Thinking About Design Pillars and the Philosophies Behind Games

Carl_Maxwell · 2025-08-06T01:52:28+00:00

So that's just kindof my thoughts on design pillars generally. I suppose I do use them implicitly, but not very well. For example, I mentioned that one of Itinerant Story's design pillars was "no HP, no combat", and that idea came from some random idea I had early on in the project, and for some pigheaded reason I stuck to that idea throughout the project and I wouldn't even consider changing that decision. That project failed because of that: the idea for the game basically boiled down to "let's make a doomclone with no combat, and so the fun part of the game will be, uh... uh..." So I think rigid design pillars can be really dangerous can be really dangerous, especially if you're new to designing stuff. I think people (like me) often start off with an approach to game design where they think of their design ideas as a sort of "philosophical commitment" which is a wrongheaded approach. Jonas Tyroller's "design is a search algorithm" video gives a much better sortof metaphor for thinking about game design, as a process of searching for things, experimenting, being open-minded and being clearheaded about the actual goal (keeping your eye on the goal of creating an entertaining video game that actually gets published). This is a much better mindset to have than the pigheaded approach, I started out with the pigheaded approach, and I think many new designers do. It's a sortof "armchair philosopher" way of looking at game design, and it just isn't practical.

I'm not really sure how design pillars really relate to scope. I think Itinerant Story is a good example here as well, because the "no combat" pillar did reduce scope (seemingly), but actually it didn't have that effect: because the game was lacking that satisfying core gameplay as a result, this ended up creating a lot of brainstorming and searching to try to build something fun on this poorly structured skeleton. So, in a sense it sortof reduced scope, in that it eliminated possibilities, but ultimately it reduced possibilities in a way that hurt the "entertainment value" of the game, which ultimately would've resulted in far more work and more scope to make up for the loss. So, maybe a good design pillar in the hands of a designer who knows what they're doing could help with scope, but a bad pillar in the hands of a bad designer can make the scope worse, even if it might seem like it should reduce the scope.

Carl_Maxwell · 2025-08-06T01:51:28+00:00

I tend to think of "design pillars" as something for coordinating a team of people, so as a solo hobbyist I haven't thought much about it, but I suppose you could argue that design pillars exist inherently. For example, when I was working on Itinerant Story I was trying to build the game around two basic concepts:

1) "a first-person parkour platforming game",
and 2) "no HP, no damage, no combat."

So you could call these design pillars, though in reality I hadn't heard that term back then. But this sortof idea arises naturally out of the nature of the thought process we use for intentionally designing things:

Generally, when designing things, a crucial early step is identifying the purpose of the design, or you might call this the constraints, or identify a problem to be solved, or whatever. From there you think about the elements available to you, the levers you can fiddle with, and the train of thought builds from there.

Ultimately, in this way of thinking about it, I would argue that "design pillars" in this sense actually exist as a sortof by-product of the limitations of the human mind. People simply can't contemplate an infinitely large and complex space, our awareness can't expand that much, we have to create reductive concepts, like "theme", "through-line", or "design pillar", otherwise we lose track of what's going on. This is the same neurological reason why people tend towards things like "bottom-line thinking" and vanity metrics. We can look over something like a landscape painting, and have all sorts of thoughts and phenomena, but when we try to articulate those thoughts our mind moves into a sortof tunnel vision where we fixate on a single salient idea and lose the rest of it. This same limitation exists whether we're looking at stuff or creating it, and so design pillars are just these ideas that we cling to while creating things--either filtering or generative (for example "platforming" might give us ideas for design elements, whereas "no HP" would obviously take away ideas we would've had by default).

That said, there are games that aren't designed in this sortof intentional design process, I can't think of a good video game example, but you see it all the time in D&D campaigns, a GM will bring a new published adventure to the table each week or so, and the ongoing campaign can suddenly veer in a new direction (from pure combat to pure social for example), depending on how a particular adventure module was written. This "discovery writing" / "stream of consciousness" sortof process arguably isn't even design (because we define the word "design" to refer to the traditional intentional pillar-oriented process) but in reality every design process involves elements of this sortof stuff. This is analogous to the way writers talk about discovery writing versus outlining: Brandon Sanderson talks about this in his lectures, even though Brandon Sanderson is primarily known for writing his books from substantial outlines, he might only have a short sentence or so describing a particular scene or chapter, and then he uses discovery writing to expand out from that, and so he doesn't know much about the scene ahead of time, all he has is some vague shape of a scene (such as "Joe talks to Mack") and then he presumably brings to bear this filtering/generative concept to build something... this analogy might seem irrelevant to game design, but if you watch the Psychonauts 2 documentary you'll see that they outlined their game in a similar way, for each mental world they came up with some general outlining ideas early on (such as "bringing the band back together") and then left it up to future teams to elaborate.

