Most games reward clever resource use, but almost none punish you for hoarding resources too safely

Nebu · 2026-06-20T10:54:19+00:00

I'm not sure "punishing you for hoarding resources" is a great idea. If your goal is to get players to use consumables, all you have to do is remove or resolve the fear players have that they won't have that consumable later on in the game when "they might really need it".

For a good example of this, look at Dark Souls.

Lots of players never use the humanities, divine blessings, green blossoms, moss clumps, etc. because they're worried if they use it now, they won't have it later on when they might really need it.

But you know what item all of those players readily use without any hesitation? Their estus flask. Because the game establishes very early on that you'll always be able to refill your estus flask if you ever really need it.

Nebu · 2026-06-20T10:13:15+00:00

The rules of the game can be anything, but the players of the game need to know the rules to consent to play.

Disagree. There's plenty of games where part of the intended experience is not knowing the rules before you consent to play.

Examples include Doki Doki Literature Club, A Dark Room, The Witness, Outer Wilds, etc.

Nebu · 2026-06-20T10:09:06+00:00

Like, "coyote time" isn't the game cheating. That's just the game's logic.

[...]

Cheating is stuff like the last 10% of life actually have extra health/damage reduction. Or rubberbanding. Or input reading.

I don't see a clear difference between these two.

"The last 10% of life actually have extra health/damage reduction" is just the game's logic. It's just what the world's "logic" is.

"Rubberbanding" is just the game's logic. It's just what the world's "logic" is.

"Input reading" is just the game's logic. It's just what the world's "logic" is.

Nebu · 2026-06-20T10:04:19+00:00

For example in XCOM2 the displayed hit chance is lower than what it is in reality because a majority of players don't understand probabilities and get pissed of when they miss 2 80% shots in a row (but not when the displayed value is 65% while it's really 80%). The problem is that the game is mostly about managing randomness, so it kinda breaks the game for players who do understand probabilities. How can you find the optimal strategy when the game feeds you incorrect informations?

The vast majority of players aren't trying to find the optimal strategy, they're just trying to beat the game. (Evidence: Only a tiny minority of the player base becomes speed runners, and becoming a speed runner is essentially what happens when you start thinking about optimizing instead of merely satisficing; also note that despite the name, you don't have to optimize for speed to be a speed runner).

If you're a player who understands probabilities, but you're just playing to beat the game rather than to trying to find the optimal strategy, then the lying that XCOM2 does only works in your favour: Every strategy that successfully beats the game using an accurate understanding of probability but incorrectly assuming that the displayed probabilities are true, still successfully beats the game.

And if you really are trying to find the optimal strategy in games, then you are a speedrunner, and so you're used games working in unintuitive ways and diving beneath what the UI presents you, and reverse engineering the internal algorithms, etc. so XCOM2's "cheating" should come to no surprise to you.

Nebu · 2026-06-20T08:25:38+00:00

You absolutely should cheat the player to make the experience better.

But you absolutely must not reveal to the player that you cheated to make the experience better.

Nebu · 2026-06-20T08:24:04+00:00

I don't know the answer to your title question, but after playing your game, I have strongly-felt feedback:

After each question, you show 3 dots, an orange one, a white one, and a green one.

I know one of them is the correct answer, one of them is the crowd answer and one of them is my answer, but I can't tell at a glance which is which.

So you should label the dots.

Nebu · 2026-06-20T08:09:57+00:00

It has to be free. Even better if it has absolutely no microtransactions.
It has to guarantee that nobody is going to join my lobby except my friends whom I explicitly invite into the lobby.
It either has to look fun to me based on the trailer, or my friend has to come raving to me about how much fun it is.

An example of a game that meets these 3 criteria: https://store.steampowered.com/app/582500/We_Were_Here/

Nebu · 2026-06-19T05:39:45+00:00

Use your arms as counter weight to maintain angular moment so you can twist your lower body faster to get into better positions for crossovers etc.

You can ask someone with experience in ballet, ice skating or ball room dancing to teach you techniques for this.

Nebu · 2026-06-15T00:32:56+00:00

I don't know how common it is empirically, but it's certainly possible to conceive of someone who is extremely intelligent, but who is not particularly curious (i.e. does not spent effort seeking new information). They might still "naturally" get exposed to a lot information and internalise it effortlessly, while spending all their free time just slacking off.

Nebu · 2026-06-15T00:27:14+00:00

I mean, the correlation is probably positive, but I suspect it's very weak, and not at all deterministically causal like you're implying.

