New answers tagged game-design
0
It should probably be situational and be based on making the situation progressively (with a taper of course) more miserable for the player, the longer they take to solve the puzzle.
In the case you've presented, I might have the astronaut grow progressively more distraught, perhaps they're freaking out because they only have just so much oxygen, or because ...
0
This is just a short answer and a possible recommendation, but you can make it so the player also has to have a minimum amount of affinity with specific npc’s. For example, let’s say the minimum amount of affinity required with the cleric, bridesmaids, little girl, king, and librarian(assuming it is not extremely easy to raise and the maximum affinity is 100)...
0
Another point that I don't see in any of the answers: in some engines you will start to run into numerical precision issues when using very large maps.
For example, the Unity engine uses the 32-bit float type for all floating-point engine functions, such as position. At large distances from the world origin, the precision limitations of a 32-bit float start ...
0
When you start modelling, is easy to think that using realistic distances to normalize your world with will be awesome!
However the first problem comes with the insane amount of detail real life has, and then, how boring moving in real life really is. Maybe the reason why people play games, instead of going "out there"?
However, when you are making ...
0
I don't think most players really think in forms of scale when traversing a world. It's more about interesting stuff relative to times spend.
If your player has to run for 2 minutes between to interesting points, they'll be bored for 2 minutes. The world may feel vast, but the boredom will make this a negative.
So, how can you work around that?
You could ...
1
It works if you treat most of the citadel as part of your world map
I remember an MMO I played a while back (can't remember which one) that got away with this just fine because about half the quests were actually inside the main city. So instead of a small city that you are constantly leaving and coming back to; the city itself was the quest space, and only ...
0
Give player's activites that they would like to do even if it wasn't a quest, it didn't have any story and didn't have substantial reward. Otherwise you'll end up writing a twilight saga and rewarding player with 18 trillion gold coins but the quest is still "click the cookie 200 times" and player will still feel it was waste of time (unless they ...
-1
GTA, Cyberpunk and other similar open world games have city maps of mostly correct scale. MSFS has a kind of realistic world map. The key - these games didn't require devs to build every single house and players to walk all those distances.
For travel, first option would be to limit players to certain zones, making full map size irrelevant. While this is a ...
8
You've already removed the main negative of a 1:1 scale map by focusing it on a small area instead of an entire city or countryside, but a citadel is still on the large side. The biggest issue here is travel time. Basically, if I want to walk to the store in real life, it might take me 12 minutes (from Google maps). That's alright; a little longer than I ...
34
Almost no game uses realistically scaled maps for cities. The problem with creating cities which are even close to the size of real cities is:
Maps become difficult for the player to navigate. They can easily get lost.
It is very hard to make all of that content interesting. Creating a large amount of good content is time-consuming and draining. So when ...
-1
Add like bowls so like for example the first marble gets second place and second gets first and add some spinners, teleporters, etc. It would be fun and challenging!
2
Do not present a timer, make it part of what motivates the player.
You are in space with an astronaut - where air is scarce and CO2 needs to be recycled. For that to happen (solar) energy is needed to work the ductwork and provide for the apparatous that removes CO2 / pumps O2 / works the repair drones for ship maintenance.
the astronaut uses air up: the ...
1
Points decrease after a set amount of time. The faster you player, the more points you make. The longer you take, the less points you get for a correct move.
4
Annoy them after a while. I had a game where I sometimes dropped an angry cow on the board which jumped on your pieces and blocked your view (it was actually programmed to tend to hop towards the piece you were manipulating). Tapping unreliably knocked it away and tapping several times completely removed it, with an extra-long delay for it to come back. So ...
7
Time the overall game (or phase), a middle-ground and less intrusive than timing each turn. This is commonly done in e.g. room-escape games, text adventure games, puzzles. Your final score is determined from a lookup table of 'time to complete', 'hints taken' and 'number of collaborative players' minus any penalties. This reduces things from a hard 'time ...
2
It depends on the nature of the puzzle.
For some types of puzzles, you can think of it in terms of marginal cost and marginal benefit. In other words, what does the player gain by spending more time, vs what do they lose by spending that time.
Suppose a game like the cups and balls. This probably wouldn't normally be considered a "puzzle", but just ...
4
I think that the "time is running out" concept is not itself artificial in nature, it just feel artificial when you put a big flashing countdown clock in front of the player. Kind of like how sanity meters in (Lovecraftian) horror games feel artificial if they are too mechanical. But if you make it a lot more fuzzy, then I think it helps immersion.
...
31
There are a lot of tricks you can pull to create the impression of urgency without actually having a real urgency in your game mechanics.
Writing and presentation
First of all, do not underestimate the power of a well-written and well-presented narrative. Just having NPCs state in a convincing manner that time is running out and the player needs to act fast ...
0
When developing a turn-based game, then it can be useful to design the basic architecture of the game in form of a finite state machine.
That means that your game can be in one of a number of states. Depending on the state the game is currently in, it looks and behaves differently.
First, your game is in the "pick unit" state. In this state, the ...
-1
You can have stronger characters and more powerful items be more attractive to monsters, drawing them in larger groups
2
A common approach to this is a lock-step approach.
Give the player more power
Give the player the opportunity to enjoy their power trip by using their newfound power on old opponents.
Introduce more challenging opponents which match the new power-level of the player, thus forcing the player to play serious again.
Repeat.
The result is that the gameplay ...
2
HP and Damage increases for the player and enemies are just a tool that help you do some other things. Until you decide what other things you're trying to do, it's very hard to know what health and damage progression will give you good results. They can be used for:
Planned Obsolescence
If you have items to pick up, or abilities to learn, you can use HP and ...
3
Feeling stat increases
My initial suggestion to help player's feel increase in raw stats is to let player's experience over-leveled mobs early. These OP mobs shouldn't block or occupy mandatory paths in your dungeon. If you let player's experience the power of high level monsters early, then in later levels, the player can rencounter the same mobs that gave ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
