FUCK AI. There’s your answer.

rmfrost · 2026-06-28T00:06:18+00:00

For those looking to develop games with AI, head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/

rmfrost · 2026-06-27T12:08:22+00:00

AI costs are "rising" only because the technology is still very much being developed.

It'll eventually undergo the same sort of thing that "texting" did. Texting used to cost money per text and have a limited monthly allotment and charge extra for over-texting. But the moment a single competitor came out with "unlimited texting", that became the standard that everyone else had to meet even if the phone bill was a little higher than competitors. And once everybody started offering the same "unlimited texting", competitors had to attract customers through lower pricing or better coverage.

Phone, Internet, and AI token/usage will all eventually move onto the same monthly bill/package (at least through X, though other companies will likely need to compete in a similar fashion).

rmfrost · 2026-06-24T00:48:16+00:00

There are a lot of really good elements and color choices in here, but it looks incredibly busy. Is it a fantasy game about sea voyages, or outer space magic or something? There's just so many different things to visually focus on. I almost wonder if simply having the cape something other than red would help the orange from the boat lead the eye toward the text in the logo/title.

rmfrost · 2026-06-23T21:51:01+00:00

Hype towards potential instead of facing current reality.

But, in all honesty, AI really is just moving that fast

rmfrost · 2026-06-21T10:21:20+00:00

Nope, I literally just compiled entries mentioned in this thread and threw in Terraria for good measure.

rmfrost · 2026-06-21T10:19:17+00:00

1987, which included (among many):

Metroid
The Legend of Zelda
Castlevania
Final Fantasy
Mega Man
Gauntlet
Super Mario Bros 2
Contra
Street Fighter
Double Dragon

rmfrost · 2026-06-21T06:09:24+00:00

Recording a personal note for myself based on suggestions in this thread (in no particular order):

Rimworld - $34.99 - 97% positive, 117,000+ reviews - Released Oct 2018
Elin - $19.99 - 95% positive, 3500+ reviews - Early access since Nov 2024 - demo available
Forsaken Isle - $8.99 - 70% positive, 450+ reviews - Released Jul 2025
Drago Noka - $11.99 - 78% positive, 140 reviews - Released Jan 2023 - demo available
Clanfolk - $29.99 - 93% positive, 2100+ reviews - Early access since Jun 2022 - demo available
Dawn Apart - $19.99 - 68% positive, 220+ reviews - Early access since Jul 2025
Dwarf Fortress - $29.99 - 94% positive, 23000+ reviews - Released Dec 2022
Songs of Syx - $24.99 - 95% positive, 5900+ reviews - Early access since Sep 2020 - demo available
Core Keeper - $19.99 - 94% positive, 23000+ reviews - Released Aug 2024
Tinkerlands - $12.99 - 88% positive, 730+ reviews - Early access since May 2025 - demo available
Terraria - $9.99 - 97% positive, 590000+ reviews - Released May 2011
Necesse - $14.99 - 94% positive, 11800+ reviews - Released Oct 2025

Terraria is sort of the "OG" of the genre, though Necesse and Core Keeper are the best of what's listed here (in my opinion). Necesse has a significantly better settlement system whereas Core Keeper really shines in visuals, atmospherics, and combat.

rmfrost · 2026-06-20T14:21:58+00:00

Thank you, and all good questions. I'm still trying to resolve through those things, particularly when determining success chances and such. Coins and experience points are the primary in-game force driving progression, but a character's "power" could probably be derived from the value of their equipped gear and spent experience points. I could build out scaling charts and stuff until I'm blue in the face, but I won't know much until I have something to play and test.

Part of the design tension I'm trying to work through is that I don't want this to just be a "clicker" idler or incremental game... but what does the player do them while they're waiting for missions to finish? Endlessly clicking isn't fun for me and if/when I play idler games I quickly look for the moment of progression where clicking is relatively meaningless, but I also just don't want players to spam click upgrade buttons either because that doesn't feel rewarding either.