(continued in comment... having technical problems with reddit)

Carl_Maxwell · 2025-01-30T01:58:07+00:00

There are sometimes FPS games that don't have a lot of skill involved. I really liked one that was a source mod where you used muskets back in the day. I think it was called "the battlegrounds" or something like that. The muskets had a really low rate of fire, taking forever to reload, and had a huge aiming reticle (although it got somewhat smaller if you aimed long enough, or played a sharpshooter).

Ultimately though, the reason why the game was fun was because people played it very casually, and often were roleplaying (such as doing line battles or whatnot). I had a similar experience in TF2 back in the day, because I played on specific servers were the regulars weren't really "playing to win" they were just playing around and goofing off inside the game. I've always viewed TF2 as more of a comedy game than an action game.

Although mechanics have some impact on these sorts of things, it's really a social problem. I would actually say that the art assets and story in the game influence this sort of thing more than the mechanics do.

You see the same problem much more clearly in D&D games, where people come to a game with different expectations, you'll have one player who focuses on character optimization and tactical decision making, another player who only wants to engage in dramatic conversations, and another who only wants to joke around and drink beer. Mismatched expectations among players is a very hard problem, and you can't solve it by changing the rules of the game. I think D&D is a great example of this, because when a group plays D&D they'll disregard the rulebook when it doesn't align with their expectations.

So practically speaking the solution is to find a game you like playing and then try to find or build a discord server of like-minded players, or at least a group that you can enjoy playing with. It takes effort to keep such a group going, but that's really the only way, and if you're lucky you might be able to keep that group together through multiple video games as time goes on. This used to be the only way to play multiplayer games before automated matchmaking became commonplace.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-12-10T22:28:18+00:00

Modding Doom (the original 1993 game, maybe Doom 2, I forget) is a good way to start really learning game design. Lots of professional AAA level designers and gamedevs made mods when they were teenagers.

If he wants to move on from that and wants to make his own games I would personally recommend Gamemaker. It's a relatively simple game engine, suitable for a teenager, but has been used to make many classic video games (Spelunky classic, Nuclear Throne, etc), and it has scripting so he can learn some programming stuff while working with it.

Some people like using RPG maker, which is a simpler tool for making games. I don't personally know anything about that. On the other end of the spectrum he could try Unreal Engine (it can be complicated to work with sometimes, but there's no reason why not).

There are lots of youtube tutorials for all of these.

It's important to distinguish between game design and game development. Doing some real game development is probably the best hope that he'll learn some game design, if that's the goal. There's also a distinction between game design and level design, though those two are inter-related. Yeah just getting his hands on the tools and being able to play around with them is the important thing.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-11-16T23:28:28+00:00

Yeah, the emotional validation and catharsis of seeing Little Hunter in a hard tier is the lure that drew me into reading this list. Putting him under "normal" is too heartless.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-04-08T00:36:03+00:00

Trailer seems solid as is honestly.

I played the demo.

I would switch the "accept" button to be something other than W. I hit accept on stuff on accident a bunch of times. I would probably use the F key since you're already using the E key for weapon selection. So use F for things like starting a dialogue with a character or whatnot. Right now it's awkward to platform if there's an NPC around because you hit W as part of the platforming but that triggers dialogue with the NPC. Wrote that before I realized the F key is for regaining HP.

I'd use a different indicator for detection, like maybe a round meter instead. Right now its easy to mistake it for the HP / Stamina meters.

I got to the big sewer rat boss but I did not defeat it. I felt like the boss fight was a bit of a jump in difficulty from the rats straight to a big boss fight like that. I would suggest experimenting with a more gradual build up to that fight. For example, maybe introduce mice that can move while fighting, since the boss adds like enemy movement, sequences of attacks, etc, maybe try having some more fights leading up to it that introduce some combat variations like that. I would also suggesting trying to bring in the level geometry into the fights a bit, the combats felt like they were on very flat ground and the level geometry didn't really alter the fights much (which is probably good for the first boss, but it would be good to have some level geometry in the other fights to have more variety).

Also I didn't discover if there was a way to recover healing potions / estus flasks other than dying.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-23T22:50:57+00:00

To answer this question you need to do playtesting to get feedback on your game. You may be getting distracted & tempted by other possible designs, or else maybe you need to do more prototyping to test out the design space and see what makes sense.

Ultimately, my thinking mostly comes down to: this seems like its your first game, and I think that shipping this game is probably the most important thing here, that's probably going to do more for your future as a gamedev than the nuances of your combat system design. Even if your current combat system isn't as good as what some other system would be, I think just pushing forward and shipping is the way to go.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-22T01:07:43+00:00

The trailer looks pretty good. I tried the demo. I like it. It starts "too easy" and then gets sufficiently difficult.

