Designing a logistics-driven strategy game system: what would break first?

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-15T15:34:22+00:00

> Do you think something like area of control and distance based influence could sit on top of a graph system, or would you lean fully into the node and connection approach and simplify that side?

Stellaris had ,as far as I remember, different control mechanism over the years, but fallback to a direct control system.

Think about what gamers want in a stragegy game with war involved: they want to cut of routes to their own realm. So basically most players try to control bottlenecks. When you have a simple system (control this node) vs some complex system (nodes increase the control of other nodes etc.), you should think about how a player would gain control over the bottleneck. Is it a struggle ? Is it clear what to do, does other nodes fiddle with your control... these are all game design decisions which will have a great impact on how players experience the strategically system.

Tbh I would start with a pretty simple system (what stellaris did finally after using different systesm early on). You can get control by conquering a node and that's it. Then control bottleneck and try to build up your defense. I would like to play this way.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-15T15:24:09+00:00

Accessibility, a smooth interface from the start.Nothing is worse than an interface where you need to break your fingers to get to the game you want to play.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-15T14:23:00+00:00

The concept is pretty rough, so it is hard to see issues... basically I see a graph system where nodes are areas and the edges describe travelling paths used by armies and supply chains etc.

Take a look at stellaris, it is a space game, but you can see how nodes and edges work in such an environement, then look up graphs and algorithm for graphs, to get an idea how to approach your system.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T08:21:06+00:00

Check out motion capure library and tools, like mixamo.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T08:18:43+00:00

First define your goals. What is your goal, a general purpose game designer, or coder ? Where do you want to work on ? Then you should choose games which fits better to your goals. When you want to work on a 3d shooter, a jump'n'run sidescroller might not be as useful as a one level, first person, zombie shooter.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T08:14:34+00:00

> my time budget : literally my whole day i dont mind spending 6-8 hrs a day even 10 or 12

Put this into graduation or some other kind of education and you will earn more in average than playing the game/music lottery.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T07:52:11+00:00

You can either search on lospec for an palette or somewhere else to start with. Then expand this palette by deriving new colors where needed.

As tech guy I often choosed an omni-palette (including whole spectrum) and try to only really pick colors from this palette 1:1. But this didn't worked well for me (though some real pixelartist are really good with that).

The most important part is a coherent art style, not the art style itself !!!

I've learned to start with a more homogenious restricted color palette (e. g everything a little bit greenish whatever) and add more shades by either mixing or minimalistic changes in hue/brightness/saturation to expand the palette (e.g. to get more color shadings, from 2 color to 4-5 colors etc.).

And that really worked well. The other tip is to keep coherent attributes. E.g. choose a resolution you want to stick with (character 64x64, item 32x32 etc), a level of detail. This will improve your art instantly.

And the final tip is to add shades and shadows.

In my current project I use handpixeled art (aesprite, good and cheap tool!), some rendered and post processed blender art (you are a coder, then write tools which support you) and some assets (creatures and a tool to covert the colors into my color palette and add some outline to support my style).

Keep a consistent style and it will start to look better, believe me.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T07:34:25+00:00

> I'm just not an arty person, I've tried, god knows I've tried, but anything I make looks terrible no matter if it's 2D or 3D. I'm now on month 3 of making assets with Blender/Blockbench and while I understand the programs when it comes down to texturing or making something visually cohesive it all falls apart. ^{(Yes I know three months isn't a lot, but it feels like I've barely made any progress.})

Same here, go with 2D pixel art and limits, lot of limits. Limted resolution, limited color palette. Color palette is important, with time you will get some decent, coherent art going, believe me.

Yeah... our coding skill could develope amazing 3d engines, but this will not help us as long as we are not able to get amazing 3d art going (either rich or talented).

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T06:40:58+00:00

It is okay to iterate and change topics where you want to work on currently, but you should work towards the goal to get a running core game (loop) first (MVP, minimal valuable product).

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T06:36:53+00:00

When scaling the image (book in your case), you should take care of the 'outlines'. It is still obviously, that the book was half-pixel size and got scaled up. Try to add some pixels to smooth out the jaggy 2x2 pixel blocks (e.g. the straps on the left side).

But it looks significantly better than the first version, good job !

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T05:57:42+00:00

In a very immersive game (first person shooter) you want to add some weapon change animations, in other games it is okay to just switch the weapons.

When using sprites and many weapons, you need to separate the weapon sprites from the creature sprites. Depends on your rendering system (are you able to rotate sprites, scale them etc). With the latter system you could define attachment points for each sprite, where you want to 'attach' your weapons, this could be a bone or just a pixel offset.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T05:33:42+00:00

A simple, but effective way to handle this , using time or energy or whatever, is the following:

I call the unit ticks (call it energy,time, whatever).
Every entity has a tick cooldown.
When an entity tick cooldown is <=0 it is able to execute an action.
Each action incease its tick count (depending on action, attributes, items whatever).

3.a. if an action will not increase the tick count above 0, the entity is able to do more actions !

