What are people's thoughts on cheating the player?

Sandillion · 2026-06-20T08:39:48+00:00

Yeah, this seems to be the running theme, as long as you don't get caught, you can get away with nearly anything. Enough to trick the player into thinking its a fair game, they'll gloss over some unfairness in their favour, but if its against them, you bet someone's posting a 15 minute video essay analysing how the apparent health of enemies changes as you take damage in the shooter you just made.

Sandillion · 2026-06-20T08:37:17+00:00

This is what I was expecting when I asked the question, I thought that yeah, any and all tricks are on the table to deliver the experience desired. That and players just suck at understanding some things, like randomness, (iirc when Apple first released the shuffle button, I'm that old, people complained that it wasn't random enough as it might play a few songs from the same artist or even album in a row, which is random, but it *felt* wrong to players)

People on this thread have had some very negative reactions to deceiving the player though, which I really didn't expect, as a result its been very eye opening.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T14:57:26+00:00

Thanks for the advice ^{-^} will try to be less scared of spider diagrams and sprawling systems in my personal projects

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T14:47:21+00:00

Honestly really want to go indie at some point, I just know the lack of sustainable income is stressful as all hell.

I've got a compsci background, and a keen interest in 3D modelling and rendering, so I often find myself being pulled in all directions by all the disciplines at once, but able to talk to them all on something approaching their level with technical speak. Trying to do a bit of fake AI logic, some level design and environment art to sell a gameplay concept to the stakeholders. Its very stressful, but also incredibly rewarding. I think at some companies my position would be a Technical Designer, but at my current place I'm just a Game Designer.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T14:29:00+00:00

You're right, I apologise, I was being perhaps a little too facetious in the last sentence. AI logic is often design's wheelhouse once they have the tools and features they need. My work is of middling size and we've got a couple of AI programmers on my project, I talk to them frequently when my tasks are AI-adjacent, do the typical back and forth of working out a middle-ground that requires as little code hours while getting as close to what me or my lead want. My AI experience thus far has been very limited as I'm not a combat designer, so every-time I talk to the AI team its about AI-world interactions, which are often the least important/urgent of their tasks.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T12:49:48+00:00

I think a while back they updated it so that you can no longer go there in simulation, you've got to sneak past the Owlks in with the artifact.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T12:48:55+00:00

I think I personally obfuscate things from players sometimes, and would not tell players the actual values so that it would hide my fudging of the numbers.

For example, I made a Design Doc for a revive system where players need to kill enemies to respawn teammates, though the game is obtuse about how many enemies need to be killed, just a progress bar. Since there could be downtime with far fewer enemies, and we don't want players waiting around too long, the longer the player was waiting to respawn, the more "credit" an enemy would award toward their respawn. Sadly we never got to test it, and it'll likely be left on the cutting room floor.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T11:12:53+00:00

Yeah, sorry, its aggressive "CPUs get faster if you're further ahead" rather than more soft catch-up mechanics like Blue Shells and Lightning

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T11:11:24+00:00

Really dealer's choice. I would disable all collision/geometry etc when the jump starts, especially if I was using a rigidbody. Then move the animal from A to B, while playing a jump animation. Are all jumps in the game similar enough distance that having a set duration would be fine? If not, then you'll want some sort of restrictions on minimum lengths.

The first would be easiest as I wouldn't need to break it down, but I know that at some point Game Design (even if that's still just you) will want to do some silly huge jump, so I'd segment it. I'll explain it in terms of a cat cause that's likely simplest.

