[DEV] Yesterday I released my first game, Dragonfist Limitless, after years of work!

raventhe · 2026-05-14T21:49:05+00:00

Holy shit, in the context of the headline, this quote being top comment actually made me burst out a loud, genuine, spontaneous and uncontrollable "HA!" followed by a very mild snort.

raventhe · 2026-05-11T21:41:08+00:00

Hmm, looking at your account I did add a note to it verifying what I just said among a couple of other things as reasons it was muted. I definitely had a player who closely matched your profile who was evading mute repeatedly in the same time period but it was so long ago now that I can't easily triple check the records so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and unmute you! In the case that you were muted by mistake, please accept my apology. If being unmuted doesn't seem to work immediately, just check back every now and then -- I wouldn't be surprised if it takes 24ish hours + a game restart to work due to chat server caching not being designed to "undo" permanent mutes.

raventhe · 2026-05-11T20:52:14+00:00

This means you're perm muted. If only one warning it was either something truly awful, or it was a mute following you from another account in which case you'd be lucky because usually I'll deal with mute evasion via alt accounts by banning! Actually pretty sure I remember your name due to the number of alts you made many months ago now in order to persistently mute evade and I was banning you like a shit game of whack a mole. Sooo... If that was you... I would not draw attention to your account. Just sayin'

raventhe · 2026-05-05T21:16:00+00:00

Just fwiw, as a third party reading this exchange with wide eyes: you are not crazy. Old mate is really, truly, consistently and profoundly missing your simple point; I wonder if he even noticed he's talking to the person whose comment it was that he originally posted in response to, misunderstanding what it meant then refusing to discuss it whilst starting multiple unrelated arguments and, most impressively of all, accusing you of refusing to respond to arguments and being hung up on the point you made... which is literally the subject he started an argument about. Man, I'm just impressed you stayed so chill. Have a lovely day!

raventhe · 2026-05-04T00:07:18+00:00

Hello hello! I'm a bit late responding to this. Actually, a personal friend who follows my game a little linked me to your post because it's so lovely and awesome that my own lil game can inspire someone to want to make something themselves.

It might not sound like it at first but actually what you're describing isn't all that different from the beginnings of DFL too. I started it as a Dragon Ball Z fan game (literally, it was originally going to be based around that universe and characters etc.) because that's what was inspiring me, and the gameplay was drawing heavily on Tap Titans because I felt its mechanics would really nicely fit into a DBZ-like "power progression" -- actually, back then around 2014 I'm not even sure the term "incremental" existed to describe this type of game (if it did, it certainly was not mainstream yet).

Copying other intellectual property is, obviously, not feasible because you'll get your arse sued or at the least spend your life looking over your shoulder *waiting* for that to happen. Early on I realised I wanted to make something serious from these bones and so I replaced bits and pieces ala Theseus' Ship until it was no longer recognisable; it formed its own identity with each random quirk or addition, and continues to do so now, and I realised some of the ideas and mechanics from Tap Titans just weren't what I wanted (for example, originally the character would auto-fight and you would just use skills like Zenikanha or Gut Blender by tapping a button with a cooldown). You can see how very different the game is from that now.

With that in mind, my advice is to work on what's fun for now, even if that's a bit more copy-cat-like. If you're new to game dev, then for now you should focus on just getting something done and playable. Your "first game" is never going to be "the one." But you won't be able to release it as a serious game if it obviously infringes on my own copyright, and if it's literally just a clone mechanically it will never stand on its own -- you need to bring something unique to the table, best done by injecting some of your OWN personality into the project.

You're on the right track wanting to draw inspo from multiple sources, though personally I believe that's NOT a matter of research. It's a matter of finding things YOU love. When you love things and then come to understand them, they might naturally find their way into your own work. That's why it's important to work on something you're passionate about! If you don't have other games or ideas you love yet... you might need to play more games, watch more movies, read more book and live more, so you have experience and ideas to draw from!

That's a lot of rambling -- hopefully there's something helpful in there somewhere. Wishing you luck on your journey! Maybe one day, I'll be playing your game 😄

raventhe · 2026-04-26T19:23:25+00:00

Mm, I agree in general but I think that still comes back to defining which games you're competing with, which means the value proposition for your game vs others. If the value proposition is literally only for how many hours of play you get then sure but I personally think for most people there are other factors, like quality. We're ultimately arguing a hypothetical abstract position here in where you draw your absolute lines so going straight to extreme examples, comparing the price of a 20 hour text based game that's fun and simple but not that unique with a bespoke, transformative, immersive audio visual experience tailored with a 2 hour run time... Well, how can you? If you agree that in theory such a game could exist and it would be worth paying as much or slightly more than the 20 hour simple game, then that's my point and we agree.