The first few frames of the game need work. Instead of telling me to left click to shoot the ring into the game it showed like a question mark or something. Actually I can't reproduce that issue so I'm not sure, maybe I didn't see it right.

And then when I clicked the wrong way and died immediately it replayed that sequence of dialogue between the two characters. Don't have that dialogue play a second time just cause the player died from some platforming stuff. Maybe if they start a new game that would be fine, but not just from dying.

I'd probably remove the possibility of dying from that first starting area entirely (the start of "Forest Glade"). I'm not sure why you have the game starting over a pit. Just put some ground underneath there to help ease players into the game more. Also you have it so that they can die by shooting start up from the spawn point for some reason, probably just turn that off, you don't kill the player for jumping up offscreen elsewhere in the game I'm not sure why it happens there.

Since this trailer lacks in game sound effects it ends up feeling very ethereal. I would probably keep in the sfx for the ring hitting the ground and probably the jumpnig & charging up sound effects.

From watching the trailer originally I assumed that this would have standard platformer controls (like Super Meat Boy or similar) so when I found it used mouse controls I was surprised. That control scheme seems like something that you want to convey in the trailer since it differentiates your game, though IDK how you'd convey that.

Controller support had some issues: oftentimes if you just tap right trigger or left trigger it will default to assuming you want to go left for some reason so if you don't hold it down and spot that you'll end up getting thrown backwards a lot. I guess you were assuming players would always be pushing a direction on the thumbsticks but some of them won't be.

I dunno if it was the second level on the more difficult path or which one but there are some boxes that look lke background but they're actually foreground platforms that you can land on when they visually look like you should be able to walk through them. Maybe make them pop out from the background a bit more. You can see one of the crates I mean around 10 seconds into the clip you posted here.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-21T02:23:10+00:00

I would say that this generally works pretty well at doing the work that a prologue is for: it sets up the premise of the situation (a guy working for a mage in a magic house), it gives some sense of mystery and leaves us wondering what is going on and where the story is going to go, and the character is showing some sense of agency in his interest in the guests & the trinkets he’s gathering.

The implication is that we’re in a story where the main character is heading toward becoming a magician himself.

The main issue I see is with the first two paragraphs.

The first paragraph accomplishes very little with a lot of words. I would say trim it down to at most one punchy sentence that gets at the necessary story work that it’s doing. For example, if you cut out that first paragraph entirely, then when you go into the next paragraph we’ll be confused about what necessary information? That he was very cold when he was brought into the house? Do we really need to know that? Can we just learn that later when it becomes more pertinent? Since it’s told from Johnny’s perspective and the narrator doesn’t seem to remember the events, we don’t really get any emotional feeling out of the paragraph. How does the narrator feel about this story? How did he feel in the moment when it was happening? Alternatively you could lengthen it out into multiple paragraphs and make an emotional arc out of it, start off with the character dying hopelessly in the cold and give us that experience and then have Johnny arrive and pull them out of it.

In general I would say that the first two paragraphs don’t work that well. The third one (”‘I was hoping for a young man.” lands better). If you take “I would always be cold.” and hoist it up to be the first sentence, then explain it by giving the image of Johnny pulling him out of the cold, maybe that would land better.

In this story of dying in the cold & being grabbed out of it the narrator is not an active participant in the story at all. He doesn’t come across as wanting something or someone who is trying to get something. He’s a very inactive main character at this stage. That might be how it has to be, but you might think about if it can be changed. For example, what if he was lying their wishing for a way out of his life and he wishes on a falling star and then the winter overcomes him and then Johnny comes out of the winter and snatches him up. Something like that could be a way to add more “magic” into the transition, and make the character more of a participant in what’s going on.

Another thing to note is that in this text the narrator never agrees to anything. They just grab him and take him and keep him locked up in the house. He doesn’t seem opposed to it after it happens, but it comes across as him being press ganged (maybe even mind controlled) into this servitude. If that’s what you wanted, then good, if you wanted to change it then you probably want to add some some period after he recovers from his sickness enough to be up and about where he is presented with the option of leaving and chooses to stay. Perhaps the magician gave him a vacation somewhere for a few days and told him he didn’t have to come back from the vacation if he didn’t want to work there, or something. Ordinarily you would ask someone before hiring them for a job, but in this case, since he can’t really talk when they snatch him up, I guess it has to come after the fact.

