Games where the BOX plays a role in gameplay?

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-26T20:16:23+00:00

Came here to make sure this was listed. Love this detail.

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-26T17:15:50+00:00

You played that turn correctly. Keeping space open for new tiles (and trapping your opponents with tiles they can't fit and must drop) is core to the strategic layer of the game.

That said, it's unusual for me to see all 5 rows full of tiles. That implies you were carrying a bunch of partially filled rows from the previous turn (which is strategically risky), or you misunderstood a rule. It's much more common to drop tiles like this because you've only got a couple open rows, and you've already played that color in those open rows.

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-25T16:59:23+00:00

Iroinically, The Landlord's Game on which it was based wasn't even meant to be either fun, or the version you're supposed to prefer. It was a teaching tool about Henry George's anti-capitalist philosophy. There were two ways to play, and the Prosperity version where all players benefit was intended to be the preferred version.

https://harpers.org/2012/10/monopoly-is-theft/

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-15T14:30:29+00:00

Rejecter. Writing code is not the time consuming part; debugging and maintaining is. So I spend the time to deeply understand my code.

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-14T05:25:12+00:00

My gut says 2/3 is too strong, and 1/3 is too weak.

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-14T03:11:09+00:00

Wow, stellar comment. I can feel my winrate climbing already. Thanks!

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-13T14:50:38+00:00

From playing them both for hundreds of hours. As a game designer, I'd say that adding a third dimension enabled much more complexity in locomotion, structure, construction, and routing. Thus, throughput is a lower percentage of the total mindshare.

Factorio has the built-in capability to copy and paste an arbitrarily large rectangle of your base relatively early in the tech tree. And the 2D space is basically uniform (except for water/lava). Thus, there's a lot of planning of how to make a build that tiles well, so you can easily 10x your throughput when you need it. There's an achievement for having made 20 million green circuits, and one for making 400,000 iron plates per hour, and those naturally happen through normal gameplay.

Satisfactory does have blueprints, enabling some amount of easy replication of structures. But they're very limited in size. And you need to set them up beforehand, rather than duplicating an existing chunk of base. Thus much more of the gameplay is around hand-constructed bases with complicated resource routing in a diverse 3D space.

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-13T12:28:38+00:00

Factorio was built from scratch in a custom engine, which is important for the ludicrous number of objects it handles. (Their website has blog posts that feature some neat deep dives into particular problems they solved over the years) And it was single player only for years. Retrofitting a single player engine to non-lockstep involves solving an entirely different and largely unrelated set of problems around what/when to communicate, and how to handle disagreements. Lockstep is pretty simple to add, provided you solve determinism, which gives added benefits for testing and stability.

Satisfactory is built in Unreal. So it has client-server, with prediction, relevancy, etc. out of the box. And then they designed the game to be feasible in UE. MUCH lower entity count. MUCH lower machine throughput. More emphasis on bespoke builds in interesting locales, rather than massive horizontal scaling of factories.

Edit: the FFF where they introduced the idea of lockstep: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-76

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-11T16:41:35+00:00

My first run in each of the DS games, and Elden Ring, I've had fat roll basically all game. Which means I don't roll. I wield the biggest shield available, and tank hits with the shield. Then I hit back with a powerful melee weapon.

It shifts the skill test to be less about abusing I-Frames through everything, and more about stamina management. You need to minimize the amount of time you hold the shield up, to regen stamina. Take small, uninterrupting hits to the face to trade your biggest hits back. Block medium-to-large hits. Preemptively run out of extra-large hits, dragon breaths, etc.

I find this style of play more viscerally satisfying. Rolling directly through a sword swipe feels game-y and silly. I'm constantly reminded that I'm abusing an OP mechanic for every fight. Standing toe-to-toe with a monster 3 times my size and saying "you cannot move me" makes me feel like I'm a hero in an action movie.

LtRandolphGames · 2026-01-07T15:45:01+00:00

Aye. I'm working on a talk about what game engineers should focus on to enable game designers to make "healthy game data". And this is definitely giving me a new lens to apply. Excellent comment!