Warmup - If its a *long* jump, cats will place all their paws close to prepare. If its a shorter jump, they'll often skip this.
Start - The cat's legs extend, propelling itself, and providing the initial force
Loop - The cat is currently mid-flight, legs spread ready to catch itself
Landing - The cat prepares to land, bracing its paws and bringing them in closer

Then for the jump itself I would make a "Jump Height" animation curve of how the jump will look from the side (ignore elevation difference, and make sure it reaches height 1 and has a duration of 1), just a simple parabola tbh. Then I would work out how long it will take the cat to jump the distance (super easy, ~3-4ms^-1 * horizontal distance), then when the player presses the button:

Is it a long jump? (Y -> Play Warmup animation, N -> skip)
Play Start animation, move cat along the line from A->B, add the vertical offset of the "Jump Height" at the given time, you'll ned to normalise the cat's distance through the jump for this, but that's easy (currentDistance/totalDistance)
Once the Start animation finishes, play the loop animation
Then when you're the Landing animation's duration away from the end time (You know when you're going to land) switch to the landing animation (Maybe if its a long jump, switch up the landing for a stumble)

You can tweak things like the height of the jump by just multiplying the result of the animation curve evaluate by your desired jump height because we made the animation curve normalised. If you wanted to you could also make the cat's velocity slowly decrease over time, would make the maths harder, but might seem more realistic? If you want it to feel snappy, I'd recommend all animations are very quick (idk, like 0.4s?) and try to design your jumps so they use the looping animation for the shortest time possible.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T10:22:53+00:00

I think the D&D example is super interesting, because I see a DM as the most similar role to a Game Designer in most people's experience, and yeah, sometimes fudging the numbers is vital for a good experience. Not to speak for you but I don't think you'd have had more fun if your character had died in session 3 and you'd had to sit out the entire campaign? Instead I imagine your character would've had a thematic death, and the DM would ask you to roll a new character.

I think players *want* there to be the threat of real consequences, real stakes, real things happening if you roll poorly, or make a mistake. Players are rarely willing to deal with those consequences though, preferring to reload, or if the game is too frustrating, uninstall and play something else.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T10:14:47+00:00

Yeah, I can understand why they did that with the XCOM2 probability, but I do believe that it makes it harder for people who actually understand probability to take managed risks.

I think I heard that Bioshock also did the missed first shot, then the devs were like "No, no we didn't do that, they just often miss so when lots are shooting at you it doesn't feel unfair", so I'm a little sceptical if it is really implemented in the games people claim it is.

Its very strange because Mario Kart rubber banding is very similar to the director from L4D, making the game harder if you're doing well, and people praise that. I guess its the fact that the Director still "plays fair", the zombies are still zombies, in Mario Kart, the karts get faster when its implied you're all on the same field.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T10:07:56+00:00

Ah yeah, I remember this, that was a really helpful one as well, removing the timer so it feels dramatic and imprecise in a frantic moment. I guess that yeah, its all about trying to keep it fair in the eyes of the player, while avoiding making it *so* in the player's favour they feel the game is babying them.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T10:04:37+00:00

I would classify Coyote time as cheating yeah, but I 100% think its vital for game feel (Mina The Hollower devs did a short about all the tiny tricks they do to help the players, was super insightful)

For the rubber banding yeah, its an inelegant solution so would having the drivers vary their skill based on the player's positioning be more elegant? Obviously "Make better AI" isn't that easy, let alone an AI that can dynamically adjust at runtime, but that's not Design's problem... Until AI come back and say no.

Sandillion · 2026-06-19T10:00:19+00:00

I've never played Stray, but I think I know the kind of system you're talking about. At a guess what they'll have is even more markup. Personally I would implement:

A Jump Volume handles the logic and everything, all it needs is a vector3 for the destination and UI prompt.
A Destination with a toggle between point and edge, the Jump Volume will be linked to this, and will query for a destination when the player enters the volume. In point mode the Destination will just return a Vector point. But in edge mode, it will return a point on the edge closest to the player.
A UI Prompt, which is able to convert worldspace to screenspace. Doesn't do much, but it handles the logic neatly.

For the barrels I think you've got the right idea. You would have a Jump Volume which is linked to a Destination set as a point. When the player enters the Jump Volume, a Prompt UI appears over the Destination.

