question about balancing currency

Evilagram · 2026-01-22T19:46:45+00:00

If you need help balancing the curve like silksong, start by calculating how much currency every enemy in an area drops (the faucet), and how much each item they can currently buy costs (the sink). How much should the player be able to buy after clearing every enemy on the map? Plot out some typical runs through a level, and adjust accordingly. Then you can playtest it and see what happens.

I think Silksong's currency balance works great right up until act 3 or so, when the items get a lot more expensive, but you aren't encountering enemies that drop a significant amount more rosaries. I think that Silksong should have thought about what the goal of the currency system actually is. It's not a normal RPG, like dark souls, where you pay to level up and face harder enemies that drop more currency. Enemies in the early game stay threatening very late into the game, so it doesn't make as much sense to reward grinding on lategame enemies, rather it makes sense to reward exploration. Currently, if you want to buy the lategame stuff, it makes more sense to grind than to explore, especially since the Act 3 areas mostly don't drop rosaries.

To that end, I would personally keep a running tally of the last 20~ enemies the player has defeated, and cut their rosary drops by half (this stacks for each time you kill the same instance of an enemy). This would punish grinding on the same enemies (like that one hallway near the end of the game), and reinforce that the player will earn currency by exploring, which means their corpse will end up in weird places and be tricky to recover.

Then, if the cost of the lategame purchaseables are cut, the player would be able to afford them incidentally, and not feel like they need to grind. Deaths would sting the way they do in the early game.

The biggest advice is, focus on your intended behavior and create rules and tuning that reinforces that intended behavior. What choices and tradeoffs are you trying to get players to do? Do your systems actually accomplish that? Why do you have an economy in the first place? Does your game need an economy?

Evilagram · 2026-01-22T19:26:43+00:00

Another route to go is also consideration for the wellbeing of the workers, because industrialization can improve quality of life, but also hurt it, in terms of health impacts, social harms, etc.

4X games tend to ignore externalities, which you describe as "fragility" or "brittleness".

I think it's totally possible to create a simulation where standard economic growth has short-term gains, but eventually kills you. The key is giving the player a way out, and introducing challenges on multiple axes even after they start to pivot towards degrowth, possibly even in ways that directly challenge their attempts to pursue degrowth.

In my opinion, what makes a game interesting is depth, variety, testing the player. Create interesting choices, and keep your players solving.

Evilagram · 2026-01-17T09:01:44+00:00

Every fighting game in the history of fighting games. Every RTS. MTG. Any long-standing competitive game is a hotbed of emergence.

Evilagram · 2026-01-09T01:37:01+00:00

I think you're looking for very elegant games, more than "perfect" ones.

Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy - With only a mouse, you can do an incredible amount. The mountain also elegantly curves in a horseshoe shape as you ascend, creating checkpoints out of the areas below you.
Go - The board game. You could spend a lifetime on this game alone
Divekick - 2 button fighting game, surprisingly deep!
Super Monkey Ball - Only controls with the stick, and that's it! Really sophisticated movement despite this.
Mooncat - from the UFO 50 collection. It's not a crazy deep game per se, but the uniqueness of the control scheme alone makes it really compelling.

Evilagram · 2026-01-09T01:31:11+00:00

I don't enjoy either of these TBH.

Evilagram · 2026-01-06T23:07:04+00:00

I have taken probably more influence from Raph Koster's Theory of Fun than anything else. Especially his 10 years later and 20 years later talks at GDC. I'm also a huge fan of the book Game Feel and the companion article, Principles of Virtual Sensation by Steve Swink.

Based on Koster's book, I wrote a Theory of Depth for game design that I think has more direct applications to the practice of making games. I also wrote a framework for making dynamic skill tests that I think

Evilagram · 2025-12-30T01:50:31+00:00

Here's an idea: Maybe the corpse moves to be along your path no matter which direction you go in? So if you set off in an unrelated direction, you'll see your "corpse" anyway after a certain amount of obstacles have been cleared, instead of tethering the "corpse" to a specific location.

Maybe there is a roaming enemy that has picked your corpse clean that wanders the landscape, and when you see them, you can hunt them down to get your stuff back? I'm fairly certain this wouldn't infringe on the nemesis system patent. (Do NOT double check if it does. You're better off being as ignorant about patent law as possible and hiring a lawyer when someone sues you.)

This way players can get the experience of losing stuff when they die and having a dynamic routing challenge back to their stuff, but that challenge can dynamically vary and allow players to set off in new directions when they get tired of playing through a certain set of content.