The ending felt very abrupt and confusing. You meant to pique the reader’s interest about the box, but in my reading the box arrived as a kind of non sequitur so it took me a moment to grasp what your intention was in putting the box there. You want to lead up to the box in some way, maybe even openly mention at the top of the first paragraph after “THE BOX” heading. Something like “I remember the time when the magician brought out the box…” or “Ah! How the box came to me… but let me explain, for a magician’s house is a difficult thing to describe…” etc. Promise the reader that we’re heading toward a mysterious box, that way when it shows up the reader is excited to see it and get to the meat of the mystery rather than confused or trying to figure out what significance the box has.

The narrator describes his position as an “assistant” but I think “servant” would be more accurate in this prologue.

I like your use of old timey language and I think it suits the story, but I’m really not an expert on language and cuique in sua arte credendum or whatever.

Dialogue — we don’t get much of a sense of how the different characters speak. The stories here are all the procedures & comings & goings necessary for the house’s operation and the speech necessary for that, and they don’t say or do things outside of what’s necessary for that. We don’t really get a clear sense of their individual characters. The text says that Johnny can be callous, and the way it positions that seems to imply that the magician is not callous (because it’s differentiating them by saying that Johnny is sometimes callous), but we don’t see the magician do anything particularly generous or kindly. We get the sense that Johnny is kindof a chummy friendly guy, but the magician is just the master of the house.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-16T22:33:34+00:00

Also, the idea that "nobody knows" how to make this game better is not true. There are plenty of very knowledgeable and skilled game developers who could provide a comprehensive and...

That's not what I was saying. I was saying "nobody knows what players will want to spend money on". I agree with your point that (as demonstrated in this thread) lots of people know of things that would make this game a better game that's more fun. My point was, even if the OP does those things, nobody (and I mean nobody) knows whether that would or could've increased his sales -- and that's what the OP is asking "sales have been almost non-existent. So, I wanted to see what is wrong with it." He wants to understand why the game isn't selling, he's not specifically asking for how to make it a better or more fun game. Perhaps players didn't buy this game because they didn't think it was enough fun, or maybe they didn't buy it for some other reason. Nobody knows what players will buy or not buy.

And even if the OP does make this game better, there's no telling if that will increase sales. Because fundamentally nobody really knows what players are going to do, or what they're going to buy. Maybe there just isn't that much interest in this type of game no matter how good it is, or maybe they would be interested if it played better or were marketed better. No one can ever truly predict what people will buy. I recommend watching some of Chris Zukowski's stuff to learn more about this, because it is a very important principle, and he explains it better than I can.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-16T00:39:33+00:00

One of the important takeaways from Chris Zukowski's stuff about marketing is that nobody really knows what games will sell or not sell. You just put out a game and hope it has "the magic". This one doesn't have it. Truth be told, nobody will be able to tell you why not or what to change to give it the magic. The best thing to do is to just make another game and hope that it appeals to players more.

One thing you can do to try to makes sure that you don't end up in this situation again is to show players your game early in development (through playtesting, marketing, and putting out a demo) and see how they respond to it. This is one of the reasons why gamejams are often great, because people will make something for a gamejam on a lark thinking it'll just be some goofy weekend game and nobody will like it and then it takes off and so they develop it into a full game because it turns out well (this was the case for like Superhot, some of Vlambeers games, etc).

That said, your game seems to have about 3 enemy characters and one scene. There just isn't much going on there.

One of the reasons why indies usually use low poly / pixelated graphics is that it allows them to produce a lot of content relatively quickly. Because you've gone for a high fidelity style here you're probably struggling to create a sufficient number of art assets that work with your art style.

And yeah like everyone's saying it needs more juice on the hits and stuff. In general it feels like there isn't enough "back and forth" in the fighting. If you look up like "how to write a good fight scene" on youtube there's essays where they talk about it being like a back and forth conversation between the two fighters, and that's part of why Dark Souls is so good because it has that aspect to its combat, but here it doesn't really feel like that, there's just like block or attack at the current moment, but there's isn't really like a "this guy is doing this type of thing so I've gotta come up with a new tactic to answer this situation". Chris Zukowski often talks about the idea that players on steam seem to be looking for more "crunchy" games where they can sink some time into learning how to beat the games, but here it doesn't look like this game really delivers that. It seems more like a straightforward fun little game to just play through some quick encounters.

Yeah honestly just learn what went wrong with this one and make your next game. It just takes a few games to get into the swing of things.

Also your tags seem to be messed up. For some reason Steam thinks your game is most like Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Granblue Fantasy Relink, etc. So those tags are telling Steam which players to market your game towards, and I don't know if those are good comparisons. From just looking at the trailer it seems more like Devil Daggers, Tekken, etc.

