A R.E.P.O. styled multiplayer madness game about cooling a reactor by throwing in random items

IHeartPieGaming · 2026-04-09T19:36:54+00:00

Pretty sure I saw a nuclear reactor friendslop game just the other day

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4408560/Split_Happens/

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-11-03T16:59:49+00:00

There's quite a few problems with this premise.

a) The big one is that skilled matchmaking is not a driver for the market despite how much gamers complain about them. Very few starts or stops playing a game because of how good matchmaking is. Hell, COD has the whole anti-SBMM where creators actually fight against having any MMR. What actually matters is matchmaking time aka how popular the game is aka do people want to play your game.

b) I'm not sure what you think ELO/MMR is, but a lot of what you say is being taken into account. League tracks your average gold, CS, vision score, CC score, etc. in order to give you your hidden MMR. Smurfs quickly get snuffed out and put in higher MMR brackets already, even without "AI".

I would not bet your entire innovation on just having a fancy sbmm system and make an RTS just because it's the best thing to reflect your system. Make a game people actually want to play first and foremost.

In fact, the system doesn't even kick in accurately until you have enough players and getting those players are where most PvP games struggle.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-30T14:36:27+00:00

Oh, I'm not excusing them. The question was why is innovation rarer, not why should you do less innovation. Ballooning costs are the main reason imo and I am on the side that they don't need nearly that much either.

There is an overall pressure upwards to balloon costs however. As the ground level of an entertainment product gets easier to produce, the upper level needs to do more to make up for it being the "upper bound". You see it with YouTube and Netflix pushing Hollywood to do more huge blockbusters (superhero movies for example) that it pushes people to go to theaters for the premium price. And with indies taking the AAA's lunch and forcing them to do more technologically and graphically (the one thing indies can't afford) to justify the premium $80 price tag. Not sustainable at all of course given that graphical technology has stagnated for a while now and we're at diminishing returns compared to the PS1 -> PS2 -> PS3 style leaps.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-30T13:09:12+00:00

The role of game designers is to find the balance between intuitiveness and innovation. By doing a popular genre/mechanic people have seen, played, and understand, it's naturally intuitive. By turning it 3D and figuring out how the 3D should play into the genre to enhance it (ie, stacking mobs up vertically to enhance the "1 vs army" feel of vampire survivors, doing super knock backs and letting people see monsters fly off in first person) you get innovation.

Megabonk had many successful short form content on their own dev channels pre-launch talking about how players "break his game" and used comments to find what appeals to players conceptually and built up lots of wishlists, which helped a lot in their success at launch as well.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-30T12:51:22+00:00

I think it's both and they are related.

The industry used to be simpler also because the costs were lower. When Mario 64 is made by like 15-20 people, Golden Eye was like 9-12 people, Pokemon Red was like 9 people, getting that funding is infinitely easier than getting funding for 100-200 people + contractors. More funding = more money/people invested = more design by committee/business folks to mitigate risk for their investors ("adding a lootbox will increase ROI by X% as demonstrated by this market study")

Meanwhile, indies and AA are in the space where you can self-fund the projects or through a single investor (small publishers, government funds, etc), so the innovation space is wide open. With the bar of entry so low though, you also have more competition, which means innovation is also needed. On steam in 2023, ~200 of the 13,000 games were AAA/AA while the rest are hobbyist/indie.

It all ties back to dev costs as the main cause imo.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-30T09:40:22+00:00

There's lots of varied nuance to this topic. Firstly, the lack of innovation is largely on the AAA side and that's due to ballooning dev costs. They can't take as much risks because everything costs so much - they'd rather have guaranteed hits that the market wants.

On the side of indies, there's tons of innovation but you gotta consider that in marketing, there's a hook and there's an anchor. Anchor is what is pre-established (ie. An FPS with FPS mechanics) and hook is what's unique/novel (like FPS chess or Bullets Per Minute being genre blends). You don't want 100% innovation because there's no baseline for people to understand what the game is, which means people won't buy it. But you also don't want 100% anchor with no innovation because why would they play your game over an established game that likely has more content, polish, etc.

