game design

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Re: game design

Post by Doug » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:03 pm

Crunchums wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:03 pm
Doug wrote:I dunno, maybe I oversimplify things, but, for me, I just don't want to play multiplayer chess by accident

Or, better example, Blokus. Great game, but I don't want to play it by accident

I'm OK playing it on purpose, sometimes
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Re: game design

Post by Crunchums » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:04 pm

Doug wrote: Yeah it's solid, one of the best worker placement games
:hfive:
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Re: game design

Post by Aeldaar » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:04 pm

KingRamz wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:00 pm

I'm kind of skeptical of this reasoning as applied to MtG. I mean, Magic FEELS better than Hearthstone in that I usually know exactly what my cards are going to do. But I can still get into a situation where (for example) I'm dead to a flyer next turn, I topdeck a draw spell, and I have an equal chance of drawing Shock or Disfigure but I leave up the wrong color of mana and die. And that example is just draw variance/randomness following a decision I made in a single turn - there are situations where I can choose different strategic lines of play over multiple turns based on what I might draw, and then draw the thing that I needed for the other line.
I think we're all on the same page where, the kind of uncertainty from not knowing if you're going to draw a burn spell or a land next turn has a distinction from not knowing if your burn spell is going to deal 1 or 4 damage.

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Re: game design

Post by Doug » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:04 pm

Less vicious than Agricola!
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Re: game design

Post by Aeldaar » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:06 pm

Crunchums wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:01 pmi just reject the taxonomy you are proposing where an R&D access is somehow a different sort of randomness than rolling a die. like i said before, everything is a probability distribution
gameplay can emerge from the latter, and not the former (unless you have meta die-modifying abilities)

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Re: game design

Post by Aeldaar » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:07 pm

Doug wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:04 pm Less vicious than Agricola!
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Re: game design

Post by KingRamz » Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:51 pm

Aeldaar wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:04 pm
KingRamz wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:00 pm

I'm kind of skeptical of this reasoning as applied to MtG. I mean, Magic FEELS better than Hearthstone in that I usually know exactly what my cards are going to do. But I can still get into a situation where (for example) I'm dead to a flyer next turn, I topdeck a draw spell, and I have an equal chance of drawing Shock or Disfigure but I leave up the wrong color of mana and die. And that example is just draw variance/randomness following a decision I made in a single turn - there are situations where I can choose different strategic lines of play over multiple turns based on what I might draw, and then draw the thing that I needed for the other line.
I think we're all on the same page where, the kind of uncertainty from not knowing if you're going to draw a burn spell or a land next turn has a distinction from not knowing if your burn spell is going to deal 1 or 4 damage.
Yeah, that seems right. Magic does this sort of thing occasionally with coinflips or (in silver-border land) dice rolling, but the cards aren't really pushed the way effects like that are in HS. Though, how do you feel about this card?
Spoiler!
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Re: game design

Post by mindwarped » Wed Oct 17, 2018 8:09 pm

Spoiler!
that's pretty close to HS-level RNG, except that

1) though the effect is mostly random, you still can *feel* like you have some degree of control over the outcome, either directly through deck manipulation, or broadly from deckbuilding (or even minimally by estimating the contents of your deck). so there's still some "play" to it

2) the card isn't particularly good, so even if it's unfun, you aren't really incentivized to play with it or subject to losing to it very often

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Re: game design

Post by Aeldaar » Wed Oct 17, 2018 8:12 pm

I feel wizard fashion has come a long way

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Re: game design

Post by Pershore » Wed Oct 17, 2018 9:10 pm

Aeldaar wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:38 pm
Crunchums wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:22 pm anyway i just wanted to totally disagree with what you said originally - randomness does not inherently make a game unsuited for competitive play
give me an example of a game with randomness as a major component that's played competitively? Netrunner's HQ access is a small facet of play, and R&D access is variance
the clash mechanic from Lorwyn.
competitive d&d from the 1970s?
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Re: game design

Post by Hoshi » Wed Oct 17, 2018 11:47 pm

Aeldaar wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 7:04 pm I think we're all on the same page where, the kind of uncertainty from not knowing if you're going to draw a burn spell or a land next turn has a distinction from not knowing if your burn spell is going to deal 1 or 4 damage.
Totally agree, this is a good point, and it's interesting to try to think about why that is.