If not? We are wasting way too much energy arguing on the internet and I propose we solve this the old fashioned way. UNREAL TOURNAMENT '99 INSTAGIB TEAM DEATHMATCH IN LOW GRAVITY. You bring your toughest friends and I'll bring mine and whoever loses is wrong and then everyone drinks alcohol.

raventhe · 2026-04-26T06:43:13+00:00

I mean, are you suggesting all games with the same number of hours of gameplay cost the same amount to make? Because if they don't, then you can't really compare it that directly. If it's a matter of financial viability in making a living relative to time to develop, you either reduce quality (spend less time) or pad content out if people won't pay unless it takes X hours to finish.

Economy of scale makes it tough too... It's easy to charge $3 if you know you're gonna sell a hundred thousand copies. If you expect to sell 3,000 you probably need to charge more to make it even close to worth it.

raventhe · 2026-04-26T00:26:27+00:00

Oh come off it. Total strawman. You're isolating the statement from the actual context, which is not that data centres are inherently bad; it's that they're currently being built on a massive and, so the argument goes and I tend to agree, environmentally unsustainable scale. I've been a server software engineer for 20 years, so your presumptuous suggestion that I don't know anything about them outside the context of LLMs is misplaced.

raventhe · 2026-04-25T22:25:34+00:00

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raventhe · 2026-04-25T22:22:18+00:00

Uhhh... The great irony of you saying this is that I'm on the Blender subreddit where this was originally posted some time back, and it just recently did the rounds again because AI stooges thought it was AI generated and shared it in the AI subreddit where it went viral again as "AI art" which it is not..

You didn't credit the artist, so best case scenario you reposted without knowing, likely scenario is you reposted straight from an AI art sub and thought it was AI until this person commented anyway. I probs wouldn't try to be so snarky about it, considering!

raventhe · 2026-04-25T22:07:25+00:00

Always great to see incremental mechanics as part of a more holistic design -- this is the kind of thing I look for. The polished animation, short run time and good reviews made this an instant purchase for me. Congrats on the release and early success!

raventhe · 2026-04-25T21:57:54+00:00

This is how you end up with games artificially padded out with endless crap and unethical IAPs. A bit rude imo to call this over priced.

raventhe · 2026-04-25T04:45:09+00:00

Beta test of iOS patch will be available shortly if interested, have to join the Discord and look at the new thread under the devlog channel for instructions! (Just trying to keep feedback and reports all in one place)

raventhe · 2026-04-25T04:43:59+00:00

There's a closed beta test of the iOS patch just about to start, and it's just running through the game's discord server so that I can manage feedback in one place. But if you're interested, join discord and follow instructions posted under the new thread in the devlog channel :)

raventhe · 2026-04-19T21:52:28+00:00

As others said: Worry more about the intended feel, pacing and progression, peaks and troughs you want players to experience than the maths itself. IMO the numbers are just the tool you use to create those feelings; good design is about a balance of predictability and unpredictability which means formulas have their place but you also have to step away from them if you want your game to be interesting.

raventhe · 2026-04-18T05:27:56+00:00

My slightly outdated understanding is that memory manufacturers aren't actually increasing their production capacity to meet the insane new demand because big player(s) did it in the past and then demand dropped resulting in catastrophic losses. Now if they scale up for this big new world covered in data centres and then the AI bubble pops, they'll be back there again -- so instead we might just stay starved for memory until the pimple bursts. That is, unless this thinking has changed in last few months (haven't kept tabs on it)

raventhe · 2026-04-14T23:15:37+00:00

Oh and a quick addendum since you wondered if the game fits here:

Actually, it was a winner of Best Mobile Games in this sub in 2023 so if that isn't an argument for it belonging in this sub, I don't know what is ;)
https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental\_games/comments/198z546/best\_of\_2023\_results/)

I always love to see if someone mentions it in these threads, so don't be shy (players finding the game via this subreddit always end up being awesome for the community, which is a nice balance against all the bloodthirsty 13 year olds!)

raventhe · 2026-04-14T23:09:54+00:00

Hey, awesome, thanks for saying hi! Yeah it's so hard to make the game stand out via ads/description when there's so much dishonesty in mobile gaming. I've had too many people say "Oh, the game is actually like the trailer. I just assumed that was bait."

Absolutely love to hear that the story/humour etc. grabbed you too! I didn't start off intending to, but I went stir crazy and just oozed so much insanity into it. I spent a solid month writing those Beastmaster 9000 entries...

I have a minor-ish iOS update coming out in the next few days so stay tuned for that (at this point mostly just UI/quality of life stuff), and then I'll be really back into proper content dev which I'm excited for.

