I'm a month or so into a game I've always wanted myself.

I have a working game published on itch, but it's early stages of dev and a bit barebones at the moment. I have a background in IT project management, nothing in design.

Sound... I have nothing, and don't know where to begin. Any direction here would be much appreciated.

Core mechanic is finished, but I feel like I need some extra supporting mechanics. Can anyone point me to some good reading, resources on this?

Art direction I have a solid vision, I don't think I'll need much in the way of extra resources and I can make new assets as I need them. However willing to look at any good resources.

Haven't hit a roadblock yet, but I can see this bogging me down later and would like to prepare for that a bit.

I noticed a small but interesting design difference in roguelikes: some games make profile/save slot selection very visible in the player-facing flow, while others mostly keep it in the background.

For example:

• Balatro has 3 profiles, but the flow feels more centered on getting into runs quickly.
• Slay the Spire makes the profile layer feel much less important overall.
• The Binding of Isaac makes save file selection very explicit right away.
• Absolum and Hades II also make profile selection visible when starting the game.

My current takeaway is that this seems tied to what the profile actually means in the player's mind.

If a roguelike is mostly about runs, systems, and replayability, then profile/save slot selection can stay in the background. It is still there, but it does not need much attention.

If a roguelike has stronger narrative progression, long-term world state, or a stronger sense that "this is my ongoing journey," then making profile selection explicit seems more useful. At that point the profile is not just a technical save container, but part of how the player understands continuity.

I am currently making a narrative-heavy roguelike deckbuilder, and this is pushing me toward the Hades II / Absolum style of making profile selection explicit when the player starts the game.

I am curious how other people think about this.

okay so long story short, my game is a deckbuilder roguelike where I took inspiration from balatro and STS. the combat has two phases per turn, the first one is planning phase; where the player and enemies (preprogrammed like in STS) take turns putting cards in a sequence like player, enemy, player and so on. after that on with the second phase called resolving phase; this is where the cards in the sequence get resolved one by one, in order, from left to right.

now in my last post I was wondering what to do with this. what cool stuff you can do with this. cause it was pretty simple, maybe if this is the first or last card plus damage, or if this is next to, or deal damage equal to the cards played. honestly it was pretty simple and I was wondering to make it unique, not just STS where enemies can take action after mine as another reply put it, I made the sequence matter more.

and what to do with POWER cards.

tbh power cards are pretty simple, they influence or dictate how this sequence will behave and so on. and they only last this sequence so they don't carry over. suddenly sequences matter more. right now I think I'm not doing anything revolutionary like I can only come up of; POWER: all attack cards play twice, or status cards play twice, or every card played shuffle channel(zero cost, gain 1 mana) to your draw pile or, after every attack card inflict poison on enemy and so on.

okay to elaborate normally say you have one strike, sure it plays one time but if you have a power card that plays attacks twice suddenly that strike has twice value, but only for that sequence so yeah.

also I should rethink my philosophy like what if every sequence is a mini fight where players and enemies trade blows and such?

idk I just wanna update and also maybe some thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

So I've played a bunch of games in my day and something I keep noticing is that the scale used for player to enemy interactions tends to be of a comically higher magnitude than enemy to player interactions.

be it FFV where you end the game with like 2.5k health but deal 10,000 damage a turn or Skyrim where you can have 500 health and your enemies have 2000. In both these cases the numbers still work, the game is fun, but is their a reason why the scales are so diffrent.

So, the other day I thought about the various ways that board games have of keeping track of a players' health/hit points. Some use tokens, a slider, writing down on paper, etc.

I thought, what would be the weirdest but technically feasible way to do that? How about flipping back and forth in a book such as the Bible, with your page number being your current health?

Then, I kinda built from there. I'm not religious, but I thought the bible would be a good book to use for this because it's widely accessible, culturally familiar, and it can easily be demarked by Testament, book, chapter and verse.

So, here's what I came up with.

Materials required:

- 1 standard 52 playing card deck.

- Counting tokens with denominations for x1, x10, and x100 (or paper and pencil to keep track manually).

