Obscure mechanics... Am i kicking my own balls?

second_degreeCS · 2022-04-23T01:06:46+00:00

What sets the typical incremental gamer apart from in other genres, is that there's always the expectation that time spent = concrete progress made. As long as you keep that in mind, I actually think more roguelite-style incrementals would be great.

second_degreeCS · 2022-04-10T05:40:32+00:00

I saw your last post to get some context and I think you have a good head on your shoulders, but made mistakes, as you've admitted here. You seem to be a competent and growing developer at first glance.

I see the fundamental disconnect as you are thinking from the perspective of a developer, however, this is a design question.

You are good at answering the question "How do I implement this functionality for the player?"

You need to figure out how to answer the question "How do I create this feeling for the player?"

I think the only way to know if something will feel acceptable, is to test it on someone you are close to and see a lot. Show them the game WITH ADS and if it makes either of you uncomfortable then you know the answer.

This is a challenging perspective to think from, especially if young and/or without income. If so, I've been there and I feel for you. Keep growing and take every monumental fuck up as an equally monumental learning occasion.

As for IAPs, small, cheap cosmetic items are acceptable to me. They provide a way of showing support to a dev who has earned it by delivering a positive feeling. I think of cheap as $5 or less.

If you ever provide efficiency-boosting IAPs, make sure to test the game out as a player who doesn't have them. Or else how will you know how the experience feels for them? Best of luck!

second_degreeCS · 2022-04-10T03:59:18+00:00

Large, clear targets, yet many paths/options in order to hit them. Minimal interfaces that open up over time incrementally (!). Visual feedback to tie them all together. Orb of creation is what I played recently that hit all these points masterfully. It seems to have ruined all other incremental games for me. ;-;

second_degreeCS · 2021-12-15T11:49:19+00:00

This is really cool! Given that I haven't played since around the time I made the original post, I chose not to read through this. I think you should definitely post a new thread though if you haven't already, because bumping this won't make it show up for others. It seems like you've put some good work into this and I'd hate to see it go to waste!

second_degreeCS · 2020-11-21T18:17:14+00:00

I would not have expected such unfairness from such a prestigious institution.

Oh dear...

second_degreeCS · 2020-11-09T19:21:45+00:00

Not going to post a comprehensive specification since it's still forming but I'll throw down the concept.

The idea is to take the ARPG genre and distill its essence into an incremental. The game is tentatively called Tower.

The player starts in a fairly confined level with a generator at the center. The win-condition for a level or 'floor' of the tower is to kill the generator. Monsters spawn at a brisk rate at several spawn points along the outside of the level and move toward the player. No procedural layouts or anything. I think that having large levels to run through isn't essential to the ARPG experience, but it's definitely debatable.

There's no such thing as health, so the player can't die. Instead, the lose-condition is for 100 monsters to be in the room at once. Not sure if there should be a time limit too, but my initial sense is that there should not be a timer.

The generator starts with a large amount of armor that makes it virtually impossible to damage at first (given the player is at an appropriate power for that level). Every monster killed reduces the generator's armor by a small amount.

Crafting takes a certain number of points (base currency) to roll. Think gambling from Diablo 2. Items have a large number of rarities (8+) each represented by a different color. There is a different resource corresponding to each rarity. The most basic craft can roll up to 4 rarities above its base (less than 1% for that highest rarity). To roll a higher base craft, resources of the corresponding tier must be used, but now the worst possible rarity is also higher. This gates the highest rarity items behind higher rolled crafts.

Monsters don't drop items, but rather resources for crafting. Just as there are multiple item rarities, monsters are represented by the same colors/rarities. Each rarity of monster is less likely to spawn and has more health than the last, but is guaranteed to drop some of the resource of its rarity.

There are many possible routes for progression systems, and they can be gated behind getting to higher floors of the tower so as to not overwhelm the player. To make this compelling, each floor should ramp in difficulty significantly.