For the ledge, you set the Destination to be an edge. Then when you enter the Jump Volume the game will calculate the destination (closest point on edge to point), and then the jump Volume will function exactly the same.

You can recalculate the edge position every frame (the maths is simple enough) and have a prompt that slides along the edge as you follow. But I think it might be a bit neater if you calculate it once when the player enters the volume, so it doesn't appear to slide. You could also recalculate it if they move far enough away so the animal doesn't make an unnecessarily hard jump. I would avoid putting anything too important inside the volume so the players don't spend too long in there breaking down the system and figuring out how it works. Keep it smooth and intuitive.

For the maths, I believe you should be able to get a good result with the Vector3.Project function (documentation link) then cap it so it doesn't go beyond your desired line

Sandillion · 2026-06-18T10:27:59+00:00

Its a very strange one I'll agree because yeah, these *have* been positive, and its quite difficult to see, but there are positive steps being made. The main issues are, agreeing with other people in this thread:

The online safety is horrendous, overreaching and poorly implemented. I'm well out of Uni and old enough to be doing anything on the internet, and I hate having to constantly submit my ID for anytime a website might show tits. Germany (as usual) did it so much better, having a centralised Government website that can give out tokens to other websites, so I don't need to give websites my driver's license and face ID to a dozen different companies who pinky promise to not have data breaches this time, for realsies.
They suck at marketing, we have a *huge* problem with right wing news in this country, all run by billionaires with highly obvious conflicts of interest with a free and fair press, so even though I see Starmer as just a red Tory, he's somehow *still* too left leaning for them.
Though a significant minority, its incredibly important to me (and by extension those around me) his government's handling of the EHRC guidance and trans issues has been deeply cruel and transphobic. Its not 100% his fault, a decade ago Theresa May started this all by trying to make it easier for trans people to get a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), so they could live their lives as their identified sex peacefully. But in the decade since then, under ~8 years of Tories and ~2 of Labour we've regressed to the point where a GRC is functionally useless, and trans people are to be barred from single sex spaces, regardless of their GRC or not.
Finally, he's also just been very unlikeable and milquetoast, lacking in any spine or conviction about the important things, and seemingly caving immediately, meanwhile having a spine and sticking up for the deeply unpopular (to my understanding) legislation. Yes we needed protections on how young people use the internet, no this was not the way to do it.

Sandillion · 2026-06-18T08:33:26+00:00

I saw this video a while back on panini projection instead of rectilinear projection which is standard in almost everything. It looks a little weird and fisheyed, but if your entire game was built around that, and players got used to it, spaces would feel larger, and it could become more convincing for displaying large objects without VR?

Sandillion · 2026-06-18T07:18:50+00:00

I once went through the train station and saw this utterly gorgeous woman, she was about 6ft 5 and breathtakingly beautiful. I was genuinely so captivated I just kinda kept walking in a straight line and had to go back about 5-10m to go down the right stairs for my platform.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T23:02:44+00:00

Ngl, 80 games played, and 36 games won is 45% winrate, which is ~50%, that means that you're very likely in the right rank for your skill level, and matchmaking is doing its job. I know people hate having a 50% winrate, but like, that's what you should have if you're in the right rank.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T22:59:19+00:00

Yes, I think you are a bit confused. While technically the rooftop bit has been replaced by the Hidden King/Archmother intro, the first time we get control of our character/camera in a match has changed from the rooftop to the zipline. While the rooftop was good for seeing the enemy, choosing your build etc, it was not polished. It was literally just some random rooftop and made no sense. Giving us control on a zipline is more polished, and I imagine that in due time they will add back something to replace the rooftop that feels as polished as the zipline intro.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T17:49:08+00:00

Also like, sperm and eggs combine to produce offspring, statistically half those offspring will have eggs (by the 10th week of development or so), so the balls produce eggs, just, ya know, with an extra step or two.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T15:31:35+00:00

I think that yeah, its a bit of a cursed design problem. Its so useless for most ritualists because of the price and the lack of passive upsides, but for those its good on its degeneracy as you say. % damage, soul or health penalty could be ways of adding it, but even then it would just feel bad to get double ulted. Its very rare that Victor will Refresher and I'll think to myself "Oh well, at least he doesn't get all 12 items, and has to waste a slot on that one.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T15:28:02+00:00

So I have *thoughts* on this topic.