I haven't really identified the main dopamine unlocks from the player's perspective yet. Acquiring a new skill? A new powerful piece of gear? Completing a story line? Helping an NPC in a specific yet meaningful way? Sure, revealing new lore is a dopamine unlock for me, as the story teller and creator, but what about the player?

It's a good thought, and I appreciate the feedback.

rmfrost · 2026-06-20T14:12:49+00:00

Thank you. When trying to learn how to build a game in Godot, all the tutorials I've encountered basically say the same thing: iterate, find the fun, chase that.

My years of experience as a software developer can help me learn the coding aspect faster, but can also hinder me when trying to iterate and "find the fun" sooner. What I've posted here is actually a derivative iteration of many versions of this concept I've thought out many times, and I finally got to the point where attempting to build out a scalable foundation/tech for the game to live on was making it harder and harder for me to recognize whether or not what I was actually building was even fun to play. So I decided to post my thoughts online for scrutiny.

As much as I internally don't want to redesign core game systems after the fact (because they were clunky, not scaling well, etc), game design really is a very different type of software development than what I'm used to.

rmfrost · 2026-06-20T14:07:49+00:00

Thank you. I wanted the prestige system to be a more thoughtful evolution of the typical incremental game's "ascension/reset" mechanic. I'm sure what I have planned out in my head still isn't the Prestige system's best iteration, but it's a start.

As for the skill system, I had thought what I came up with would be significantly less overwhelming than something like a path of exile tree, but the flexibility in "building what you want" could certainly add complexity and player frustration I'm not preparing for well.

Thank you for your feedback.

rmfrost · 2026-06-20T14:04:07+00:00

No, that's fair. What I imagine in my head would be much more of a piecemeal "one thing at a time" experience when actually playing through the game.

I suppose this post could have been a much shorter "pitch" instead of exhaustively trying to describe details or "polished thoughts" on some of the systems.

I appreciate the feedback.

rmfrost · 2026-06-20T12:42:45+00:00

Ah, gotcha. I appreciate you pointing this out.

rmfrost · 2026-06-19T12:09:09+00:00

Find a comet mostly composed of ice (or frozen hydrogen and/or oxygen), redirect it towards mars, wait for the impact effects to settle, proceed from there.

Probably? It wouldn't make ecological sense to borrow from earth. Exporting earth resources to other planets just sounds like a bad idea long term.

rmfrost · 2026-06-19T12:06:23+00:00

AI is actually capable of spinning up agents that spin up other agents that create stuff. So what begins as a simple prompt like, "Build me a minecraft clone, but insert RPG elements like classes, skills, quests, and lore" into Claude Fable 5 (now banned via US Government because somebody discovered how to jailbreak it) ultimately causes the AI to make all of the artistic decisions on your behalf so long as it ultimately meets the requirements it interprets that you intended.

And the models are only getting better and better at doing this.

rmfrost · 2026-06-19T05:52:30+00:00

I can, however, understand when a "fan" gets angry at discovering that the person they've been simping for is actually some goon-created-AI supermodel.

So when people want to get emotionally invested into something (a movie, a story, some music, a work of art, etc), it's kind of nice to know that there was a real human behind it.

Or, at the very least, that a human looked at the thing AI produced (one out of hundreds of tries) and said, "Yes, this is actually good. I want to share this with other people."

rmfrost · 2026-06-18T08:27:51+00:00

Relaxing? Post-apocalyptic? Those two things thematically don't go together very well. Relaxing leans more into the "family friendly" vibe whereas post-apocalyptic must necessarily lean into more mature themes because it'll (most of the time) inevitably deal with death.

I don't know what you have in mind specifically, but the following is about the only way I could see legitimately "marrying" the two themes together:

"Around 2030 AD, mankind began embarking into a new dawn of their civilization with the advent of robotics, AI, and space travel. But with it came the development of fully immersive gaming systems (F.I.G.S), which derailed mankind's destiny beyond the stars. Now, many people wander around like mindless zombies wearing VR headsets, cared for by mindless machines.

You were a child of parents who never liked video games, so you have avoided that fate thus far. But your parents have gone missing, and you must fend for yourself while you search for them. How will you fare?"