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Re: game design

Post by Doug » Thu Oct 18, 2018 8:28 pm

It's funny to me to talk about how Magic is fine but dice are objectionable when you remember that sometimes in Magic, one of the players does not really get to play whatsoever
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Re: game design

Post by catonkeyboard » Fri Oct 19, 2018 1:32 am

Aeldaar wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 5:57 pm a lot of games try to include some mechanic to break up set openings and play patterns, because otherwise you have a sirlin game. In these kinds of games, the better player can almost always leverage their superior knowledge to beat the weaker player, and then the weaker player stops playing and the game dies. Two major ways to handle this are randomness and variance

randomness is when the player makes a decision, and then the outcome of that decision depends on a dice roll or other percentile method. This disrupts strategies because they may or may not work; the player is meant to figure out changing probabilities and find the most likely path to success. This generally leads to casual party games where the outcome is not overly dependent on player decisions, like Machi Koro and Sandy Peterson's Cthulhu wars.

variance is better represented by a deck of cards, where the uncertainty happens before the player's decisions. This still leaves outcomes somewhat out of the player's reach depending on what they draw next turn, but in general a player is much more in control of making good decisions using shifting information. I find netrunner corporation decks show this very well; depending on the distribution of agendas drawn the corp needs to value different servers much differently in their opening when deciding where to place ice.

Chess is a very "serious" or "competitive" game because of the somewhat unique quirks of perfect information and deterministic play. It would be very hard to introduce a new game with those attributes in current times and have it catch on. Poker, texas hold 'em in particular, also works as a serious game despite having uncertainty and positions where the player engages with randomness, because of the ongoing stakes between hands.

Another way to introduce uncertainty is having randomness be tied to player dexterity or other skill. First person shooters use this with headshot mechanics, and magic the gathering experimented with chaos orb. You could also use bidding mechanics like netrunner's psi games that allow psychology to play a large part in determining outcomes. But any game where the player makes a decision and then rolls to see if it worked or not cannot be seriously competitive
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Re: game design

Post by Crunchums » Fri Oct 26, 2018 6:07 pm

Crunchums wrote:looks like my library system has a copy
i have check it out and am going to read it :patriot:
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Re: game design

Post by kouharti » Sun Nov 04, 2018 5:34 am


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Re: game design

Post by 人造 » Mon Mar 04, 2019 1:00 pm

this is a really cool article from grinding gear games (path of exile) about creating an action rpg end game and how to deal with / how they had to deal with players deliberately sabotaging their own experience because of "content difficulty entitlement." def a sort of negative thing to identify, but through good game design and self reflection it did turn out to be something of a design flaw on the part of the developers, and something that can be / could be overcome. this article is old but this seems to be something that permeates. it has been coming up a lot lately again because path of exile put a new system into the game that no casual players seems to understand that is gated for their own well being
Players would finish the Merciless difficulty level and were excited to play in the Maelstrom of Chaos [the end game]. Because the areas were connected together, they could easily skip the first ones by running through them to get to the harder content. This was fine when the players were able to handle the harder content, but it failed in reality. Players would watch streamers and get the impression that everyone was farming the hardest Maelstrom areas, so they'd rush there themselves and fail to kill anything. Many players expressed vocal concerns that the game was so unforgiving and difficult, despite the fact that there were easier areas to play while working up to the hard ones.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2071848

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Re: game design

Post by Rylinks » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:48 am

here's a game design question: in tragedy looper, the mastermind has the advantage of knowing all the hidden information. What major advantage to the protagonists have? (there's goodwill abilities, but there's another big one)
Spoiler!
the protagonists get to play their cards second, after seeing the locations where the mastermind put cards