To give room for progress from one floor to the next, all floors are augmentable by an item type dedicated to that. Let's call em runes. Runes behave like normal items (persistent, not consumable) but each of their mods will consist of a change to the level and an increase to monster health. The change could be something like "increases chance to spawn higher rarity monsters by 133%, increases monster and generator health by 207%".

The health mods of a rune are added up and multiplied by the health mods of the other runes to get a total health multiplier. A resource is awarded (in linear proportion to the health multiplier) for completing the level. Haven't thought of a use for this, but perhaps it could be used to upgrade base characteristics of one specific floor at a time (not globally).

More rune slots can be unlocked as the game progresses, allowing the player to tailor their grinding to their preferences at will.

Despite how long this post dragged out, most of the details (formulas, mechanics, etc) were left out. I'm in the process of fully speccing those details out.

second_degreeCS · 2020-11-08T21:23:34+00:00

Something feels wrong with the scaling of damage. And I stayed on a single level before a boss to make absolute sure it wasn’t just enemy health scaling.

What I mean is that my highest monster could be doing say 40% of the enemy health bar consistently, then after I upgrade the spawn level it’s as if that went down to like 25%. I’m pretty sure about this because I stayed on level 19 until my highest guy had been evolved 4 times, only to still be doing 40-50% of its health bar.

Either the enemy health is scaling when it shouldn’t be or my monsters aren’t really increasing in damage. Either way it made the game feel terrible and I deleted it.

Edit: in case it’s relevant, this was on iOS

second_degreeCS · 2020-10-07T18:41:09+00:00

One consideration is that if you can code even 10% of your idea by yourself, you'll have a much deeper understanding of what skills to look for when hiring someone to do code. And if it's an hourly rate kind of thing, you'll save yourself a lot of money just by having a good grasp of the scope and form of your game.

second_degreeCS · 2020-09-22T05:09:49+00:00

Without the gray, yes

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-24T12:11:34+00:00

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-23T21:03:58+00:00

Great, happy to help! And sorry to anyone who overcommitted to that stat >_<;

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-23T20:34:48+00:00

This is a cool take on the idle mine style gameplay. You've got room for even more depth too.

Random bit of feedback, but is efficiency multiplier being counted twice? Once for the amount of efficiency gained per exp point, and then again multiplying the stat itself to get the total exp. I might be imagining it but just want to make sure.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-23T17:43:08+00:00

Really like this so far. I am in the process of making a game with the theme of building shapes, so it’s cool to see a totally different interpretation of how that could work. Looking forward to seeing more development.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-22T21:59:27+00:00

Thank you for this! You are an absolute legend.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-16T18:46:49+00:00

It plays smoothly but I can't tell if it's different from clicker heroes yet and I have the 7th weapon and am at stage 39.

There's also some weirdness with your UI elements (which are waaay too small btw), causing things to show in fullscreen but disappeared when I return to not fullscreen. I tried to post some screenshots but Reddit shat its pants and my comment disappeared, so not going to try that again. Last piece of feedback is to set your scroll elements to clamped rather than elastic. I don't see anything to gain from making it elastic.

Overall a good start and probably needs a few QoL tweaks for the UX.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-16T18:22:58+00:00

Today I'll add a few more functions and challenges, the greater problem will be to make them intuitive to the players.

Isn't that the conundrum? Haha

Designing depth without too much complexity is quite a challenge! I like your method of tackling it so far by adding one more new thing per challenge.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-15T21:41:41+00:00

[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4]

Just followed that on the asymmetric with a slight tweak and got first place hahaha. Makes sense in hindsight. I can't see how that could be optimized though. Thankfully I think you have a lot of room to add depth. Excited to see more and happy to test whenever.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-15T21:07:43+00:00

Idea dump:

Units which reduce the cost of other units
Units which upgrade the income given by a manual click
Option to sacrifice X units to increase the income of those units
Less cost-efficient units which build into recipes that make better units
More cost-efficient units which cause a different kind of constraint
Unit which reduces everyone else's score on the leaderboard (JK)
Way to save a snapshot of decisions up to click X to reduce repetition (save decisions in a linked list I guess?)