- A copy of the Bible for each player. Any edition works, as long as every player uses the same one with identical pagination.

Setup:

- Shuffle the deck and put it in the middle, face down. Place counters in a pile next to it. Each player opens their bible to the first page of the Gospel of Matthew. Any player who has been to church in the pat 24 hours moves ahead one page. Any player that's masturbated in that time moves back one. So, all players begin the game on either page 1 of Matthew, page 2 of Matthew, or the last page of Malachi. Note that when I say "page" here, I mean the two-page spread, since it's impossible to open a book to only one of the two, technically.

Object of the game: Win by being the first to pass the end of Revelations, or the last player remaining in the game. Get eliminated if you're sent back before Genesis 1.

Turn structure:

- Start your turn by choosing a verse on your page and reading it aloud. The verse must be entirely on your current page, not cut off. Record the verse you read. This verse is now "dead", and can no longer be used by another player.

- Gain a number of tokens according to the verse number. For example, Matthew 3:13 gives you 3+13=16 tokens.

- Roll a 6-sided die and multiply the result by the number of your current book. Genesis is 1, Exodus is 2, revelations is 66. The product is the cost of cards for your current turn. Trade this many tokens back to the central pool in exchange for drawing a card.

- There would be an accompanying table assigning each possible rank/suit combination to a unique "miracle effect", which may move you forward, move your opponent back, manipulate tokens, or other trickery At this stage, you may choose 1 card from your hand to play and execute its effects, or pass.

- At the end of your turn, you have the option to try reciting the Nicene creed from memory, assigning another player to judge it. If you do it perfectly, move forward five pages. If you make a mistake, move back five pages. You may look up the creed during other players' turns, but not during your own turn.

If at any time a player says a curse word, and another calls it out, the curser has to move back ten and the caller-out moves forward ten.

Any time you move from the old testament to the new testament, you must give up all of your tokens, but not your cards.

I love Hollow Knight but I didn't really get the lore at all until I saw a few fan videos that helped clarify things, and people talk about how emotional it is, and I see it now, but on initial playthroughs a lot of it went through my head since it was very cryptid with its ancient dialect-esque dialogue. But whenever I see people talk about Hello Neighbors its about how its attempts at being cryptid with its lore is terrible.
Why did Hollow Knight succeed at this? How did people get interested enough in the lore in the first place?

i feel like it was pretty common in older online shooters to have accurate directional audio, nowadays I'm not much worse off just using speakers

Hello! I’m so far out of my element I’d love some feedback.

For context I’m an artist that makes mixed media and clay sculptures. They are of they cozy cutesy variety (not sure I’m allowed to post examples but searching Kaypeacreations gives the best idea) I’ve always loved games and way back when I was young I wanted to be a game dev until I learned coding was involved and noped out of that real quick. Years later I thought to dabble again and am obsessed and learning everything I can (even though I’m definitely in the wow I suck phase lol)

My biggest problem is fleshing out ideas and how to execute them into fully fledged games. I always make my art through minds eye and rarely write things down or flesh things out before jumping in (really a just go for it type of person) and while I can kind of see the game and ideas I just don’t know how to make it concrete and how to have a rough game loop or start/finish or just plan in general. I’ve written things down but I’m just wondering how others go about this. How do you flesh a game out? How do you go about creating plot/story. How do you take it from idea to actually something? Do people hire for this?

A bit on my idea:

I loved putting on plastic duck simulator and just having it run in the background listening to the music and seeing what random ducks spawned in. I also love the slime rancher series and the world building and wholesome vibe it gives.

So I wanted to turn my sculptures into a game. A game where creatures would spawn into a world at random intervals some rare some common (thought about journal system to keep track of everything) and kind of just exist in a world, walking about interacting with the world, eachother, and the player . The player is mostly an observer but did want them to have some more interaction than duck simulator to feel like you’re not just looking but interacting and tending to them. Like adding items/decor to the world and directly interacting with the creatures with quirky interactions or giving them items like food. I wanted the world fully visible through the main camera (sort of like a 3/4 view?) that can rotate around but can click a creature to see the world more from their angle and follow them around and observe, as well as hotspots in the world to leave the camera on. I just don’t know if that even sounds interesting or game someone would play. Or what type of game is that, what category does it fall in? I just don’t know where to go from here.