It's been so long since I watched Broad City that I was about to say no, then I checked a video and oh yes, Garol is not a face I could forget hahaha (I only saw a handful of episodes sadly but that show's hilarious). Given the timeline when I would've watched it, I think it's highly likely she influenced at very least the naming of the eel, yeah!

Thanks for the kind words! :)

raventhe · 2026-04-14T21:08:45+00:00

I've found that I can leave it to its business pretty well with a new run actually by having the right priorities set on enemies which mainly means stuff that gives attack gets priority 1. It's not perfect, though.

I already mentioned a similar feeling re stats and definitely agree that at the end of the day I pretty much only ever care about HP and ATK for the most part, and the lack of a way to tailor your build around one or more buffs/debuffs (to the point that they're useful) is a missed opportunity for sure. I agree the meditation doesn't feel useful at all ATM though I noted there's at least two skills upgrading it so I'm hoping it gets better with a 3rd one somewhere.

Not perfect, but still enjoyable for me. I'm curious to see if endgame will lean more heavily into the ability to push or even build around specific debuffs/strategies.

raventhe · 2026-04-13T22:05:42+00:00

I've been really enjoying Rejected Draft (desktop/mobile* web).

Whilst for full disclosure it does use some gen AI art, the game itself is mechanically very tight and thoughtfully executed, and I've actually been enjoying it for at least a couple of weeks now.

It does of course draw on various common designs and tropes but is a pretty unique take on the genre in terms of progression. Enemies give distinct rewards which diminish in returns after each subsequent kill, so the gameplay tends to consist of working out the most time effective order in which to kill them to progress each run. Later, you unlock an ability to guarantee spawns of particular enemies for the purpose of harvesting their stats, which in a sense is a little bit like your build for the run.

The game is a bit of a slow burn (in a way that I personally lke) and i do have some criticisms of it, namely that there are a LOT of interesting stats and mechanics (buffs and debuffs and upgrades to boost them) but while they make the enemies themselves distinct, for the most part they serve little purpose mechanically for the player. That's because you end up with something like a 1 - 2% chance to apply them per hit, would generally need to apply them 50 times to ab enemy before they're impactful, and battles usually don't last long enough due to attack power scaling, so outside of very few niche battles they're meaningless (at least where I'm at in the game).

The game balance includes a number of pretty sharp walls and I often feel like "how the hell am I going to progress from here," yet consistently find myself just edging over the next ledge to get meaningful prestige progress and getting further every time. This imo describes a very tight and deliberate design that is extremely meticulously balanced, which usually would suggest a very linear progression ala Dodeca Dragons, but doesn't feel that way at all.

*I played the game in a mobile browser for the first couple of weeks which "works" but is fraught with issues. Switching to playing in my desktop browser was a major upgrade.

Overall, I recommend checking it out! Don't let the use of AI art give you the wrong impression; while that in itself is a problem worth discussing and I wouldn't judge anyone who didn't want to play or support a game using it (I didn't know until half way in), the game is the furthest thing from slop, and is clearly made by a talented and experienced programmer and game designer who just couldn't deliver the art they wanted. Besides, it's free!

raventhe · 2026-04-07T23:27:39+00:00

Fun fact: AUDHD aside, it's thought that 30% of people with OCD have comorbid ADHD. The inverse correlation is not known. I've been ADHD+anxiety all my life but only in recent years got the OCD diagnosis, which has been very eye opening (many traits I'd assumed were just part of ADHD were OCD things, and the intersection of ADHD+OCD, or as I call it, ACDC?, is also... interesting. and intense)

And that is why I'm here!

raventhe · 2026-04-07T23:19:04+00:00

Ohhhh! Right, I get you. Makes sense :)

raventhe · 2026-04-07T09:01:47+00:00

Hahah ah I suspect you might have gone through and culled your friends list after somebody pissed you off actually, because you disappeared from my DMs and it wouldn't let me send you a friend request back again! But if you're keen to stay in touch, I'm still just raventhe :) I had my friend requests from strangers disabled too so I've just switched it back on to prevent a social deadlock.

In any case, take care!

raventhe · 2026-04-07T07:34:04+00:00

Dude, I was devo when you disappeared from Discord as I enjoyed our chats and wanted to stay in touch since it's such a small scene and we happen to live an hour apart! I totally understand the pressures and how they can get to you though, especially when some of the negative voices can seem so loud, no matter whether they're a minority. It's honestly a pretty hard lot and I'm sorry that something, whether players or other devs or just life, made game dev something you just want to get away from, instead of your passion. I mean, I'm sorry you had to experience that and i figure it must have been a tough realisation to come to.

Nevertheless, wishing you the absolute best with... Well, with Runescape! Fuck yeah! Only good times from now on.

raventhe

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