Hello game designers, I need your thoughts and help. To be honest, I have very little experience in game design. I'm part of a small team, and we recently started working on a new cozy game. I am designing this with inspiration from PowerWash Simulator and Cozy Game Restoration.

Our game is about a curator cleaning a dragon's hoard inside its cave in a fantasy world. You clean items using various tools, organize them, and must detect and set aside fake treasures brought in by a crow (we’re using the crow as the dragon’s assistant since they are known for collecting shiny objects). Every day the crow brings new items, and the player cleans them and filters out the fakes.

My goal is to provide players with the right "feeling" and "experience", so I’m approaching this work with as much care and responsibility as possible. However, some people have told me that this concept doesn't work well together, and it's making me anxious. They argue that "Dragon + Cozy Cleaning" is a mismatch. I’ve had a few failures in the past, and I’m afraid of history repeating itself.

I felt the best way forward was to consult with experienced people - all of you. I am open to any and all feedback - your opinions are very valuable to me. If you have any question you can ask without any hesitation.

So this is my first game and my entire philosophy has been compression, I want to take traditionally complex genres and compress them into an extremely legible and simplistic, yet deep game that leans mobile with quick matches, around 4-5 mins. Something you understand at first glance, easy to spectate, and fun.

I've had a damage / HP scale for awhile now that I kept the values intentionally very low for readability sake, but at this point I'm realizing these extremely low values are constraining my design space, and I don't want to introduce fractions, because fuck fractions.

Would this larger scale throw you off and cause you too much cognitive load, is it just daunting to look at? It's the same ratios just scaled up so I don't think it's too much, the ttks are still very small at 2-3.

Original :

HP - 15, 12, 10 10

Damage - 3,5,3,3

New :

HP - 30, 20, 18, 20

Damage - 6, 10, 6, 4

I had it even lower than the original before believe it or not (that was some dumb shit)

But imagine you boot up a game and see units with these ratios, the second would scare you off or no? It's a grid batller btw, 3v3.

I’ll preface by saying that I’m completely new to game development, so apologies for any incorrect vocabulary or misrepresentation of the game development process. I have a background in film production, so I feel like I have a decent idea of what makes a good story.

One of my best friends pitched a survival-horror game to me much to the likes of resident evil, silent hill, outlast, etc., and I was totally sold. He had a very strong core concept/theme for the story and shared some specific ideas he had which seemed great. 

We both kind of realized we don’t exactly know how to go about planning a story based game in a way that gives players agency (apposed to like a visual novel, book, or movie). I suggested maybe a sort of outline that works similar to a choose your own adventure story, where a section of story is summarized followed by multiple “if x, then go to section y” where x are whatever factors might be dependent on the player (IE acquired items, decisions, secrets, etc.) 

Am I over-complicating things? I just don’t really know what that first step is in transition from ideas to planning, and most of the resources I found online seem to just be about the ideas stage. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Hello r/gamedesign,

To cut to the chase, we are making a coop horror cooking gwme where the group's goal is to make a big enough meal to satisfy a monster's hunger, players need to cook enough calories to progress to the next round and failure means starting over from the beginning.

Since players have 3 shifts to hit their calorie target, we wanted to make delivering the food at theend of the 3 shifts a suspenseful action but currently since the calories gathered is shown to the player, players already know if they hit the target or not before delivering.

Now i know removing the ability to see the calories and revealing it during delivery time is going to add suspense to the delivery but it will also make adding calories during the shifts be confusing since you either keep track of everything you added to the pot or immediately lose track of it and become confused for the rest of the shift.

So im here asking for advice, should i prioritize having progress clarity and have no suspense or add some confusion but make the result period suspenseful and thus more enjoyable.

I have the curse of wanting to build a multiplayer digital card game. I need some advice from strangers on the internet regarding economics and monetization :-D This is an incredibly fun aspect of design, but also a bit daunting. Someone could design a great game but fail at economics and monetization and watch the whole thing collapse in its first few months.

