No, I don’t think that the levels become harder. They also gift so many free boosters to the players that it is way easier than 10 years ago when I first played the game.
I also feel like that after failing a level too often, that the game is cheating for you so that you don’t lose interest.
The game is “cheating” all the time. All the successful games with thousands of repetitive levels, go whale fishing and have engagement promoting strategies.
The general strategy is:
Introduce core mechanics “organically” over the first few levels, then keep a periodic “loading screen tip” reminder
Add a harder level every several easier ones
Introduce “boosters” with a few free ones
Dis-associate booster cost from real money cost by having an “in-game currency” (not actual currency) with some non-intuitive conversion ratios
Add a second kind of free-ish in-game currency to keep players used to making in-game purchases
If a player runs out of boosters, give them some free ones after a while
Improve user engagement with regular reminders and periodic offers
Promote FOMO with limited-time offers
Add mechanics with obvious MiniMax-ing strategies, that are however impossible for a person with a normal life to MiniMax, while offering a way to use in-game currencies to correct for that
Keep adding cosmetic changes
Introduce slightly new mechanics once in a while every a lot of levels, combine mechanics together if you’ve run out of ideas
For each level, have a predefined setup that makes it extremely easy to solve, along with normal generators that make them hard to solve
Use the easy setups to showcase new mechanics and boosters
Use the hard setups to make people want to spend boosters, and buy them, and use real money to purchase in-game currency to do that
Ideally, have a level generator with tunable difficulty that can be adapted for every user
Offer whales big spenders exclusive VIP levels, that require a lot of spending to win
Add one or more “leaderboards” for big spenders to showcase how much they spend good they are
Remove real world time clues for big spenders, don’t let them realize for how many hours they’ve been throwing their money away
If a big spender drops their spending or engagement level, shower them with offers, assign a personal manager, offer invitations to real world events… whatever it takes (up to a certain % of their expected monthly spending)
Periodically expand the game with hundreds and thousands of “new” levels… which follow the same rules
Bonus points if you add “seasons” and a “season pass”.
Extra bonus if you place and cross-promote a number of games with the same strategy but different cosmetic themes.
Casino mode: have thousands of “games” all in one, with different cosmetics, complex winning modes, and very simple mechanics (press button to spin, press button to auto-spin 1000 times, etc)… but in most jurisdictions you need to calculate and disclose the exact odds of winning in each mode for every level generator.
“Subnautica in space” as in “outer space” or “on an alien planet”? Because outer space is kinda empty. Probably wouldn’t make for as lively a backdrop as under an ocean
The way Breathedge got around it initially is the starting area is a ship crash, so you collect broken bits of the ship(s) (which includes water and food).
But space is vast. Why couldn’t there be space fauna? Or a way to travel to nearby system planets? Its fiction, after all. We don’t need to be constrained by reality.
If you get a spaceship and can just go wherever, that sounds to me exactly like NMS. I think part of what makes Subnautica what it is is the constrained resources of the environment, and that feeling of being stranded. NMS lets you just bum around space forever, which is fun, but you don’t really feel that need for survival like you do in Subnautica.
NMS is survival in space, insomuch as planets are in space and you can fly around in a ship, but you start on a planet. I was thinking more like having to survive in space by building the ship in space, building a station in space, etc. Space would be your primary sandbox, rather than planets (at least initially).
The normal NMS experience isn’t quite what I’m envisioning. Maybe if you started on one of those abandoned freighters, though…
I’m not sure that this is a “game” idea so much, but I’ve had this idea I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the implementation of.
Think a digital audio workstation such as Ableton Live or Logic, but gamified. Complete various musical objectives to pass levels, have a creative mode for just making music and maybe even a multiplayer mode for collaborative or competitive music making.
Basically Dwarf Fortress, but sci-fi, with space travel and with really good 3D graphics.
An overly complicated simulation of an entire universe where I can do anything that the game’s laws of physics allow me to do. Particularly, I dream of a game where you can fulfil Star Trek fantasies of solving convoluted problems with equally convoluted solutions; but without it being a pre-programmed option. (“Reconfigure the deflector dish to output a neutrino wave to counter act the tachyon field!”)
Fake physics that allow for real fake science and engineering.