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Re: game design

Post by Crunchums » Sun Apr 07, 2019 11:09 pm

Khaos wrote:tell me about your worms board game. or even post the rulebook. i am intrigued by it
i don't have it or a copy of the rules any more. but it wasn't very complicated. apart from using the stack because in middle school mostly i had just played magic. so

there's a square grid, and 2-4 players start in the corners. that is, they have a piece (of paper, with "P" written on it) that is "them". you win by being the last person alive.
there's a shared deck of cards. everyone starts with iirc 7 cards, and draws 1 card at the start of their turn. some of them can be played at instant speed, others only at sorcery speed.
iirc your turn is like you can play cards and you have to move once. so obvious question, what are the cards. well most of them are just like worm things. things i remember:

shock (instant) = dig. blows up everything adjacent to you. diagonal is adjacent and everything can move diagonally. "blow up" means put a lightning bolt (one of the kinds of objects) in every adjacent square and then remove them. but like there's a state based effect where if two things are in the same square, they both die; that's how you kill other people, is by hitting them with things. oh also you can use a shock to block a shock from killing you

zap = rocket spike. places a lightning bolt (which has a direction). at the start of your turn turn it moves in the direction it's pointing. i think just memory probably to keep track of who owned what, heh.

hole (instant) = put a hole somewhere (essentially a zergling; it sits there and doesn't move)
3 holes (instant) = put 3 holes anywhere. there are rarities, so hole is common and therefore has more copies in the deck than 3 holes, which is uncommon

darkness = target players skips their next turn, but draws cards equal to the number of players in the game. mostly you should play this on yourself

counter = i think this was like, it stays out and counters the next card played. maybe the person who played the card got to draw a card? i dunno

magnet (instant) = move anything one square

titan = put a titan next to you. titans move in any direction of your choice at the start of your turn. when they leave a square they leave a hole in it

i think there was a rare that's like the corsair one where it puts lightning bolts surrounding you pointing outward? not sure

anyway like actual worms, the best way to play is to play as few cards as possible. you've got to play some because of maximum hand size (7). and it's pretty silly because trying to kill people is like, you're next to a hole? magnet that hole into you. in response, hole that hole (flavor fail, heh) to fizzle the magnet. so like probably if you play to win it's this miserable game of attrition that takes forever. but people had fun with it. it feels silly because now i try to make games and never come up with anything that's worth playing at all, but middle-school me succeeded. mostly by straight ripping off a pre-existing thing though, heh
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Re: game design

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:18 am

i dont think getting inspiration from other games count as ripping things off. i wonder if we could modify it to make it better

when you move do you leave a hole behind you

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Re: game design

Post by 人造 » Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:20 am

literally the only thing blizzard has done as a company is rip people off

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Re: game design

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:24 am

that sounds right, but what rts was before warcraft

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Re: game design

Post by 人造 » Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:25 am

Khaos wrote:that sounds right, but what rts was before warcraft
dune ii, by a little studio called westwood ... studios.

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Re: game design

Post by 人造 » Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:28 am

actually while we're in the game design thread, here's an excellent first hand account of the creation of warcraft [orcs and humans]

https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-ma ... aft-part-1

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Re: game design

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:53 am

i was thinking how to turn worms (basically multiplayer snake) into a board game and i was thinking the best way thing to replace the dexterity aspect of it would be to have some sort of delayed movement. so if someone cut you off, you couldn't just immediately turn away unharmed. and you could be rewarded for predicting enemy movement

so i was thinking, a big board of hexagons, and your worm head would have a direction pointer on it. you have an infinite amount of the following move cards available: move forward, turn 60deg right and move forward, and turn 60degrees left and move forward

you would start the game by queuing 3 cards (place them face down on a track in front of you, but then on following turns, everyone would simultaneously resolve the first movement in their queue (turn it face up, do the thing, then discard the card), place a worm body token in the space they just left, and then add a new movement to their queue

then for actions, i was thinking you could have both, queued actions and instant actions. queued actions would be played face down with your move action, and slide along and resolve the same way. maybe they would be things like "hairpin turn, rotate an additional 60 degrees in the direction this card moves" or " speed boost, move an additional space after resolving your move card"

offensive actions would be, like in your game, "dig, deal 1 damage to things in range 1 of you (worm heads, worm bodies, rocket spikes, etc.)

