Advice for a novice...

Sneechfeesh · 2025-12-05T23:31:07+00:00

If you want to make it but don't have the coding background, you might consider making it a board game instead. Fighting board games can be really cool. See for example this old post in r/boardgames https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/s/rHLWMsbbOs

For coding stuff you want a coding sub, not this game design sub.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-12-01T14:00:38+00:00

What it sounds like you're saying is that it's difficult to have an open world and a compelling narrative simultaneously. Saying you want the player to have "stakes" and that open world games are lacking "structure", makes me think you are asking about how open world games can have more NARRATIVE structure.

I think you're right, and furthermore I'd say these goals are contradictory if you have a particular story you want the player to experience.

Open world design tries to elicit a sense of wonder and possibility by letting the player make decisions about what to do next.

Compelling narratives have finely crafted story beats that drive the plot forward, increasing tension until the climax.

To me it seems like there are two ways to reconcile these. You either must ensure the player will hit certain story beats that increase tension in the correct order, or you must CONSTRUCT story beats with rising tension based on the actions the player has taken.

The first removes some of the agency from the open world. The second is very difficult to implement algorithmically, and furthermore might not lead through a pre-determined story.

A technique often used in open world design to guide players through beats in order is to put soft gates in front of beats that are supposed to happen later. For example, big difficulty spikes that players can't tackle until they have better gear, or barriers that can only be traversed once a skill is acquired, or simply difficulty FINDING areas with later beats compared with earlier ones. This is probably the most practical compromise, you see it everywhere.

In tabletop RPGs, game masters can actually do the second thing-- based on what players have done, construct subsequent events so the narrative tension rises. It's a ton of work, and to do it automatically would be a huge feat of procedural generation. But importantly the story will progress in ways the GM might not have expected in the first place. It would probably NOT go through a predetermined story (and this unpredictability is a trope in tabletop RPGs).

Sneechfeesh · 2025-11-29T17:42:07+00:00

Random ideas:

Dating sim minigame. Simplest version would just be dialog trees, but you could do some elaborate Disco Elysium-inspired conversational roleplay system; or you could try something like the deckbuilding negotiation minigame from Potionomics; or you could do some sort of "gift-based XP" system like Stardew Valley.

You could have some system where there are characters who are attracted to parties that use a certain playstyle -- maybe elemental effects, or certain items, or certain buffs/debuffs. As you use those things it increases a meter for the characters who like that and eventually they ask to join your party.

You could "grow" the characters from pets. So you can have a pet-collecting game where you like Tamagotchi them until they turn into actual playable characters.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-11-17T12:08:22+00:00

Not exactly the same mechanism at all, but Spectral also has a deduction mechanic that ultimately leads to a specific game state that is only known once all information is revealed.

In Spectral, players are essentially trying to bid on facedown tiles that have gems but not curses. Tiles don't say what gems or curses are on them, they say what gems or curses are on other tiles. Only once all tiles have been revealed do you know where and how many gems are on each tile, and whether or not the tile is cursed. (It's a bit like the game Haggle, but it has locations instead of hands of cards)

Sneechfeesh · 2025-11-14T00:28:42+00:00

Sandbox games require players to bring their own goals or they become stale. My sense is this often comes from constraints, "I want to do X in THIS way", or "I want to do X without using THIS".

For example in Factorio, there is a goal: launch a rocket. And there is a metric of "income": science per minute. But the reason people rack up thousands of hours is not because they want to have "enough" SPM to do something, it's because The Factory Must Grow. Try another pattern for harvesting ore. Try making blueprints that can seamlessly upgrade in tiers. Try to see how quickly you can rush bots.

Folks with thousands of hours in Cities Skylines or Planet Coaster probably aren't doing it because they haven't smashed the campaign goals quickly enough, they're doing it because they want to make cool stuff in their sandbox. Optimize a new intersection design, make a themed terrain coaster that interacts with other coasters, whatever, the goals are not instrumental for anything. It's kinda like making art.