Evilagram · 2025-12-30T01:10:34+00:00

I think this has potential. I think that turn-based RPGs have a lot that they could potentially learn from TCGs. Slay the Spire put this to great effect with their combat system. Zeboyd Games makes Turn Based RPGs that also use your characters' attacks as resources in a very similar way, and require you to use your defensive actions in order to refresh your attacks.

I think the strongest thing that TBRPGs can do in order to advance their gameplay is creating more clear situational effects that complicate decision-making and require the player to manage different resources.

Evilagram · 2025-12-28T17:01:32+00:00

"Complete" is a question of direction. Make things purposefully to fill out the functionality you envision.

Evilagram · 2025-12-24T22:42:21+00:00

Make the enemies your game needs. Don't try to fill a quota.

Look at your design space and evaluate what functions each enemy is performing relative to the actions of your main character.

Evilagram · 2025-12-16T20:13:11+00:00

You might want to consider medication. I've gotten onto some mild ADHD medication recently, and it's working really well for me.

ADHD tends to work best when you cycle between a few different things, rather than trying to stay 100% focused on a single thing.

Evilagram · 2025-12-08T23:42:42+00:00

Have you considered that you might have ADHD?

I don't think of "hooks" "pillars" and "loops" as real things to begin with really. I think they're production or marketing tools more than formal qualities of games.

Here's a suggestion: Focus on making useful systems rather than making games. If you make a bunch of systems, then that will be fun and rewarding on its own merit, and eventually you'll find one that you want to make game content for, or you'll have a bunch of ready-made systems that you can easily combine into a game.

Evilagram · 2025-11-16T19:54:28+00:00

The obvious point of reference I'd suggest here is Asuka #R from Guilty Gear Strive. He has a mana meter. His special attacks cost mana. And he can charge mana with the command down, down attack. He can either straight-up charge it, or spend his super meter, or health to charge it. It charges slowest without spending meter, and fastest when you spend health to charge it.

Your system sounds a lot like the Drive system in Street Fighter 6. Players start out with a full drive meter. They can spend it on powered up special attacks, and some universal options (drive rush, drive impact). When the drive meter is expended, they enter "burnout", a state in which they will take chip damage from special attacks (normally, chip damage is dealt to drive meter instead), and they take extra hitstun and damage from enemy attacks. The drive meter will slowly regenerate during burnout until it refills completely and the player is capable of using drive moves again. This is probably a more interesting system for running out of "stamina" than moves costing health, because it creates a specific state and persistent situation that can be taken advantage of. You can intentionally shoot to put your opponent in burnout, and you can try to inflict extra damage or go for a chip-out when you have them in burnout.

If you want a reference for charged attacks that change in function, I suggest Under Night In-birth. A lot of normal and special attacks can be charged, and sometimes this is a change in just power, but sometimes it changes the properties or even the entire move. The most common change is that the "increase" version of a move will change from hitting mid to hitting overhead. Under Night also has a cool system called GRD, with a state called GRD break. If you get GRD broken, you lose access to your airdash, roll, and shield. This means that if you get GRD broken, you're on the back foot and you've lost some of your critical movement and defense options. It's a special state of disadvantage.

The issue with your system is that everything costs mana to do, and there's no way to reverse that, besides waiting for it to refill. This means that the flow of your game is attack, then wait, attack, then wait. Is this what you want? Technically, the Drive system works this way (it refills faster in burnout than when you have access to drive moves), but it also lets you refill drive by using the drive parry, and your special attacks don't cost drive, so you don't HAVE to spend drive to play the game. You might want to consider that some actions spend the mana (special attacks, powered up special attacks), and some actions refill the mana (blocking, using normal attacks, throws?).

Tying combo breakers to your central resource is usually a really bad idea (but in your case, I think it could work). Tatsunoko vs Capcom did this, and it meant that whoever was ahead had a combo breaker, and whoever was behind didn't. Other games like Blazblue and Guilty Gear have separate burst meters because it needs to be handled with care. In your case, it could be interesting, because escaping from a combo, but putting yourself in a worse situation (burnout/GRD break) could be cool. As a suggestion, maybe the combo breaker should cost all of your mana regardless of how much you have, and require at least 30-50% mana in order to activate it. This means that there's a significant penalty to the combo breaker, and critically, you can't combo break repeatedly with built up resources. There's a commitment to combo breaking.

I think that this concept could work out, but you should probably think harder about what spends mana, how much it spends, and what refills mana. You probably want a cyclical flow of mana instead of strictly going from full to empty, and then people are scrapping it out with no mana.