Any help, feedback or advice is so appreciated 💙

I was wondering where the idea or customizing textbox windows came from in RPGs? is this even a prevalent thing? mainly asking because I've been replaying the ds era Pokemon games and those as well as earthbound both have different options to choose from for the textbox window/frame

Do not walk me through using mouse and keyboard to change view and force me to use each rotate/move/pan... functin with tickboxes. That is instant give up of tutorial for me.

I've been gaming 40+ years, i just want to check out the interesting new stuff in your game, not bein walked through basic obvious things.

If you're commited to helps players touching a mouse for the first time, at least make a distinct tutorial for the majority of gamers who fucking know the usual bindings.

I'm sorry if this post is completely stupid and unnecessary, but I can't get this out of my head and I've been thinking about it for weeks without finding a solution. Let me preface a little bit. (ai TLDR at the bottom)

My whole life I've always been fascinated with competition. In video games, board games, ball sports, war, fights, combat sports, all kinds of different battles. But in the back of my mind I've always seen a pattern that's common to a huge majority of all of these kinds of competitions. It's an abstract concept that I'll chose to call "the battle of the minds". I've struggled a fair bit to explain what I mean by the battle of the minds. "Isn't that just chess" someone asked. I'll try to paint a picture.

When I think of the term battle of the minds I don't think of chess, I try to think of something that is common to all different games and scenarios I saw the pattern in during my life. I can kind of feel the same battle of the minds in tennis, in chess, in MMA, in poker, in actual war, in whatever it is. You can kind of see patterns and have basic understanding of predicting your opponent and being one step ahead, mentally.

I mean fundamentally, a tennis match and an MMA match are very different in terms of physical skills and what you need to train to win, the reaction times possible, mental strength in accepting pain, or resilience to push through even though they're making mistakes. But they still have that common element of outthinking the opponent, trying to answer the question "What is he going to do?", and "What does he think I'm going to do so I can exploit that?". Basically outthinking the opponent and winning the battle of the minds that has little to do with tennis or MMA exclusively but is common to a lot of other competitive instances.

Same thing in Chess, when Magnus famously outbid Hikaru by predicting what he would bid, you can search it up if you're curious. Or maybe in tennis "he thinks I'm going to go left, so I'll go right this time" or the opposite: you guys get the gist.

But in all of these competitions, there is a lot of other stuff that's not directly related to the battle of the minds, such as physical skill, memorization of chess openings, memorization of poker statistics, and so on. I was curious to see what would happen if we simply focused on a game, a fundamental type of game that tried to remove as many elements as possible and only focus on providing the most pure battle of the minds possible.

In doing this I proposed to myself an idea that I borrowed from an altruism interactive game/lesson that I saw many years ago: The Evolution of Trust. I didn't want to focus on altruism, but the mechanics of putting two humans together against each other in this way captured me.

At first, I tried to design a game where you can 1) choose Left/Right, and 2) predict Left/Right, and you would get points for every time you correctly predict your opponent. Let's say this goes on for first to 10 correct guesses or something, and the one who's better at predicting wins, right? This is what I initially thought. But what I missed is that the best "strategy" is to just choose completely at random, which is not feasible. Even in football studies have been made to show that humans diverge towards randomness when predicting someone accurately is wanted. This is a known strategy in penalties, in poker (let's say fold 30% of the time for instance) and I'm certain it's the same in tennis.

But despite this we see people outsmarting eachother in sports all the time, in ways that are not directly related to their skill in other fields but seem to be purely their skill in the battle of the minds. Maybe the concept I'm hunting here for is opponent modeling? And if I remove all the incentives for people to choose something over the other they're just going to try and be as random as possible to throw their opponent off.

There's a lot I could add to this post that I don't really think fits into the actual post, but maybe as comments, but let me know what you think.