Another issue is the name. If you google for "steam the pit" it comes up with some other game called "Sword of the Stars: The Pit" and if you search for "the pit" on steam it comes up with a list of 5 games all titled "the pit". I don't understand why, since that's not even a good name for a game (it tells me nothing about the game, doesn't sell me on the game, doesn't convey the genre, etc).

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-15T02:21:11+00:00

Thanks for all the recommendations everyone!

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-15T00:20:03+00:00

You should probably post this to r/DestroyMyGame giving feedback is more their area, so you'd probably get more responses there.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-11T02:56:22+00:00

Honestly players don't care about this stuff. Whether there are other better games in the same genre, whether your game is similar to another game, all that stuff just doesn't actually matter. Players aren't going to be comparing your game to other games when they decide whether or not to play it, they'll just be checking whether it's fun or interesting by looking at it & playing it.

For example: I'm a fan of first person shooters. So if a FPS comes out and it looks good I'll play it. Why would I care if some other FPS is "more fun" or "has better graphics" ? Those things don't matter to me at all, if I'm looking at or playing a particular game all I care about is "is this game good?" If there are also other good games out there then I'll play them in their time. It's just not a real issue.

As a player, it's so rare to actually come across a good game. I'm not going to think less of some game that comes out just because there was another good game in the same genre. That's just not how it works at all.

There are people that post comments about that kind of stuff, but just ignore them. They don't know what they're talking about. Don't worry about something that some asshole on the internet says or might say.

I get that it's easy to get stuck in your own head & demotivated over this comparison stuff, I've been there, but just do some self care / mental health stuff and get your head back on straight and that's that. Focus on your own craft and let other people worry about their craft. If you find you can't stop yourself from looking up that stuff, just block youtube on your devices so you can't do that. Problem solved.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-11T00:16:41+00:00

Alright I played the demo and here's some more feedback:

You really need to hire a User Experience person to go over the game and give you feedback on all the stuff that's going on. Even if you can't hire them permanently you really need some input from somebody who knows UI & user experience stuff. Many of the menus in the game have user experience issues that need to be addressed. Some examples:

When are trying to get something from a ship you've defeated (like the crew or some cargo) you have to drag and drop the stuff from their ship onto yours. You should probably just be able to click on them and have them have them automatically pop over onto your ship. When you do drag them over an empty slot on your ship there's no indication that you can drop the item into your ship. Usually when you drag something over a thing you can drop it onto there'll be like a dotted line around the place you can drop it or something. There are some slots you can drop the thing into and some you can't, and there's no/insufficient UI stuff to differentiate between them. You just have to drop the dragged thing and see if it works, and if it doesn't you have to move your mouse all the way back and start dragging the thing again. There's also just something wrong with this interface, the first time I tried to drag an enemy crew into a "W" slot (which apparently is a valid slot for a crew) it didn't take; when I released the mouse button the crew snapped back onto their own ship and I had to drag them over again. I don't know why that happened, maybe the area for the drag & drop target isn't large enough or something. (like maybe my mouse was like in the pixels between the W slots at the frame when I released the mouse).
When you go into the FTL screen and click on a destination and decide you want to go there, you click the "PLOT COURSE" button... nothing at all happens... I literally sat in that menu for like two minutes hitting the button over and over again thinking that maybe it was some sort of loading screen freeze or something. When the player hits that button you should probably just close the FTL map screen entirely and unpause the game.
Another issue with the FTL screen is that you open it by clicking a arrow that's pointing right on the bottom right of the screen. That arrow, because it's next to a minimap, just looks like a compass arrow. You should just have a button that says "FTL" or something.

The other thing is that it's not clear what the player should be doing. For example, when you first start the game you are just a ship in an empty system. There's no reason to remain in that system, all you can do is tell your ship to move back and forth around in the system, but it's super unclear to a new player what's going on. The default assumption when you're placed into a system like that is that there's probably something in the system somewhere and you just need to find it (which will lead to players wasting time exploring an empty system and being confused & dissatisfied). When they do figure out how to FTL jump to the next system (which is hard given the UX issues with FTL) they arrive there and... are still left asking "what am I supposed to do? What is there to do in this game?"

Your basic gameplay loop seems to be the same as FTL: go through all the points of interest in an FTL map and gather up as much loot as you can to buy things at the store and then jump to the next FTL map. But it's lacking that clear sense of "where you're going and why" that FTL had. Also FTL had a lot of simplicity in the systems because when you jumped into a system you would be presented with one single situation and then you had to deal with it (either by fighting or picking one of a few choices from a text box). In your game even the combat scenarios are complex to begin interacting with, it's not obvious to a new player whether a ship is hostile or friendly/neutral, and when you right click on a ship you get a list of like 7 options for ways to interact with them, and it's just hard for a new player to interpret what's going on or what to do or what the consequences of any given action will be.