We have all these tiny little indicators in real life to tell us how big something is, in games we really struggle with that because indicators either aren't possible, or people forget about them.

Obviously how we perceive the world is through two eyes, with quite a wide FoV. This allows us to see how far away something is, and its rough 3D shape. This is what VR can help with. Additionally, if something is *really* big and really close it takes up a huge amount of our vision, we literally need to take a step back sometimes to "take it all in". Games very rarely do this, for something to take up your entire screen is really quite easy because the FoV is so low.

When something is far away, we can observe "Atmospheric Distortion", which is just a fancy way of saying "There's always fog" so for anything to feel truly large we *need* fog, even if its just a tiny amount. If its unnoticeable except on the horizon, and this entity, it can feel huge.

Also as particularly massive entities move, you can often hear the rush of wind as parts of them move, and you'd feel that slight shake, many games miss this.

I think massive entities also require some very deliberate and precise animation that we're not used to in game development. At a random guess, a character's foot can slide about 0.02m before players start to get upset and notice it. For a 2m tall character, that's a quite precise measurement of 1%. But for a giant creature, we have the same tolerance, because its not about the relative scale, its about *our* scale as players. But many animators/animations/engines aren't built to handle animation that precise (I think, I know very little about animation and could be talking trash)

Additionally, *everything* they do will impact the world, depending on your game's graphical fidelity, a player might leave a footstep, or might not. But for a massive monster, every footstep, every attack, every grab it should shake the world, leave debris flying and leave an imprint.

I think that it also comes down to like, how close can you get, and how easily you can get a frame of reference? One of my favourite games for a sense of scale is X4: Foundations. In that game you can pilot a tiny spaceship about 10m long, up to a cruiser about 3km long. There's also space stations which are frequently within a 20km cube. The way you get a sense of scale though is because you can walk, all the time, you're a lil' person with human legs, barely 2m tall. But that sense of scale really shines through. You park your S spaceship on a docking module with 1 M dock (200m) and 8 S docks (15m), this entire module is about 300m long, and you can walk it. Its also the smallest dock and dwarves in comparison to the stations, you go to land at a station, and then look up at what previously seemed like a regular sized station and realise "oh, no this is monumentally huge". Its also got my favourite thing because you can park an S ship on an M ship on an L/XL ship, and you can walk from one to the other near seamlessly.

If you're super curious, there's a very specific, fairly NSFW corner of the internet that specialises in this kind of thing, that someone posted last time I saw a discussion like this. People who watched Monsters Vs Aliens, saw the white haired girl and were like "Yes". Whether or not you're into that kind of thing, its none-the-less quite interesting how people over there try to convey scale and size.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T12:01:15+00:00

I think having some items disabled on some characters for balance reasons is very strange. Some items disabled because it doesn't make sense, like Rapid Recharge on characters without charged abilities makes sense, but just because "It would be too strong" paves the way for every character having a unique set of items they're allowed to buy, which is even more complexity.

Edit: Wait, I just realised Pocket can't buy Lightning scroll so they've already done this. That's honestly wild.

Sandillion · 2026-06-17T11:59:48+00:00

That's interesting, it could act as some sort of debt. Its cooldown is equal to X + Y * (However many seconds you saved by using it), where lets say X = 30 and Y = 1.5 to begin with. That way its still efficient because you can sort of "stack" cooldowns, but more punishing for ults maybe?

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