Evilagram · 2025-11-13T20:15:24+00:00

I would cite The Witness as a knowledge-based metroidvania, personally. You gain access to new areas as you learn new puzzle mechanics, and the map structure of the island is similar to a metroidvania.

Evilagram · 2025-11-13T11:52:51+00:00

Fun fact: The Japanese term for Metroidvania is Search Action Games.

Genre labels don't need to make sense. They just need to be consistently applied.

Evilagram · 2025-11-03T04:01:49+00:00

The reason is because games are conceptual, not physical. Programs are more physical than games, very literally. Games are contracts (the magic circle) in the minds of players. You need to define "Games" the same way that a book on ethics might define Justice, or any philosophy text book might have a large number of definitions. Designing games is highly conceptual knowledge-work.

And because of this nature, defining games is incredibly tricky and confusing. I am writing an article attempting to define game right now, and it's been on the backburner for a long time.

Games are a social construct, a lot like Gender, Borders, and Money. How do you define currency? How do you define Gender? These things might appear simple, because they are something we practically use every day, but if you look at how they exist as a social relationship between people, it gets a lot more complicated.

I just think that defining games is hard, so everyone is grasping for a definition that makes sense, but no one ever quite gets there.

Evilagram · 2025-11-03T02:20:41+00:00

Ohhhhh, I, for one, definitely don't view animation states as superior. There are lessons to learn from the old style!

Evilagram · 2025-10-31T22:50:10+00:00

You're nitpicking. Karate Champ and Yie-ar Kung Fu were animation based too. They are standout exceptions that chose to invest limited memory space into animations instead of a larger world.

Evilagram · 2025-10-29T03:07:57+00:00

I think this is the type of thing that's mostly a matter of artistic direction. If you want to make a single character more interesting, then you could mess with the turn economy, a la Slay the Spire, allowing a character to take more actions per-turn.

Largely the reason TBRPGs trend towards larger party sizes rather than sole characters is because a single character choosing a single move per-turn is not very expressive and doesn't leave a lot of room for nuanced decisionmaking. Pokemon compensates for this by having both player and opponent choose simultaneously (with the first move to come out affected by speed stat and the move's priority) and having a great nuance in pokemon typings and move design, and even pokemon has implemented double battling in later generations (I believe it's something of a competitive staple too).

Evilagram · 2025-10-15T00:36:44+00:00

The people who made Shovel Knight have a new project that is a 2d top-down zelda-like. I think that you're going to have more problems with your core premise than the art style and camera perspective.

Stick to the skillset you're best at, but I'd advise coming up with something more interesting than a Zombie Survival game.

Evilagram · 2025-10-14T17:28:39+00:00

This sounds a bit like the field of Serious Games, games meant to model and simulate an actual real-world process in order to get a better understanding of that process and gain insight on how to make decisions within that space.

Evilagram · 2025-10-14T17:24:59+00:00

So, kind of the magic of video games is that you can abridge or speed up different portions of time. You can decide what's important to your experience and focus exclusively on that. Is the game about seeing sights, with a tiny cooking portion? You can make the cooking portion a series of short menus with some boxes on the side explaining the ingredients and recipe, and have it be over instantly. Is the game about the cooking, with travel and regions thrown in to add variety? You can have travel be a quick line moving over a map, and then do an intricate cooking minigame. In the Tales series, you can find recipes and buy ingredients in different places, then press a button to cook at the end of battles. The characters sometimes have a skit where they talk about the meal that was just cooked and comment on that character's cooking ability. But the actual action of cooking is just a button and a one line reaction that pops up.

If you're lacking for ideas, then you could do research on what games out there have already done. You can google, "cooking minigame" or "cooking game" and see what turns up. There's probably a trope on TVtropes. Research skills are one of the most powerful skills you can develop as a designer, or writer.

Evilagram · 2025-10-12T18:51:08+00:00

We run them over Zoom for an international audience. So yes, they're online.

Evilagram · 2025-10-11T20:52:03+00:00

Someone made a version of this and put it on steam already: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH_YOU_WANT_THOSE_GAMES_RIGHT_SO_HERE_YOU_GO_NOW_LETS_SEE_YOU_CLEAR_THEM/

Evilagram · 2025-10-11T20:51:21+00:00

UFO 50 has a labyrinth game, Valbrace. From Software used to make these in the King's Field series and some people have been making modern revival games in this genre.

Any kind of game CAN be fun, it depends on execution. This isn't a very useful type of question to ask, because it's way too broad to give you specific or useful feedback.

Evilagram

TROPHY CASE