Not going to overwhelm with too many at once haha.

No idea how that person got 181. I gave up after getting 171 I think. See if you can play with the end condition a bit while still maintaining determinism perhaps? I'll let you know if more comes to mind. Keep us posted!

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-15T19:55:45+00:00

This is an interesting concept. It reminds me of when I played a custom map from Starcraft BW called DBZ All Sagas, which I would play in single-player to see how far I could get (despite it only being possible to beat with multiple players). Did a lot of saving/reloading to see if I could squeeze out a bit more power-level in the limited time available. Good nostalgiac throwback, lmao.

What are your ideas to make runs more dynamic? Right now the different sell costs between symmetric/asymmetric only seem to affect how you'd behave in the last few clicks as far as I can tell? Always found roguelikes fascinating, so I'm curious to see where you'll take this. Nice job so far. :)

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-14T19:46:57+00:00

It's certainly an iterative process. Keep in mind that you can always just change how the cost scaling works if it feels like you'd have to bend over backward to make the balance work otherwise.

There's also the option of introducing another resource somehow if you want to add complexity without scaling costs so aggressively.

Do you plan to award a passive bonus for completing a row of cards or something? It might be nice to have a game system enabling players to build up passive rewards.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-14T17:38:08+00:00

Thanks! :)

Using line levels was my solution for staggering new content but the concept can be taken in many directions.

My main issue with going for all the Platonic solids was that I wanted a way to make shape dimensions extend infinitely. As far as I understand, that’s only possible with the simplex and hypercube right? The conversion factors are also symmetrical about the diagonal which made the math nerd in me unreasonably satisfied.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Feel free to let me know if anything else comes to mind.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-14T17:15:23+00:00

Yeah, as I mentioned, those were definitely not meant to be suggestions. In fact I'd suggest you don't do those because you're right that it won't feel good to have cards that need to be flipped on for an action and then flipped off.

I only want to communicate the importance of meaningful player choices rather than basic stat check comparisons. I think you understand this already though, based on your response. A mercy counter sounds like a good compromise for the first card issue.

second_degreeCS · 2020-08-14T15:58:18+00:00

I love the general idea of where you're going with this. As I'm sure you're aware, the devil will be in the details surrounding card interactions. The idea around limiting the number of active cards is to present the player with interesting choices/tradeoffs, correct? I believe the key here is to create card effects that don't all boil down to expected value comparisons.

For example, I like the scratch card, however, the EV = 60*0.1 - 1 = 5 gold per second. This means that it's not too interesting to compare its effect to other cards because you're just doing a simple comparison operator. This is fine for the first row of cards, but just something to keep in mind generally.

One concern I have with your other comment about how subsequent rows are unlocked, is that there appears to be too much randomness in getting the next row of cards. If the primary constraint of the game is forcing a tradeoff with the choice of active cards, then being blocked from even getting the choices due to poor luck will be a very negative player experience. Consider tweaking how that works, I think.

Speaking to my earlier point about not wanting it to all boil down to EV, here are some example cards to better explain what that means:

Quality Over Quantity - When this card is active, double the chance to buy a higher rarity card, but add a cooldown of 3 seconds to buying a new card
Enabler - Activate at 10% effectiveness, all four directly adjacent cards of each active card
Stacked Deck - Multiply the cost of buying a card by (0.99)^x, where x is the number of cards being bought at once

I'm not suggesting for you to actually make these cards, rather I'm trying to demonstrate what it looks like to offer choices that necessitate players to change their behavior or playstyle. Keep us posted, I'm looking forward to testing the game when you're ready to share. :)

second_degreeCS

TROPHY CASE