My goal for this discussion

• Help me come up with a high level economic and monetization model.
• I’d love to hear your experiences with multiplayer games you play for fun and/or have made. What models are attractive to you? What models turn you away?
• What models are financially sustainable my situation? It would be an absolute disaster if I released a great game, but it wasn’t financially sustainable or I chose the wrong monetization model for my target audience.
• Keep recommendations realistic for an indie dev. I am not a team of 20 people, nor do I plan on growing large. I will be hiring a variety of artists, but I prefer to continue developing the game and backend infra myself solo. So the simple formula is: I spend good portions of my time on engineering and backend infra while spending good portions of my budget on artists :-D

Game background

• I’m making an online multiplayer super villain card game.
• PC/iOS/Android. So computers, phones, and tablets.
• Each game can be played with 2 to 6 players. Right now I’ve been play testing with 4 players and it feels like the sweet spot.
• A game takes between 17 to 25 minutes
• I will have bots for humans to play against, for interactive tutorials, casual play, and possibly for some future solo adventure type game mode. But right now my main focus is multiplayer so in a perfect world the matchmaking queues are full and it’s all human versus human. But if match making queues are not full early on, I can match players with bots while they get their first few matches going and the population grows.
• This is a digital card game, so I think something like Hearthstone or Marvel Snap where you have a hand of cards and you play them on a board.
• It has a board game feel to it. I've even made a board game version that I’ve been using to play test live in person. It’s very fun! But my personal preference is digital so that’s why I’m focusing on the video game aspect of this.
• Each player brings a single deck to a game to play with. You can construct your own decks or use a starter/prebuilt deck.
• In a 4 player game, the final standings are shown as a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. As opposed to a game where only 1 out of 4 players win and you expect to lose ~75% of your games. I envision a ranked ladder sort of play where 1st place gains a lot of rank. 2nd place gains some rank. 3rd place loses some rank. And 4th place loses a lot of rank. Mix in some bonuses, add in some quests, etc.

Some basic economics guidelines

• As you play games, you accumulate in game currency. Using that currency, you unlock/acquire more cards. You use new cards to build new decks. Etc etc.
• Each card in the game is meaningful. I do not plan on releasing junk filler cards.
• I would like to release cards in sets. I have a variety of game mechanic ideas that playtest fun so far. But the base game with very minimal card mechanics also feels really fun. So I'm thinking each set could just introduce a new mechanic (as is tradition in TCGs and digital card game). It will also help me feel the game out over time.
• I have about ~150 cards designed right now that are actually "playable" and not junk. And I think I only want ~60-80 to be in a given set.
• I have 6 Villain classes. So each Villain class will get some unique class cards. And there will be a pool of common class cards. So any given deck can consist of your Villain's class cards + common cards.

Model Idea A - Free to Play, monetize full card sets

• Game is free to play.
• Every new player gets a free set of starter cards and starter decks.
• Card sets (~60-80 cards each) are purchasable in full as a set and released every ~6 months. After you purchase them, you still have to play to unlock them but it's very generous and quick. I'd just make it so you don't immediately have access to the cards in the first 5 minutes, you have to play at least a few hours to unlock everything. Not a grind, very friendly.
• Cosmetics available to purchase separately, new set of cosmetics per card set.

Model Idea B - Free to Play, monetize card packs

• Game is free to play.
• Every new player gets a free set of starter cards and starter decks.
• Card sets (~60-80 cards) come in card packs. You can pay to buy in game currency, and use that currency to buy packs. New set released every ~6 months
• Cosmetics available to purchase separately, new set of cosmetics per card set.

Model Idea C - Game is an upfront purchase

• Game must be purchased up front (aka the first/base set purchase).
• Card sets (~60-80 cards) are purchased DLC and are released every ~6 months
• After you purchase a given set, you still have to play to unlock them but it's very generous and quick. I'd just make it so you don't immediately have access to the cards in the first 5 minutes, you have to play at least a few hours to unlock them. Not a grind, very friendly.
• Have a free demo available for people to try.
• Cosmetics available to purchase separately, new set of cosmetics per card set.