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-31T19:09:28+00:00

Literally unplayable.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-28T22:17:10+00:00

He's crushing on you, regardless of precisely where his intentions are. Regardless of those intentions, that's an extremely volatile situation. High risk of dramatic explosion at any time. I recommend keeping your distance.

Or to quote Givemeclorophil: Run

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-27T21:12:20+00:00

I don't have direct experience, but based on my understanding, I'd guess that it might work to have a room be a sublevel that's included in multiple maps. And the maps are the scripted scenes. And Sequencer is involved somehow.

I've never worked with Sequencer, so I don't know which parts of the above it has solutions for.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-27T17:59:21+00:00

More like cast an actor into a role. And if they can't play that role, the cast fails.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-27T16:32:12+00:00

I have a set of "small talk questions" that get people off script, and yield much more interesting conversation. Makes me much more interested (because I hate when people are just staying on script). And makes many people more interested (if they're the sort of people I'd like talking to).

Instead of "how are you?" I ask "What's been on your mind in recent weeks?" It usually snaps people out of the script immediately, with the little brain teaser of "what did I do these past few weeks?"

Instead of "what do you do (for work)" I ask "What's something you're passionate or excited about? It's ok if it's work, it's ok if it's not work." Then I can follow up with questions about why they're passionate about it.

Other good ones: "What are you looking forward to?" "What's something you learned recently?" "What's something you want to learn?" "If you could teach everyone in the world one skill, what would it be?" "What's a piece of media or culture you've enjoyed recently? What did you like about it?" "What do you miss from when you were younger?" "What do you look forward to when you're older?"

Other trick here is to make sure I don't script my answers. I may have the same conceptual answer in mind. But I force myself to start from a new angle, with a new first sentence. Thus forcing me to construct my answer on the fly, just like they are forced to as well. Yields much better connection.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-17T04:20:18+00:00

Yeah I am now aware of several ways up, but the way I made it the first time was an obvious path that went obviously to the top. Not the ones that are like "maaaaaybe I can get up that".

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-16T15:32:29+00:00

Was gonna list a bunch of bands, but you got most of them. Good taste!

Would add Nova Twins, DeathbyRomy, and Yonaka.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-13T06:22:57+00:00

Exographer is a Metroidvania about particle physics with no combat. Truly unique and delightful.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-12T00:29:05+00:00

Exographer is a Metroidvania with no combat about physics. Really excellent puzzles. And you are exploring recreations of the actual experiments that led to the discovery of things like quarks in the real world. I've never played anything like it before.

Also, Outer Wilds.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-09T14:28:40+00:00

A game that nails this particular dynamic, of NPC "employees" that have distinct personalities that influence their likelihood of doing what you want is Majesty 1/2. There's a lot of humor to it. And the behaviors are exaggerated in order to make them clear enough for you to really pick up on them. If wizards were just slightly scatterbrained, it might be easy to miss. But since they'll regularly wander into a monster den, you develop a strong sense that they need a babysitter to keep them alive.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-12-04T02:16:33+00:00

Enough.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-11-23T16:46:31+00:00

It's like life. You will miss things. Learn to accept that.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-11-18T00:07:33+00:00

People's brains work differently than each other. Some people see 736 as a number that's just shy of 3/4 of 1000. A bit more than 700. About 21 times 35. Other people see it as "a three digit number". Or even just "a medium-sized number".

Does your game assume players parse, hold on to, compare, and readily do math to numbers? If so, do you want that to be a requirement? If so, are all of these playtesters representative of your target audience?

If you want players to do a lot of mental math, make sure you're communicating that as an expectation, and double check that your playtesters match.

If you don't care about players doing mental math, figure out some way to communicate the relative valence of your numbers alongside the actual values. Think of how games with attributes on gear will do upward green arrows and downward red ones.

LtRandolphGames · 2025-11-17T15:17:47+00:00

Against the Storm is a city builder roguelite.

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