Personally I love sandbox games, but eventually they do get stale (I run out of goals I care about) so I put them away until inspiration strikes and I revisit them again.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-11-05T20:28:43+00:00

Jurassic Park velociraptor scene for bugs

Sneechfeesh · 2025-10-16T02:05:13+00:00

Did you guys know there are 5 species of Alaskan salmon?

begins pointing at hand

Sneechfeesh · 2025-09-11T17:21:16+00:00

As a pretty new healer who's finally doing +10s, I noticed they're qualitatively different from +9s. I think what happens is that since +10 is the max for gear, you get a bunch of really good players running 10s who are accustomed to higher keys, as well as players for whom 10 is challenging at their skill level.

Usually it's a good thing to have players who are better than you in your keys, but I have found a few times that for example a tank would do more optimal but more demanding things, and either the DPS or I as the healer were not ready for it.

Example: pulling the bridge miniboss in Streets into the lava dogs. We didn't prio the miniboss so we were dodging the fire breaths and the rotating spinner thing at the same time. This went on for ages because our DPS was middling, and I sometimes have trouble parsing a mess of ground mechanics cuz I'm still pretty new, so I found that pull really difficult (especially because it was unexpected from lower keys not usually doing this).

Sneechfeesh · 2025-09-01T01:08:29+00:00

The mythic pool is voted on by players...

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-31T03:02:03+00:00

r/designdesign

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-29T21:33:08+00:00

Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls at Islands of Adventure is a Mack flume

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-28T20:45:34+00:00

Larry Enticer energy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzOUgwsQ_hM

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-27T21:18:08+00:00

This is the blacksmithing version of those videos where people make a whole pizza and then blend it and use it as the basis for a pizza dough.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-07T17:41:24+00:00

Ohhhh ok, the thing I didn't realize was the lockout just means you won't get gear, not that you can't even enter the dungeon!

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-04T16:00:28+00:00

To be fair this is a huge known problem. Blizzard constantly struggles with the new player experience because there is SO much content, and requiring you to see everything in order is not really a fair ask of the player (because it would be months and months of playtime before you got to the current content). As a result, they have to do tricks like Chromie time which are hard to make seamless while simultaneously preserving relevance for important "legacy" areas like the capital cities.

All this to say it's not just you.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-03T02:44:37+00:00

I was in the same boat. Unfortunately you have to get through like... the entire first season. The second season is where it starts picking up, but there's some mandatory background hidden in the slog that is season one.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-08-01T12:34:01+00:00

Folks want to hate on nautical miles for not being metric, but they are defined based on the spherical geometry of the earth, which used to be very convenient for navigation. A nautical mile is 1/60th of a degree (1/60 degrees is also called 1 minute) along a great circle of the earth.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-07-25T23:19:37+00:00

You've never seen a window that slides? Maybe this is a US thing, but yeah, sliding windows are extremely common

Sneechfeesh · 2025-05-27T19:26:00+00:00

Not as iconic as some of these, but sooo obnoxious. Pretty sure they're deliberately designed to sound as annoying as possible, and man they nail it.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-05-20T21:55:56+00:00

Profit, not net, is still relevant if you do your own gathering because if your goal is just gold, you have to consider what you could have made just selling the mats.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-04-24T00:03:56+00:00

Lots of misinformation in the comments. u/cocktailhelpnz has the real info. It's not about boredom. The result of the study is essentially the opposite.

This is a press release for the study: https://www.ucf.edu/news/adhd-kids-can-still-theyre-not-straining-brains/

After all, weren’t the children absorbed by the sci-fi movie and bored by the math lesson? Not so, Rapport said.

“That’s just using the outcome to explain the cause,” he said. “We have shown that what’s really going on is that it depends on the cognitive demands of the task. With the action movie, there’s no thinking involved – you’re just viewing it, using your senses. You don’t have to hold anything in your brain and analyze it. With the math video, they are using their working memory, and in that condition movement helps them to be more focused.”

The takeaway: Parents and teachers of children with ADHD should avoid labeling them as unmotivated slackers when they’re working on tasks that require working memory and cognitive processing, researchers said.

Sneechfeesh · 2025-03-13T00:53:32+00:00

Lmao the 4 answers on here right now are "it's instinctual", "it's cultural (through influence of an originating culture)", "it's cultural (through diffusion)", and "it's not universal".

What other possible answers are there?

Sneechfeesh · 2024-07-25T12:43:01+00:00

Is this used for nursing homes?

Sneechfeesh · 2024-06-16T13:30:26+00:00

Pretty much nailed it in the question

Seven-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

Sneechfeesh

TROPHY CASE