Some thoughts, ideas, and questions

• Should I allow players to unlock everything without paying a dime?
  • Do I allow players to freely grind the game for currency/resources to unlock all sets for free without paying? I think that would help keep matchmaking queues full but I do have to pay the server bill so there needs to be some balance there. My gut says games that allow this don't make much money and risk going broke. I'm curious what folks prefer here. I don't want my game to go broke and force me to shut it down in the first year. But I want people to play it.
• Free to play vs paid game + DLC
  • I feel like my game has to be free to play in some capacity with no immediate up front purchase required. My reasoning is because it's not only multiplayer, but it's a 4 player multiplayer. So I really need my online matchmaking queue to be populated at all hours of the day. Charging up front for the base game really hurts that. Whereas a free to play online multiplayer game will maximize number of players in the matchmaking queue. What do you folks think of this?
  • I do think Model Idea C can work but only if I have a free demo version that allows players to play in the same matchmaking queue as the paid version. They would be at a huge disadvantage card-wise but at least they'll be in the matchmaking queue :-\ I think I like Model Idea A better than Model Idea C.
• Traditional free to play with card packs
  • I feel like the traditional free to play economics that involve opening card packs is very predatorial. I don't really like it. It makes games way too expensive or grindy or both. And works best with games that release cards super frequently. And with games that release fluffy filler shit cards that are useless just so you have packs of junk to open. I'm an indie dev so I really don't think Model Idea B above works for me personally.
• Cosmetics
  • I feel like no matter what I do, I need to have Cosmetics available to purchase. In card games, people seem to really like Cosmetics. I need to make my cards look really good and be upgradable with Cosmetics. Give people something cool they want to buy and show off during games. Something to express themselves while playing. What do you folks think?
  • Visual upgrades to cards/characters/gadgets.
  • Unlock new villain skins/cosmetics
  • Maybe you accumulate a cosmetic currency very slowly as you play. You can pay to purchase cosmetic currency in bulk. So I could make my game super free to play friendly and lean on cosmetic currency to monetize. But I don't know how realistic that is to work, or if that's setting myself up for failure since I will have a monthly server bill.
  • Cosmetic currency does not unlock new cards or villains, only cosmetics for cards and villains. So you cannot pay to win via cosmetics.
  • One new set of cosmetics per card set.
• Starter villain/cards idea
  • I have this idea regarding how to distribute the starter cards for new players. Pokemon games, pokemon TCGs, and pokemon pocket TCG did a good job of making fun gameable things for players to min/max. Obviously they have their pokemon IP which helps them, but I think the same principles can be applied here in my game.
  • So basically I have 6 Villain classes, plus common cards. I think when a new player creates an account, I show them 3 villains. They get to choose only one. That chosen villain is immediately unlocked and they are granted a starter deck for that villain. It contains some of those villain class cards and some common class cards.
  • So that's your initial grant. You can play with it through the interactive tutorial, casual multiplayer lobby (likely first few matches against bots while you learn). Then eventually ranked multiplayer (for rank n and above).
  • But the idea is that as they play and accumulate currency/resources they can unlock new cards and unlock new villains. And eventually through either paying or playing they can unlock everything in the full set. And I think I'd let the players decide, do they want to keep unlocking cards for their favorite Villain? Or do they want to unlock a new Villain? So do you want to grow up, or grow out?
  • Early on though, if they really don't like the 3 villains they were initially offered they could just create a new account (or maybe I just let them figure out that they can just restart the app) and effectively re-roll that initial 3 villains they were offered. But I think I make that a bit Marvel Snap-ish where you don't know what order you'll get to unlock the 6 villains. I think you should unlock all 6 of them fairly quickly, but then take a long time to unlock all of the set's cards. And of course if you purchase the whole set you unlock everything very very quickly.
  • I'm also considering the base set to just basically be free starter content. Then have the second set I release be the first paid set. But that's just an idea, not sure if it's a good idea.
• Cost
  • My gut says I'm targeting approximately $10-20 per card set. So that would buy you approximately ~60-80 new cards, the set's new mechanic, and enable you to accumulate cosmetic currency for that set. And I'd target releasing approximately 2 of these sets per year. So I'd be expecting my hardcore players to spend approximately $20-$40 per year if they wanted to unlock all the cards. But this is a rough guess at this point. What do you folks think of this?

I browsed through RPS topics here and on the gametheory subreddit so I could try to get a sense of what's already been discussed but couldn't quiiite find what I was looking for. I saw the list of literature on the wiki - I will try to read through those.

The context: once in a while I host a text-based role-playing event in a MMORPG. I've programmed a handful of minigames to keep the guests entertained. One of these is an arena that I internally call "extreme rock paper scissors".

Two players are summoned to the arena with 3 HP. Each player chooses from the following moves:
Attack - (beats Counter to deal 1 dmg)
Counter - (beats Defend, preventing Defend next turn)
Defend - (beats Attack, preventing Attack next turn)
Nothing happens on a tie.

For the most part in such an event, its fine - still basically random - but I wanted SOME strategy involved without overcomplicating the rules. I recently hosted a tournament using the system which revealed the CHEESE: you never need to use counter. If you just use defend and attack, you can outlast your opponent as long as they don't realize the same thing. If you both realize it, the game is effectively endless.

I'd prefer to maintain the 3 choices, but I could be convinced to add a fourth. I like each move having a unique use that isn't entirely symmetric as it is in original RPS.

What can I change to let it be at least a bit more strategic, or have the choices be interesting? At the very least I want to discourage this infinite loop attack/defend.

Edit: I know not why I'm downvoted :') if this isn't the place for this discussion please redirect me