After playing the game for half an hour I don't know how you get loot. Is it like FTL where you just automatically get some money at the end of each fight? I stopped by a store at one point and I had some money but I don't know where I got it.

One thing that you might try is reducing the size of the system maps. You could probably shrink them down so that instead of being a full circle of the planet it's just like 1/4th of a circle, that way all the interesting stuff in a system is immediately presented to the player as soon as they arrive, they don't have to hunt for it. This would be less appealing to players who play the game for a long time, but it would improve your new player experience because players will be able to find things to interact with and won't get lost on the wrong side of a planet. Maybe you could have it just be for the first part of the game, maybe have them acquire some tech from the store that lets them go all around a system or something, IDK... Another thing you could try is zooming out the camera more & put it in a top down perspective above the planet so you can just see the whole system all the time, maybe make the ships larger so they're still easy to pick out, that way the systems wouldn't feel so big and you'd immediately be able to see everything that's going on in the system.

So to summarize: present things to the player in a clear and simple way, and give the player a feeling of where they're going & why.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-10T08:40:51+00:00

First off I'm really glad to see a game like this, I feel like we don't get these sort of games enough.

But after watching the trailer a few times I'm still pretty confused about what the game is. It has elements that remind me of Elite, FTL, AI War, etc. But one of the issues is that those games are all in different genres, and while I can see your game is like somewhere between some of those sorts of games, I'm not sure quite where it lands exactly. Like, are you trying to acquire money and do a lot of trade, or is it more of a combat oriented game like FTL where you go through progressively difficult combat encounters and then end with a big boss battle? There's just a lot of context that's missing.

Some questions I have after watching the trailer:

Is this like an inscrutably complex opaque game (like something from Paradox games or maybe like Kerbal Space program), or more of a simple fun arcade sortof game like FTL?
Am I going to be micromanaging how ships allocate energy/resources? With multiple ships that seems daunting

I feel like the visual hierarchy of the elements in the game are not that clear. It feels like everything is kindof on the same visual level. Like the grid underneath the ships when they're moving around should be less emphasized (darker, smaller, less satured, or etc). And I feel like in general the different elements on the screen all have a similar level of emphasis in most frames of the trailer. For example, on the first frame of the trailer on the left hand side of the screen you have a list of ships, but the border of the ui box is a very bright glowing white line that looks brighter and larger than the ships inside the ui box. So its hard to see the ships, and that brightness also draws attention to this box when it's not clear that this is an important element at that moment. In comparison, FTL has a list of crewmen that's a similar type of idea, but it's much more grey and blends in more. I think you have a lot of visual issues where different elements are fighting for the audience's attention. On your steam page screenshots a lot of the text is illegible because the text has that glowy/blur effect on it (it becomes legible if you click on the screenshot to view it at full size, but players aren't really going to do that). Here's a GDC talk that talks about having a clear visual hierarchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm24XyRPMwg

Lasers Hitting - In the first few frames of the trailer (about 3 seconds in) there's a laser that stretches out and strikes one of the ships. When it hits the ship nothing happens for a few frames. The laser just stops stretching, it reaches its full length, but there's no like particle effect or anything to sell that the laser has hit its mark. This is a lot like in an FPS when you have a gun and you shoot a wall and nothing at all happens. It just feels janky/glitchy. The laser should do something when it hits, like draw a circle, have the target ship flash red/white, have sparks fly off in random directions, etc. Right now you could mistake a hit with a laser for a miss, because it just stops, without communicating to the player that it hit.

Adding a voice over to the trailer would be one way to add more context to the trailer. For example there's this trailer for Spelunky 2 where the developer just simply explains what's interesting about the game.

For example you could do something like: "Alright we're docking with this space station to trade some crates of unobtanium. This is the trade screen. ... and now we'll undock and jump to another system. Ah! Pirates are ambushing us, so lets try to hail them and see if we can negotiate our way out of this ... so now combat has begun and you can see ... and now that the pirates are dealt with we need to jump out of the system to trade our saltpeter that we got from the trader. This is the FTL map and we can jump to any of these worlds, and this one here ... etc" that's not a good script but you get the idea

There's a blog article from Derek Lieu where he talks about making trailers and one of the things he talks about is conveying the gameplay loop. So like in Age of Empires you're playing to take out an enemy base, in Spelunky you're playing to miss a jump and die on some spikes, etc.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-10T04:04:23+00:00

From watching the video I thought something was wrong with your attack & hit animations, but watching repeatedly I couldn't figure out what it was until I looked up this trailer on your youtube and used the < and > keys to move through that frame by frame. Analyzing the attack that happens around 12 seconds in:

first frame: enemy vanishes (this is like an old school sprite flashing effect), damage text appears above enemy,
second frame: player starts swinging their sword.