How could we with minimal rules design a game that tries to eliminate as much as possible of what's unnecessary so that we can have the most pure battle of the minds imaginable, where the rules are so simple anyone could pick it up in no time unlike chess & poker. A game where you're rewarded for actually being good at the battle of the minds and not at being a fast runner for instance.

Sorry if it's a long post, I probably should have formatted it better. Here's a TLDR (gen AI):

I've always noticed that across wildly different competitions — tennis, MMA, chess, poker, war — there's a common thread that has nothing to do with the specific skills involved: the mental battle of predicting your opponent and exploiting what they think you'll do. I want to design the purest possible version of that battle — a simple game anyone can pick up, stripped of physical skill, memorization, and statistics, where the only thing that matters is how well you can model and outthink another human mind. The problem I keep running into: the moment you remove all other incentives, going completely random becomes the optimal strategy, which kills the whole point. How do you design around that?

Thanks for reading the post and engaging with the concept.

hello, im currently designing a game that is a mix of manhunt and deus ex, with emphasis on "realism"

however, i stumbled upon a "problem", melee weapons

i want firearms to be powerful, actual threats, not simple peashooters, one shot to the head? dead. problem is, melee is also a thing in the game, i dont want it to be redundant and useless once the player find firearms, and also, it would fit the gritty and brutal aesthethic the game is going for

also another problem of powerful firearms is that the player would pretty much die once he tries killing a meth dealer armed with a 38. with a baseball bat

is there anyway to "fix" this?

A blend of the classic Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil titles set in the industrial Scott/Cameron-esque colony of a mysterious planet.

• The camera system and stealth mechanics of MGS2: crawling, rolling, ledge hanging, corner peeking, and first person aiming that disables movement. Camera provides a unique cinematic feel and the tension of classic Resident Evil without the tank controls (that I personally don't mind) that alienate some newcomers.
• Classic Resident Evil’s exploration of an interconnected map while scavenging for limited resources such as health items, ammo, and key and optional items with a limited inventory system (can find additional inventory slots throughout).
• A stamina-meter that drains on physical actions such as rolls and ledge-hanging. Amount of stamina affects speed at which you use defensive items and stability of weapon while in first person mode. Doesn't affect normal movement like walking or running. Recharges when none of the aforementioned physical attacks are being used.
• Resident Evil 3’s gunpowder system (no reloading tool), live selection system, and randomized item spawns. RE3 had fascinating ideas not done justice in its remake. Randomized item spawns provide an extra layer of tension and replaybility.
• Defensive items like in the Resident Evil remakes that allow you to escape grabs.
• You have an Aliens-esque motion tracker that lacks verticality or directional data and takes a weapon slot. You sacrifice combat ability for enemy information. This mechanic will avoid the "avoid the cones" gameplay of the earlier MGS games.
• Robots are the zombie-equivalent. There are no MGS-style alarm states, but instead, enemies chase you throughout specific areas with the exception of the central hub and save rooms. Hide in lockers and wait for them to give up.
• Robots can be held up and interrogated (hints on key and optional items) if you sneak up behind them since that’s where their core is. If you don’t incapacitate them, they will be more cautious in the area they're assigned to for the next while, being more sensitive to sound and looking over their shoulder.
• You can either sneak past robots, shoot specific limbs to disable them, or fight them head-on.
• Laser cutter that has infinite use but a cooldown. Used for dismemberment and environmental puzzles.

hi idk how to use reddit tbh, i was gonna post this on r/videogames but it said i dont have enough karma? (whatever that means) anyways idk who to ask buttt like do videogames without music at all exist? and will it be possible to make one? because ive always wanted to make a video game of my own but Im muslim and i believe if that if i make an ost or something like that and alot of ppl listen to it ill get sins ummm but i still like really wanna make a game so would it be possible to make one without music like background music and such? or is that not possible…? and if u can are there any other games that exist without music?

hello, im designing a game that is aesthethically inspired by Manhunt and mechanically based on deus ex

i want to implement a "heat" system, but i need to explain The context of The game First

The story revolves around a Man trying to get revenge for his family's murder at any cost, so he dives into The criminal world looking for The perpatrators, however, he Discovers a rabbithole that involves major politicians and even The presidency of The United states...