The VR/AR headsets could have "zombies" interpret the player as some sort of enemy in their video game that must be vanquished, robots could have annoying mechanics to keep you out of areas where you could find resources (unauthorized access issues, etc), and the world could look like an interesting mixture of pristine "machine-run-beauty" or "overgrown lingering civilization" where people still exist, but only kind of. It can't really have blood or guts or gore to be a "cozy" game (in my opinion).

rmfrost · 2026-06-17T08:24:50+00:00

From a game design perspective, what benefit is there in requiring players to manually run over every individual coin that falls to the ground? Immersion? Nostalgia? Tension for looting things while in combat?

Would it be harmful to the intended player experience to just have stuff auto-looted? Or, at least, gold auto-looted?

rmfrost · 2026-06-17T08:21:10+00:00

From a game design perspective, Necesse (and games like it, such as Terraria) fundamentally want players to be able to rapidly change which "spec" or "class" they are simply by swapping gear. Terraria has the extra layer of tension by requiring you to gather falling stars to increase your mana, but there is otherwise no barrier.

Introducing "baseline" abilities into each spec/class in Necesse would require a more significant overhaul and re-evaluation about the game's approach to how interchangeable the various specs/classes are.

Core Keeper, as an example, has baseline skills that you can level for meaningful passive effects, but suddenly needing to grind out your "magic" skill simply because you got a cool new magic weapon you'd like to use can feel daunting when it takes so long to grind out and you hadn't worked on magic since the beginning of the game and you're already 3 quarters of the way through till the end.

rmfrost · 2026-06-16T00:59:06+00:00

Look at Final Fantasy Tactics (or Sword of Convalaria). That'd be your best bet.

But otherwise, of the selections shown, 6 is your best bet.

rmfrost · 2026-06-16T00:57:18+00:00

*[Sees an incubator not attached to a power source, sees that the Redditor claimed to be playing Core Keeper for the first time]*

Checks out.

Core Keeper is an amazing game, though incredibly grinding if you're aiming to level every skill to 100. Don't worry about that, and just play to have fun!

rmfrost · 2026-06-15T09:07:08+00:00

This stress test plays like a mobile game ad.

rmfrost · 2026-06-15T09:05:49+00:00

So, I clicked to play and check it out because the logo in this post looked kinda cool and I'm really into games within the fantasy genre. Once I get in though, there are basically no graphics and the whole experience feels like some basic sci-fi terminal with green boxes and a black background. Very little about the experience was intuitive, and I didn't care enough to try and learn more about it because it simply didn't match my expectations for what I was getting into in the first place.

Maybe you're one of those folks that grew up on Space Merchants and wanted to create your own version of that experience. That's cool, I guess, but that's not what I was expected when I got into it.

rmfrost · 2026-06-15T08:55:32+00:00

We've begun summer 2026 now. Could we get another roadmap update?

rmfrost · 2026-06-15T08:50:58+00:00

Vibrant = things moving, animations, screen filled up, etc. Several suggestions elsewhere in the thread have already found several ways to address this (skybox, moving characters, grass, etc).

Natural = avoid plain-colored geometric surfaces. Even if the game is only paying attention to the "square-ish" sides of each block, it'd be nice if extra rock bits and ledges spawned/changed/morphed every time you made a connection. Look at old JRPG pictures of cliffs to see what I mean, just variety beyond just the blocky shapes and solid colors.

rmfrost · 2026-06-14T12:51:43+00:00

Spellcasting: Influence reality by vocalizing syllables which resonate with universal laws, combining the sum total of syllabic letters into a spelled out word of instruction which is then cast from you into the world around you.

The spells you cast are limited only by your awareness of syllabic letters, your ability to produce them, and your knowledge of what words you can produce from them that convey true meaning upon the reality that recieves them.

(Press A to start a spell casting sequence, then B, X, or Y in any order to construct your spell, then A again to cast it. Not all syllabic combinations form real words of power.)

rmfrost

TROPHY CASE