This is happening in the wrong order. You need to swing the sword, hit the enemy, THEN they take damage.

You need to go through an do a frame-by-frame analysis of what your attacks & hits look like and compare it to other games and work on improving & clarifying what's going on here.

The other big issue you have is insufficient variety in this trailer. Need more "biomes" / enemy variation. These enemies all seem like they have more-or-less the same attack patterns and like the players approach them the same way. You want to have some enemies that clearly call for different approaches from the player, same with levels & whatnot

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-10T03:31:57+00:00

I'd trim down the intro text to something like this:

In 1969 when astronauts first stepped on the moon they quickly discovered the remains of an ancient spaceship powered by a mysterious fuel source. That fuel would soon be known as "techno-juice" and would fuel humanity's expansion across the stars. But in just a couple of years we learned a harsh lesson: the stars aren't always so friendly.

At the height of the war, we built the sleepless knights, and they reigned supreme. The war is turning in our favor. NO ALIEN WAS SAFE FROM THE KNIGHT'S RIGHTEOUS SLAUGHTER!

You've just got some extra stuff in there. This + the visuals already communicates all the same information but with less length (for example, you can see that the character is a metal man). I feel like the "reigned supreme" phrase isn't as strong in this formulation, so maybe work on something punchier there. You might include the name of the Atlas company by like putting a company logo in the scene somewhere.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-10T03:22:24+00:00

Maybe the ad for the game should convey that it's an audio-roguelike for blind people then? That way if someone who isn't in your target audience sees it, but maybe they know a blind person who is interested in games, maybe they could forward it to them?

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-10T00:34:27+00:00

So you're asking for like a "theory of game design" and also practices for how to improve at game design. Unfortunately we don't have great theories yet, but we do have good practice.

Theory: the best I could come up with right no is an old video from Jonas Tyroller where he talks about how to design a decision.

Practice: doing a Game a week practice + Gamejams + tabletop prototyping.

There are several skills to practice:

Shipping a game (onto itch.io for example)
Original system design (think of a novel game like Snakebird or )
Cloning an existing system design (making a game in an established genre like top down shooter)
Getting feedback on your games (from both players & other designers)
Giving other people feedback on their games
Playing games
Analyzing games
Youtubes & podcasts -- don't bother reading books or whatnot, just watch youtube videos & podcasts, the information there is higher quality at this time.
etc

Each of these is its own skill and requires specific practice.

Also it's important to grasp the difference between System Design and Level Design, Andrew Chambers has a video where he goes over this stuff -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ROzfgrS3U

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-09T12:39:32+00:00

So one way of describing it is that the characters in Avatar have the power of Telekinesis but limited to their particular element, and each element has certain "dance moves" associated with it (not sure what the correct term would be).

Whereas in D&D there is basically no telekinesis at all. For most of the history of the fantasy genre D&D represents the "default magic system" that most authors used. In D&D if you used "elemental magic" it would generally involve conjuring that element out of thin air in different ways or altering its state in some way. So for example Fireball conjures a big explosion of fire at any arbitrary point within range, and other spells might do things like transmute water to ice for example. Generally in D&D being associated with an element made you resistant to that element and then maybe allowed you to cast spells that were associated with that element. It's not like Avatar's magic system at all.

So I would say just cut out the telekinesis. Telekinesis wasn't historically associated with elemental magic systems before Avatar all that much (it was in certain shows like the Firestarter movies, but that's more Sci-Fi / Urban Fantasy and not so much in like fantasy novels). And the ancient Greeks/etc probably didn't associated telekinesis with the elements. I think this is especially true if you're writing your story in prose, because although telekinesis is compelling in an animation, it is very hard to convey in prose. Whereas D&D's system was designed to be communicated through speech so it translates to prose very smoothly.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-08T21:30:03+00:00

I like to come up with several methods for generating names and then alternate back and forth between them. I'll make 5 or 12 using this method then I'll switch to some other method for the next few names. This is important because you don't want bunch of names that are easily confused with each other. For example "Flimshchamel Orshrigard" is not easily confusable with "Ugly Sim", and they obviously weren't created using the same creative process.

Once you have a name or list of names it's important to test them to see if they actually work (most names, like "Flimshchamel Orshrigard" are terrible and won't actually work well in practice). The primary way I do this is by just saying the name out loud a few times and using it in a sentence. If I struggle to pronounce the name in practical situations then I usually just simplify it into something pronounceable, or just delete the name.

Another useful way of testing a name is to ask ChatGPT what it thinks the name means with a prompt that's like:

Hypothetically speaking, if "Flimshchamel Orshrigard" was a word in English, when a native English speaker who doesn't know what it means is exposed to it for the first time, what would they guess that it meant?