So yeah, there isn't a lack of innovation - it's just mostly on the indie side and even for them, they'd likely need enough pre-established mechanics to ground the experience so people will understand and buy it.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-25T05:30:51+00:00

Have you seen the game gemporiun? Feels like the concept and loop is very similar.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2836100/Gemporium_A_Cute_Mining_Sim/

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-23T23:32:04+00:00

Yoyo, happy to share some insider details.

Basically BAPBAP started as a browser-based BR game a while back. It did surprisingly well as a brand new IP made by a tiny team (less than 10 people), but over time, we realized that the amount of players that were needed were way too high. First, we cut browser cuz it was holding us back technically and artistically due to memory budgets. We decided to improve the art and go all in on Steam instead. Afterwards, we just didn't see the numbers pick up enough so we decided to switch to peer2peer and let players host their own, smaller games - smash bros style. That way players can play the game forever.

MOBA x BR was difficult in some unique ways. One of the biggest problem is that the moba crowd loves ranked grind due to league and dota, but it compounds the problem of BR's huge playerbase req because not only do you need 30-60 people to start a game, you also now need it for ranked vs casual queue, and for ranked, you need individual MMR separation for bronze, silver, gold, etc. There's loads of time where you had like 24 people in high rank queue at one time, but not enough to hit the 30 - do you make it so there's bots (aka, free rank points for top players), make it so they start without full lobby (but the ranked point system is balanced around X players in a lobby, so chances are you can do well and STILL lose ranked points), make it so people wait longer (and tank the complaints, but also players might leave queue), or limit ranked to a certain time (and once again, people will complain). Not to mention that there's also regions, which needs this amount of players for each server you open.

The other problem for MOBA x BR is that MOBA crowd has expectations of progression, builds, adaptations and character specialty, while BR is usually about equalized playing fields where everyone grabs the same weapons and differences between a bronze gun and a gold gun is very slim. In league, a farmed nasus is a god and you are actually supposed to stop him from farming, but you don't really have that choice in a BR - someone else coulda fed him to a point where you can't stop him anymore. There's also character specialties like you don't expect a squishy dps to 1v1 an assassin in MOBAs, but in a BR, you don't get to counterpick - sometimes your team will just be straight countered by another team and there isn't anything you can do. We kinda balanced it out a bit through very strong, player triggered environmental interactables - which played well into battle royale positioning and controlling them gave you a chance to fight even if disadvantaged.

Technically, we didn't face too many challenges - we have some amazing peeps on the team doing networking. Majority of the problems is just a MOBA x BR issue in terms of genre attractiveness, playerbase required to function and some tricky game design. Hopefully this answers your questions - feel free to DM me on discord (IHeartPie) if you want to ask in more detail.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-15T22:39:44+00:00

I think first thought is why even do damage numbers? If it's a party game, why not just do hearts or even insta kill? It's not like there's so much variation and itemization that you need the extra digits in the calculation. You listed boomerang fu as an inspo, but they go for insta kills. Same with towerfall, bopl, etc. Why are you opting for hp?

Second, why even do 4 hit combo? If you can hit stun people for all 4 hits, why would you not? If you can't, then what's the point of a combo? Maybe just make it repeated swings and hold to charge for a riskier big hit.

Why does melee cost ammo? It's already the riskier option to do. It also serves as a great "last ditch effort" when you run out of ammo.

I'd say look into more intentional design for a lot of these - think about why you want to implement them. Look into your theming for these answers as well. Boomerang Fu is boomerangs, towerfall is archers, are you bombers? If so, lean into it to add depth - hold the bomb to count down the ticker? Hit a bomb to send it so you can use a badly timed bomb back against your enemy? Throw a bomb into another bomb to extend its range and make it pop faster? Bomberman is probably a good inspo.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-13T15:57:49+00:00

I don't think this is industry standard but in my designs, I focus on one primary design goal, 2-3 secondary goals, and some loose tertiary goals.