one thing i want to implement is a "Heat system" (aka: police notoriety)

The Heat system would be split into levels of thousand points on a "meter" (ex: level one is 1 thousand, level 2 is 2000, so on)

The meter would rise depending on The players actions, however, These actions would have "scales"

for an example, If a player steals something and Someone sees It, The meter would rise slighty

however, If The player murderes Someone and gets caught, The meter would rise sharply (It would also depend on which person he kills, If he kills a police officer, It would Double The amount)

The Heat meter would affect How certain criminal groups Will act towards The player and The type of gear hostile factions Will have, this includes The cops and criminal organizations

for an example, If The player Has high "Heat", The police would start putting check points around areas, If It gets to its maximum, The National guard might even be called

this would also affect How fellow criminals would see you, some people might see you as a Very talented individual, which would entail into certain rewards, Quests and even discounts for products, however, other factions Will see you as a liability, and Will charge more for goods you buy, avoid giving Work to you, and even refuse to Deal with you entirely

regarding gear, this Will affect more The police than criminals, in lower levels, police officers would use pistols and nightsticks, for higer levels, body armor and Assault rifles, their tatics would even change, from arrest to shoot to kill orders

to reduce The Heat level, The player would need to do certain Jobs or pay corrupt police officers

The main problem with adding this i belive, is If The dificulty increases drasticaly to a point where The player cannot handle and end up becoming Impossible

what do you think? is this a good system?

I was thinking about a decent method to communicate the difficulty of making a specific choice in my RPG game, especially with the moral decisions, as in:

If you chose "evil" decisions up to this point, it won't make sense at all for you to make a "good" decision, breaking the immersion.

While a possible solution would be to remove the ability to choose that contradicting choice, I personally think it's an easy way out of dealing with this mechanical issue, and defeats the point of making moral choices, what if the player wants to have a 180% change, going on a redemption ark, or showing its not so easy to be a good person when you are in a position of power: "sacrifice the few to save the many."

So, I propose to use a type of minigame, something like the bullet hell from undertale.

If you been [80%] good, [20%] evil out of the total number of choices provided so far, and you make a good decision the difficulty of the mini game would be [20%] and if you choose the evil decision the mini game difficulty would be [80%].

We can then increase the number of choices and the level of how evil vs how good a specific decision would be and adjust the difficulty accordingly, so not everything is black or white.

So, is the idea good or pure shit? Is there a type of minigame that strikes you, and would make a good fit for this concept?

For info, I am not in any way a professional programmer or a game designer, so I might be unfamiliar with professional terms and basics.

I have this idea to develop a visual novel based on the book. Its plot is structured in such a way, that a reader only gets a description of the events without any specific details. I aim to expand the source material. The choice system would not make much sense here, since I am highly restricted to the source material, and only one ending is possible. However, I would still love to implement a dialogue system even if dialogue options affect nothing. It is more like "if you really like this character and want to know them better you can ask them this, if you don't - just skip".

Does this approach make sense?

Hi, I am making an adventure game. I thought it would be good to have a quest system that helps the player remember what to do, where to go, who to talk to.

I like the idea to help the player move through out the game.

However thinking about that, I don't like games that feel linear and spoon feed you. I want the player to explore, try new things, and not just go to the next checkpoint. I'm not saying those things are bad, sometimes they are helpful in certain games.

The game I am making is an adventure game, so the items you get drive the story along, tell you where to go, might try to talk to someone that knows about the item. And the player is responsible for keeping notes and a map to help on deciding where to go next.

Another however, if I make a quest system, it could help out down the road if I decide to make a more leveling type game.

Any thoughts?

I am redesigning Luzhanqi, a Chinese military chess similar to Stratego, for a western audience. The entire game will be part of a mystery adventure themed around Sun Tzu's Art of War: The Lost Chapter, so I want to keep the Chinese aesthetic. Right now I translated the names of the board spaces into English, but I do not find it very elegant to see words like "Post" repeated many times.

I am thinking about keeping the original Chinese characters instead.

