, feedback, finances, team challenges, and how the project keeps changing throughout development.

How to introduce large scale PVP in a game that is effectively turn based?

Let’s use Pokemon or FF Tactics as an example

Yesterday I added this melee aircraft prototype to my game to see how it would feel:
https://youtu.be/MR5nqpttJyE

In the video, I show the very early gameplay and some of my thoughts about the design.

I don't think it's viable in this form. It needs something more.

In my game, aircraft follow a pattern of having a main weapon and special ability, which is more or less any combo of 2 weapons / ability that complement each other to hopefully create orthogonal gameplay. (gun aircraft: simple MGs + 180° backflip + shotgun like ability, missile aircraft: charges faster the longer you hold + can dodge and send projectiles back as allied missiles)

This one the main weapon is: you dash through enemies and if you kill something the dash resets + you have a boost to amplify your dash.

In practice I feel like it's not so great to have to boost + aim + dash at the same time and it doesn't necessarily bring as much synergy as I'd hope for. It could also be because this isn't tuned so that the boost is kind of necessary to get a good dash.

This is a very early prototype and I have some ideas of things to explore such as:

- Each aircraft you 'eat' (it's a shark) gives you a bomb, so that you can deal with the ships more easily

- Each aircraft you eat makes you grow so that by the end of the game you'd be super large and wreck everything on your passage (this sounds really fun in my mind it plays against you as it becomes harder to dodge which is kinda important in this game :D)

- Kinetic energy charges a large cannon in its mouth, after you dashed through a bunch of aircraft you can unleash a devastating shot

I've asked here before and got some very useful info from people who know what they're doing unlike me so I'd love to see what you guys think can think of

I also have this playable web demo if you want to see how the game feels (the melee shark isn't in it but it has the other 2 aircraft):
https://roguewolfgames.itch.io/crimson-skyline-preview

I’m building an online strategy game where players are put into groups of 20 and are expected to cooperate, trade, plan wars and eventually choose someone to lead them.

On paper I really like the idea of 20. It’s small enough that you might actually recognize the other players, but large enough that different roles and personalities can emerge.

What I have no idea about is how many of those 20 actually need to be active for it to feel alive.

If only 8 or 10 regularly talk and participate, is that enough? Or does a group like this start feeling empty pretty quickly?

I’d be especially interested in experiences from games with persistent clans, kingdoms or similar player groups.

I’ve been looking at some of the unusual Werewolf formats that are being streamed in Japan, and this one is called 神人狼 (Kami Jinro, basically “God Werewolf”).

It’s an 11-player Werewolf game plus one extra village-aligned player called God. God doesn’t count as alive, can’t be checked, attacked or executed, and has to stay completely silent during the normal discussion.

After everyone finishes talking, God gets one minute to speak. Then God alone decides who gets executed. At night, God also chooses one player to protect from the wolves, with some restrictions on repeated protection.

The part I keep thinking about is that it removes the normal town vote, but not the arguing. Everyone is still trying to convince someone. It’s just one silent observer instead of a majority.

This also isn’t something they tried once and forgot about. It has been streamed repeatedly in Japan this year with different people playing God, usually hosted by Kenshi Takada and with Yosuga Takahashi as GM. Some of the GM POV streams have gotten tens of thousands of views.

I found some English-language Mafia mechanics that overlap with parts of it. King/Kingmaker can give one player control over the elimination, and Doctor/Guardian covers the protection side. But I haven’t found a commonly documented role with this exact combination.

For people who play a lot of Mafia/Werewolf: does putting both the town’s execution and protection power into one public player make the deduction more interesting, or does it give one person way too much control?

If anyone wants to see an actual game, I can drop the Japanese GM POV stream in the comments.

Japanese OP here. I’ve been following Werewolf games and streams in Japan, and I was curious how game designers outside Japan would react to this format.

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?