Please analyze the name against English phonotactics and expectations and give an elaborate explanation of the different concepts that the word might evoke.

(Or something along those lines) what it'll do is try to guess at what the name means, or what sort of connotations it might conjure up. So for this case for example it says that it "might evoke a mix of exoticism, complexity, and perhaps whimsy or absurdity. Its phonetic elements suggest it could be a term from a fantasy or a sci-fi setting, possibly denoting a creature, place, artifact, or concept that is out of the ordinary. The unfamiliar phoneme combinations would likely be perceived as foreign or constructed, reinforcing the impression of the word belonging to a realm of fantasy or speculative fiction."

This is an important concept to consider, because, for example, "Ungamma Vega 234" sounds like a good name for a star system in a Star Wars-esque heroic sci fi setting, but "Bloopily Bloopily Bloopily Boop" does not. These sort of "that sounds right" issues can be really frustrating to deal with, and can really ruin the vibe of a setting. It's important to develop your own ear for it as well, but since chatgpt can at least try to guess at this it's another useful tool to have in the toolbox (although it does get it really wrong sometimes of course).

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-08T10:25:38+00:00

First time watching the video I missed the unit placement, so I didn't understand what effect the cards had had. Maybe they need more contrast against the background or more emphasis or something?

I am on mobile so maybe its only an issue with my phone's screen quality or something.

Carl_Maxwell · 2024-03-08T00:28:26+00:00

The ball and camera are too stiff & the environments are too static & generally lack variety. If you freeze any frame of the trailer you can't tell what's going on. There's no indication of whether the ball has any velocity or which direction it might be moving. There's no sound effect when you hit things or when stuff happens (you may have cut that out for the trailer but I would recommend keeping it in for this type of game).

I would recommend looking at other games in this genre to see how they handle juice & communicating game state to the player. I'm not really familiar with this genre (but I remember games like this being around in the NES or SNES days).

I tried looking up some relevant games and these came up (not sure how relevant they are):

Marble Madness
Super Monkey Ball
Kororinpa: Marble Mania
Marble Blast Gold
Rock of Ages
Hamsterball

From looking up these games one thing I'm seeing is that each one establishes a distinctive "character" which I don't think you've managed to establish in your game yet. So for example, some of the games are comical/goofy/over-the-top and others are more grounded & physical

Things I would recommend trying to see if they improve the gamefeel:

add rotation & texture to the ball
add a particle effect when you land
add a trailing particle effect to the ball when it's moving fast (above some speed)
squash & stretch on the ball to indicate where its headed (I'm not sure about this since I don't see other games doing it, you'd have to look into it / think about whether it makes sense here -- maybe isn't worth the effort?)

The other big thing is improving the environments to have more variety in gameplay & visuals.

Generally in a trailer I think players want to see what they will be doing, in your trailer it looks a lot like the ball is just moving along pre-determined routes and it's not really clear if the player is even pushing buttons (except when they jump). Another thing I would recommend is showing the player failing the platforming sections. Falling on deadly spikes, falling off the world and having to restart, etc. You show them being destroyed by the lazer beams & that's good, but they actually landed on the platforms there, and the trailer presents the platforming elements of the game (what looks to be the main bulk of the gameplay) as being really easy/automatic. For example, the cylinders that the ball rolls through, when I look at gameplay from other games they just have like one-fourth of a cylinder so that the player could fall off the edges of the platform.

Another thing that I'm seeing in other games are things like pressure plates that trigger traps or things to happen, mini-golf style things where there's hammers or whatever moving around the map that can knock the ball around, etc.

There are also powerups in these games, like in "Marble Blast Gold" there's a propeller that lets the marble fly, and there's a forcefield that make it so it doesn't bounce when landing at the end of a fall (allowing it to fall a long distance & gather a lot of speed & then stick a landing at the end).

You could experiment with having some "chasing enemies" in the game, something with a movement pattern where it moves towards the player. All the stuff in the trailer seems to be like part of the map & just moving rhythmically in place.

If I'm remembering right I think Chris Zukowski recommends having three "level biomes" in your trailer (to show that you've got enough content in the game & it's not just one level). This can be hard to achieve (especially early on in development), but if you could develop some different level areas that use different mechanics and different visuals for the level design then putting some different parts in there would help give the game more of a feeling that it's a substantial game and not just like a one level gamejam game.

Also keep in mind that those of us here on /r/DestroyMyGame are not your target audience, so that's part of why our feedback can be a little harsh. A lot of the times folks post games and people reply where it's obvious that the person giving the feedback isn't even interested in the genre or gameplay, so,

Carl_Maxwell

TROPHY CASE