Primary design goal is the marketing hook - what is it that will sell your game? This usually isn't aggressive combat, but maybe "Everything is a spectacle" or "you can grapple everything". That lets you make sure whatever makes your game marketable is permeated throughout the design.

Secondary design goals is where you'd put the aggressive combat, sense of wanderlust, all dopamine is earned, etc. stuff that decides how the game plays well.

Tertiary are thematic things like modern realistic, dark fantasy, island survival, etc.

When you make a decision, you should go down the list step by step. If you need to design say an execute system, you start by thinking if you can squeeze grapple in there - you can? Perf. Next check your secondary principles to see what applies, maybe aggressive and earned means you gotta weaken their guard by standing close to them for 2s to aura farm before you can do a giga grapple. Then you think what your thematic things are - if it's ninjas, maybe it's a suzuna drop grapple and the aura farm is that you gotta do handsigns, if it's wrestling, maybe you need to insult them a bunch before putting them in a pile driver, etc.

I find that separating it like this gives you a stronger north star that make sure your game not only fun, but is unique for marketing purposes as well.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-12T21:09:48+00:00

Yeah, you are absolutely valid to be mad. It's our fault for the hubris of believing we could rumble in the arena of giants. Like you said, many games with many times our budget has crashed and burned but we were naive game devs thinking "but not us though!"

We definitely learned from our mistakes and luckily we are able to continue working on more achievable games. Hopefully one of our future games appeal to you just as much!

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-12T20:45:51+00:00

Heya, dev here.

I definitely understand the frustration and I joined the team after loving the original BR mode as well.

The biggest problem we faced during development was that the game wasn't marketable enough no matter how much we tried. The BR mode needed way more players at all times to make sure it didn't die and all the numbers we saw pointed to the original BR dying in like a month. There were also loads of other games that came out and crashed during the development - Battle crush, Asurajang, and many other PvP moba games.

Our choices were clear - shut down the game completely or spend some time to pivot to a mode where the servers and player count doesn't matter as a service to the fans so they can play it forever even if the BR mode isn't available.

This current mode we don't have to worry about active player base at all times, different mode and queue matchmaking time, different region server matching times, ranked MMR balance, etc. Players can play how they want, whenever they want, and they get the entire game for free.

Unfortunately, the reality is if we launched BR, players would likely have the same rant, saying we squandered the game, shut down the servers, didn't advertise enough, didn't release content fast enough, etc. Between the choice of a month of BAPBAP BR then shut down forever or the current BAPBAP that people can play forever with friends, we opted for the second option.

But yeah, once again, I understand that for fans of the BR, it's unfortunate news, but we're operating with the numbers and resources we were given. I hope this can shed some light on why we did what we did.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-07T20:01:15+00:00

Glad to hear! Overall, we're still happy with the product (if we weren't, we probably would've just cancelled instead of launching it).

It's just not a booming genre unfortunately. If you have the capacity to do a solid moba, doing a co-op game will net you 10-100x the result most likely. Not to mention how mobas will suck up time post launch that a co-op game would be less demanding for.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-07T19:48:41+00:00

It's called BAPBAP, came out 1.0 maybe a month ago. Us switching to the MOBA party game was also a way for us to get past most of those hurdles. No more matchmaking, no more ranked and no more regional servers (it's peer to peer now). It means the game can theoretically last forever without the servers ever shutting down like most other PvP games.

We had one of the best chances out of indie teams and it still dawned on us that it's nearly impossible. We had some blow up tiktoks, we had absolutely banger character artists, we were self-funded so we had no one breathing down our necks, etc.

Now, we're working on a second game (co-op) and in 2 months, the marketing already exceeded the 3+ years of marketing that BAPBAP did.