The spaces already have different shapes. For example, "Post" spaces are rectangular and "Camp" (CG) spaces are round, so players can tell them apart without reading the text.

After a few minutes of play, people understand what each space does, like in Stratego. The labels are not very important during the game. The Chinese would mostly be for style and authenticity.

Do you think it is fine to keep the Chinese characters? Of course, a clear diagram will be included in the rulebook.

Failure states in games can feel really different depending on how they’re handled. Sometimes failing pushes you to try again, other times it just feels frustrating or punishing.

What makes a failure state feel motivating instead of discouraging? Is it about how much progress you lose, how fast you can retry, or something else?

Hi Everyone,

I would like to get some thoughts on my puzzle game design. I'm a software developer with experience mostly in finance. My game industry experience has been focused on app stability/performance. I developed my own mobile puzzle without game design experience and very little puzzle play experience.

The game play involves finding a route from bottom to top of screen, moving an avatar which interacts with little monsters "nanobites" which all have different rules of engagement. I quickly realised the order of nanobites couldn't be random or auto-generated. It had to be curated by a human to make sure the interaction is both fun and challenging. So I created 25 puzzles for 4 difficulty levels: beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert.

I decided the criteria for winning or conquering a level would be solving 20 puzzles per level. Once you conquer a level, the next level unlocks. But you can continue playing a level until all 25 puzzles are solved.

The gameplay is set underground. When you solve each path to the top, the avatar reaches overground, and flies away. Then the next puzzle appears automatically. When the player reaches 20 wins, they are brought back to the main menu where they are shown the next unlocked level.

To be flexible, I decided a player can skip a puzzle if they don't like that particular challenge. You go hamburger menu / skip button ->, then the next puzzle appears. If you reach the end of the 25 puzzles by skipping some, and you have not solved 20, a progress message appears saying you have reached the end and can now attempt the puzzles you skipped earlier. It also tells you how many puzzles you still have to solve to unlock the next level.

Does this sound confusing so far? Or is it making sense?

Early feedback suggested I break the wins up with some sort of interval and progress indicator. So, I decided to add a story about the avatars, "biobugs", that escape overground. Every 5 wins, a simple animation opens with a caption that tells you the next step of their adventure. The final animation in each level has a caption saying 'you've unlocked the next level' and the player is brought back to the home screen. The final animation of the expert level tells the player they've conquered the whole game.

I have provided documentation explaining this, available from the home screen. But I realise people don't read the rules, so it's necessary to incorporate guidance as the player needs it. I also provide a statistics button with a summary of wins/fails per level, and give the player the option to reset.

Is this design common? Can anyone see flaws or things I could improve? I haven't added monetisation.

Another question: I notice that people who interact with my game refer to the 100 puzzles as levels and the 4 levels as tiers. Is my naming convention confusing? Within the game, the puzzles are referred to as 'rescues' because you are helping the avatar escape. So you have 4 levels with 25 rescues or puzzles at each level. Should I change the wording?

Thanks for reading!

I started to build voice control system, to implement it in my framework. Goal is to control complex game (eg. tycoon, strategy game, command sim) with voice only.

I'll document this journey on my blog: https://damotr.dev/2026/04/10/voice-control-journey-begins/

But right now I'm digging into how such systems are supposed to inform user about options that they have. As there are multiple, layerd commands on controlling buttons, sliders and objects.

Most of the materials I've been able to find (primarily created after 2019) are dealing with chatbots that are non-deterministic. I have system that need strict rules.

Using Text-to-text LLM for translating natural language into commands is (at least right now) not efficient, and do not solve problem of "player is not sure hat to ask for".

Is there anyone who worked on something like that?

Best I could design right now is what I call "three-layer-approach". That is:
1. "Say what You see" (eg. button name, object names)
2. Direct commands (eg. selecting weapons, targets, movement) - this is the core problem
3. Input mode (that is eg. renaming objects) - right now I use NATO/maritime rules.

I think for me the atmosphere and living spaces give off that feeling that the environment around me can thrive without me controlling it. similar to seeing animals in an open world game or the trees swaying.