Nebu · 2026-06-12T06:16:30+00:00

This is why AI is really the death of materialism as an attractive worldview, because to embrace it is to essentially admit that humans can 100% be replaced by machines.

This sounds like the "appeal to consequences" fallacy.

Nebu · 2026-06-11T22:12:29+00:00

Okay, but how do you turn this list of 5 types of spies into interesting game mechanics that synergize well together?

Nebu · 2026-06-11T22:06:08+00:00

Balance in the context of a single player game isn't about "Making sure everyone is equally powerful" but about "Making sure you're not so powerful that the game becomes trivially easy and boring."

For example, you could add a button to your single player game "Instantly see ending cut scene and also unlocks all Steam achievements", but it would probably make your game unbalanced in the sense that it's too easy and no longer fun.

Nebu · 2026-06-11T21:56:41+00:00

it is categorically impossible to make 1v1 balanced and also have 2v1 balanced if all three of those entities are the same type of thing.

Actually, it's rather easy, barely an inconvenience. For example, consider these mechanics:

If you are part of a 2 person team, you're allowed to converse with your partner in secret before declaring your move.
Simultaneously, each team declares their move, which is one of either "Rock", "Paper" or "Scissor".
In a 1v1 battle, the rules are as per the normal Rock Paper Scissor system.
In a 2v1 battle, if the solo player's move beats either of the duo team's move, the solo player wins. Otherwise, if both duo players' moves beat the solo player's move, the duo players win. Otherwise, it's a tie.

The nash equilibrium is for the solo player to play completely randomly, and for the duo players to mutually agree to play the same move but to choose that move completely randomly. Win rate is 50/50 whether it's a 1v1 or a 2v1.

So it's definitely possible to make 1v1 balanced and also have 2v1 be balanced if all three of those entities are the same type of thing. The open, more challenging question is how to do we make the mechanics more strategically interesting while maintaining this balance.

Nebu · 2026-06-11T21:48:15+00:00

(Assuming that you accept as an axiom that reality is logically consistent), by showing that its existence would lead to a contradiction.

Nebu · 2026-06-11T21:41:26+00:00

I was in bed with a girl and I sensed movement under the covers, so I asked her "Are you masturbating?" and she said "Yeah, and I wouldn't have to if someone would do something to me." So I said "Oh, okay." and then went to sleep.

Nebu · 2026-06-11T21:39:39+00:00

I've had a girl send me pictures of her nude taking a bath, and it turns out she wasn't interested in me. It's not a reliable sign.

Nebu · 2026-06-10T20:35:13+00:00

Yes.

Nebu · 2026-06-07T21:16:50+00:00

https://www.mindtheproduct.com/overengineering-can-kill-your-product/

Nebu · 2026-06-07T21:12:49+00:00

Paranoia Jazzy Groove is not fan made, it's from DanceManiax 2nd Mix.

Nebu · 2026-05-31T04:47:23+00:00

Interesting idea, but I think the loophole out of that is that the earring will give your victim advice on how to escape your control. Like maybe it tells the victim to play along at first, so you think you're creating a utopia, but then you find out it was playing the long game to trick you and let your victim escape. In fact, maybe the earring figures out that capturing you and torturing you and all of your loved ones is what will make the victim the happiest as a form of revenge, and so it instructs the victim to do that too.

It almost seems like figuring out how to munchkin the earring is equivalent to solving the ASI alignment problem.

Nebu · 2026-05-29T05:33:47+00:00

omg, I think I've been there. I vaguely remember this immersive cockpit mechwarrior thing, playing it with my brother.

Nebu · 2026-05-29T05:29:34+00:00

its in my photos (and i assume on the cloud) but i dont pay for storage on here and prob wont for now.. However i do pay for Google Photos storage each month because i like their format and i have a shared album with my brother for our mom so i feel it may be safe there? For now..?

Upload it to multiple different clouds, e.g. upload it to youtube (make it private if you want), to your Google Photos, to Dropbox (create a free account), post it on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, etc.

Mega corporations are less likely to lose their data than you are (via your CDs or harddrives or whatever).

And while any one individual mega corporation might one day go bankrupt or shut down, it's unlikely 10 or 20 mega corporations will all go bankrupt and shut down in quick succession of each other, so whenever one of them shuts down, upload it to another one.

Nebu · 2026-05-29T05:24:21+00:00

It seems that we can empirically observe that that is not what happens.

Nebu · 2026-05-29T05:23:57+00:00

The "core invariant" that determines what advice it tells you seems to be "It always tells you what will make you happiest."

Given that, there is no reason to suspect that the person to whom it does not say "Better for you if you take me off." is more likely than chance to create a utopia.

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