the questions then become

how do you get action cards
how do you incentivise players to use them and not hoard the good ones
how do you score points and encourage players to engage each other, without having people suiciding into each other or just hiding as the optimal strategy

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Re: game design

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:36 am

Khaos wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:18 amwhen you move do you leave a hole behind you
no
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Re: game design

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:38 am

Khaos wrote:i was thinking how to turn worms (basically multiplayer snake) into a board game and i was thinking the best way thing to replace the dexterity aspect of it would be to have some sort of delayed movement. so if someone cut you off, you couldn't just immediately turn away unharmed. and you could be rewarded for predicting enemy movement
making some things simultaneous and double-blind seems natural
so i was thinking, a big board of hexagons, and your worm head would have a direction pointer on it. you have an infinite amount of the following move cards available: move forward, turn 60deg right and move forward, and turn 60degrees left and move forward
i tried to make a game in this vein recently. it was like everyone repeatedly double-blinded their movement + maybe a spell. i even built it and played it! my conclusion was that keeping track of all of the movement of the non-player things was too fiddly and annoying - most of the game was spent resolving that instead of playing - and that it would be better as a video game instead. maybe if you could somehow make it interesting where the non-player things mostly didn't move, so there was less to keep track of?
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Re: game design

Post by Crunchums » Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:42 am

the queueing idea is interesting. whenever i have that idea i always wonder whether it would actually be fun, or whether it actually just feels dumb when you queue something and then get wrecked somehow. i think 1) the queueing shouldn't be too deep (i.e. far into the future) 2) your idea of instant actions on top of it makes it better

my first thought is, you get a fixed set of stuff at the start and either that's it or there's some way to occasionally get more. and you just have the board be small so that even if i try to just hide, space will run out pretty quickly and i have to do something
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Re: game design

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 3:20 am

you could have actions of different speeds! slow gets played with/on your move card, fast gets played at the same time, but is placed on the earlier move card in your queue, and instant would be two down the queue (and so is played next turn with your move card)

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Re: game design

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 3:22 am

Crunchums wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:42 am the queueing idea is interesting. whenever i have that idea i always wonder whether it would actually be fun, or whether it actually just feels dumb when you queue something and then get wrecked somehow. i think 1) the queueing shouldn't be too deep (i.e. far into the future) 2) your idea of instant actions on top of it makes it better

my first thought is, you get a fixed set of stuff at the start and either that's it or there's some way to occasionally get more. and you just have the board be small so that even if i try to just hide, space will run out pretty quickly and i have to do something
you could do it hunger games style and spawn boxes near the center, as a means to get more powerful actions

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Re: game design

Post by Khaos » Mon Apr 08, 2019 3:33 am

it being a pain to manage npc makes sense. we could minimize those

in the nick of time
movement Action
Instant - Reverse the rotation of your move card this turn

delay that order
movement Action
Fast - Before you reveal your move card, switch it with the move card next in your queue

munch
common action (infinite pool of these)
deal two damage to whatever is directly in front of you after moving

wiggle
Common action
take a worm body connected to you only on one side and move it to a new space that is still connected to you

munch and crunch
action
slow - deal two damage to whatever is directly in front of you before and after moving

stop and think
action
slow - dont move this turn

tongue lash
common action
Slow - deal a damage to the first thing in the path in front of you, after moving

maybe i should make a thread

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