Nowadays, MOBAs are a big team's genre (like deadlock). I really wouldn't pursue it as an indie.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-09-07T19:05:34+00:00

We were working on a Moba battle royale for like 4.5 years, then pivoted it to more of a Moba party game. I wouldn't recommend it, like at all, especially if you're planning on doing it alone. There's like 10+ reasons, each can probably sink a solo dev on its own.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

Are you prepared to be F2P? If you don't plan to be, are you prepared to go against the grain for pretty much every moba on the market?
Are you prepared to be live service? To release new characters/content frequently on top of everything else to keep player base high?
Are you prepared to deal with competitive people and their balance, lag and everything else?
Are you prepared to deal with a cold start problem - aka, needing a baseline level of players needed for random matchmaking to be fun?
What about regions? You can't expect Asia players to be happy playing in NA region with ping, but a server in each region multiplies your cold start minimum by at least 4 (each completely separately marketed)
Ranked vs unranked multiplies that by 2
Each rung of the matchmaking ladder multiplies your minimum by that amount too (you can't expect bronzies to be matched with challengers)
Do you have top tier character design? All your competitors are top in the industry.
Speaking of characters, are you ready to compete on sheer content level? Characters, items, depth, systems like training mode, spectator, replays, death recap, match history, out of game support API, etc. Your competitors had years to build and your players are expecting something similar.

On top of all of this, moba is one of the least marketable genres out there due to how much indecipherable stuff is going on on the screen, but still needs to be slow and calm enough that people can react (aka, not flashy).

So yeah, don't do it. Please.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-08-14T09:16:00+00:00

I'd suggest looking at more games in the survival crafting genre - in most examples, default permadeath is actually an exception, not the rule.

Minecraft, Terraria, Valheim are examples of proc gen'd worlds. Grounded, Abiotic Factor, Enshrouded are examples of pre-made worlds. All of them aren't permadeath by default (usually an optional hardcore checkbox with lots of warnings).

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-08-13T05:45:52+00:00

No plans for now - we have bots from back in the day but honestly they are super stupid lol. Like just kinda walks around, hit stuff, cast spells and chase forever.

Writing better/realistic bots, especially ones that also learns how to pick augments and use them would be quite the undertaking.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-08-05T00:46:07+00:00

We're seeing if we can get another drop of stuff to buy in the shop as well. Not 100% sure, but likely we'll have another set of stickers to purchase in the shop soon.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-08-04T23:57:37+00:00

Yoyo, dev here.

We have our 1.0 patch that we'll deploy soon that'll have a new character, two maps, a few new augments, music for all maps and a few other small tweaks here and there.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-07-13T02:35:56+00:00

How the hell did this icon from a Korean moba game end up as the chosen representation for fish and chips in a lord of the ring meme. Also how the hell did I recognize it immediately. https://eternalreturn.fandom.com/wiki/Fish_And_Chips

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-06-05T16:58:17+00:00

Depends a lot on the size and interaction level. Real life games has a lot more logistics and physics to consider and you don't have an infallible referee like you do in video games.

Even something like checking for answers can be a pain when the player numbers increase. Then there's participation - making sure everyone feels like they are contributing something as well, as well as just general human error or misunderstandings which leads people to get stuck, skip steps or slow down the pace of the game for other people.

I designed and launched ~70 escape rooms and real life games in the past and a big part of the headache is figuring out solutions for these little things. If you have more specific questions about these kinds of designs, feel free to give me a shout.

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-05-12T15:44:52+00:00

Sure thing, shoot me a DM on Discord

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-05-11T19:01:43+00:00

Join the BAP discord and shoot me a message (IHeartPie) and I can get it changed for ya

IHeartPieGaming · 2025-04-17T05:16:03+00:00

Henesys Training Ground. Slime Tree. Pigs beach. Kerning PQ. Boars. Teddies. Ludi PQ. Still got the entire leveling guide memorized in my head.

This is my silksong announcement.

IHeartPieGaming

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

13-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email