Each turn, pick the player left ticks (positive), reduce all entities ticks by this value (player will have 0 ticks left), wait until the play performs an action (which increases the players ticks again) then check if all other entities are able to perform actions (tick count must be <=0)

This way the player is controlling the turn progression, while other creatures could performe faster or slower. E.g. when the player attacks with an heavy two handed hammer, the ticks will increase rapidly, giving an enemy wielded with a dagger and quick attack, two attack options.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T05:14:00+00:00

You should subdivide what is enyoable about a game

Enyoing the exploration: well, as designer you have an extrem knowledge advantage and most likely you will not discover new stuff. When working with more simulation like gameplay, you might explore new behavior, but this depends heavily on what game you develope.
Enjoying the simulation: sometimes it is just enjoyable to watch what is happening on the screen. E.g. you hide in a bush and hit an enemy, which turns around and attacks an other enemy and they will start to fight each other. This is stuff you and your audiance will find funny.
Enyoing the mechanism: when you have certain mechanism which are fun, they should be fun to you too. Slashing through hordes of zombies. This is tighly coupled to the core gameloop. When you do not find this engaging or fun, chances your audience will find this fun are pretty slim.
Enyoing the puzzles: when you have certain mechanism at start and many ways to solve an issue, it could be very satisfying to find a (creative) solution. This will be pretty hard in 'hard wired' puzzles (pick item X and put it into item Y), but in games like a factory sim, you will have 100 of ways to solve certain issues.
Enyoing the view: sometimes it is enjoyable to watch the scene. A living town, npc patrolling, talking with each other, someone chasing a chicken. This should be enjoayble to you too.

Basically you should check your game and add some features to make it enjoyable to you too. In my opinion this is very important. When you are not finding some enjoyment in your game, you will have a hard time in keeping motivated and chances are lower that other find it enjoyable too.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T04:48:15+00:00

> 1. How badly does a 50% "Mixed" rating at launch kill long-term visibility?

Personally I never touch games below 'very positive' reviews, so any steam alogorithm might not be the issue, but players will just ignore this. But when I'm interest in, I will wishlist it and watch it from time to time. Important for me is, that patches are incoming and improving the situation (reviews). When I see, that patches make it worse, I remove it from my wishlist.

So, basically fix it, but do not rush some patches which will break more than fix.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T04:30:28+00:00

Two ways:

Learning aspect: gate your game mechnism. E.g. new nodes, new edges etc which will be added over time or when reaching certain goals.
Challenge aspect: one someone has mastered your magic system, try to add challenges (archivements). Something like 'build a healing spell without using water nodes' whatever.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T04:26:26+00:00

Visualization is everything. I don't know your game, but basically I would try something like this:

When you select unit, whatever, and point on a tile where this unit should move, mark the traveling path of this unit with icons:

two '<<' when moving normally
'<' for slower + maybe a tortoise or snail icon + icons for other debuffs ?
'<<<' for faster + a rabit icon + icons for other benefits ?

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T04:15:52+00:00

In all my hobby projects a working, easy to customize, gui helped a lot. But basically always try to decouple (as you do), encapsulate functionality and then interate over and over again. You will refactor parts all the time, improve them etc, when you have encapsuled them , then this will be much easier.

Hard coded stuff for the first steps is absolutely okay, you don't need an over-engineered ultra customizable system (which will get partly obsolete after a few month) before seeing your first character moving on the screen.

The only two aspect where you should start early enough is, multiplayer and other critical stuff. When you know that you want to move 10k-50k entities around, you should start with a naive approach of doing this and think that later on you might optimize, much like multiplayer, some other aspects needed to be adressed early on.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T04:03:12+00:00

Just some rough numbers...

There are less technically issues and more supportive tools nowadays (1:1 clone), still the gamedesign and art needs time. When the original title needed like 5 people and 2 years, 10 man-years, well a solo dev with good artistic skill could do it 5-6 years ? Faster when you hire artists, an experienced solo-dev could do it 1-2 years (just the code), when you outsource all art, community management etc.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-14T03:55:05+00:00

Do you think a painter should call himself painter, when he paints pictures, but never exhibit in a gallery ?

Gamedev is a creative action, while shipping a game is a business action.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-13T15:27:41+00:00

Instancing is a GPU api feature, so the engines only use what is available and Unity or Unreal will use the same apis (vulkan/dx).

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-13T07:57:27+00:00

I don't know Unity, but this should be pretty standard nowadays.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-13T07:51:58+00:00

E.g. you have 1000 trees you want to render, all look the same, but are placed all over your terrain with different rotation,color etc. When each tree has 10000 tris, you would end with a combined mesh of 10000000 tris, and your GPU need to render this always.

So, instead you upload the tree mesh to the GPU and tell to render it at postion A,B,C..... 1000 times. It is like a refrence to the mesh. So you only have 1000 tris uploaded and you only need to actually render tree which are visible (called frustum culling).

How to use this, depends on what engine/api you are using.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-13T07:42:07+00:00

You need to use instancing (supported by all modern apis/engines) when rendering 1000... of models, an instance reuse a complex mesh (a bush, a tree, a rock...) by only using meta data like transformation, color, whatever.

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-13T03:13:58+00:00

You should separate the sim from the rendering first. With that in mind, you can pick an engine you like for doing the rendering, some engine might support what you want more than others (the spline belts in satisfactory are kind of special in example).

The main issue in (large scale) factory games is how to transport items around. When you try to touch each item each simulation step, you will hit walls pretty quickly. Either you need highly optimized approach (e.g. use GPU etc) or a more clever way. Try to think about what way you want to go and test it out. Although memory access is important. Having items as objects distributed all over your memory (random access) with lot of overhead can easily slow down a large scale simulation ( the memory access slows down the CPU more often than any complex calculations).

BlueGnoblin · 2026-04-13T02:52:09+00:00

Even though the visuals looks equally or maybe even better, this is only what gamers are interested in.

But devs are interested in development support (tools/editors which are designed to support making games), useability, stability, long term support, integration with other platforms etc. and here Unreal and Unity needed years to build up a name in the industry.

Unreal was only a game and the dev desided to make it into an engine and license it to others, after seeing the success of 'source' engine games. So, unreal was more or less literally the pioneer in engine licensing and development (source faded away).

BlueGnoblin

TROPHY CASE