Close, but RimWorld’s mechanics are nowhere near the complexity, even with mods. And I don’t just mean with how many different types of rocks and trees exist. I’ve gotten as close to a DF-like experience + the space travel part, but it’s still like 1/4 of the full experience.
Although it’s moddable, which boosts it’s playability a bit more. I’ve played more RimWorld than DF at this point.
I love playing/writing interactive stories with an AI. A dream game of mine would be an RPG/Adventure game that extends this to a fully realized game that adapts to how you want to play.
Want to be the adventurer who slays the evil monster and saves the kingdom? Go right ahead!
Prefer to stop halfway, settle down and become the village baker, getting involved in the town’s intrigues? Also fine!
It would probably be too much to ask to turn this into a full-fledged 3d world with high detail. But a consistent Visual Novel would be a really great next step.
My new pet theory is that CS:2 came out so that Valve had all their IP sitting at 2. So then at some point, when their audience is too old to play games anymore, and the youth don’t even know that Valve ever made games, they’ll release a 3-box with HL3, Portal 3, LFD 3, CS:3, TF3, and DOTA 3.
Back in the day I playtested this game concept under an NDA, but since it expired I can talk about it.
An FPS game in an open map with buildings, has 12 players playing but when someone dies, they respawn right there but swap to the opposite team. The last person to get shot gets eliminated and then the teams split again. This goes on until 6 players are remaining, who are declared the winning team.
You could mitigate that by coms only being proximity and no indication of how many players each team has. Thst would also make offensive playstyles preferable.
I’ll tell you what I want… Katamari Damaci online multi player. Imagine the final level where you roll up the world but with the mechanics of the multiplayer mode that was already in place. It’ll be like agar.io where you get bigger and you absorb other people as you get bigger or you get absorbed because you weren’t quick enough at growing. They could update the levels to be themed and add new items and Easter eggs for you to discover and pick up. I want this soooooo bad! I want to play with my friends and strangers. I want different play modes where you get the biggest in the time, pick up the most of a specific thing, capture the flag, use your katamari to play golf but it gets harder if you pick up weird shaped stuff that throws off your balance, Easter egg hunt, racing, team games where you absorb the enemy!!! I want it alllllll!!!
Cities: Skylines but ecosystem repair. Plant forests, regrade areas of mountains to mitigate landslide potential, reintroduce species and study their functional relationships with each other… Game progression comes in the form of additional research grants or new area assignments which present new challenges and unlock a new set of tools/procedures, but the successes from previous sites allow for migration of the reintroduced species into the new site.
I’ve only watched gameplay of Terra Nil, but it seems like it’s just an environmentalism themed puzzle game. You could replace all the titles with colors, and all the buildings and what they do with arbitrary rules, and it seems like it wouldn’t look anything like an ecosystem sim. It would be like taking the game Lights Out, changing dark spots to “growth”, light spots to “wastelands” and saying the goal is to balance out the ecosystem.
I didn’t see the late game though, so maybe I didn’t see where it shines.
I was hoping this was the direction Dyson Sphere Program would go. I think it would be an interesting twist on the factory management genre if nature was working against you; not in a Factorio “aliens will attack you if they see your pollution” way, but a “you’re producing pollution, this is creating more in-climate weather that is damaging your factories and changing the landscape dynamically” sort of way. I think this was the natural next step given that the game is already about climbing the Kardashev scale, producing more energy so that you can construct the means to produce exponentially more energy. Seemed like the natural next step would be exploring the balancing act that has to happen to achieve that energy production without also creating systemic issues for yourself that make it infeasible.
Instead their latest patch adds aliens that attack you 😕.
I guess this game just doesn’t exist, but remember that tweet of the guy who had a dream about an open world pirate exploration game with Waluigi in it?
Now I'm just imagining AC Black Flag, but Waluigi just replaces Edward whole cloth, just does all the voicelines and everything, everybody else just pretends he's a normal guy.
There is/was a fan made version of this in development! I don’t know the status of it currently, and I heard that development was rocky for a while… and they haven’t posted on the blog since 2020. But take a look anyway!
The WoW raiding experience, but without the MMO, and possibly the addition of rogue lite elements (each raid is a run with its own progression, but wiping would be allowed and embraced).
The format of DRG or Gunfire Reborn is pretty close, but 1) I prefer the high fantasy setting of warcraft to the gunplay, 2) I’m not interested in procedural levels, and 3) I want the focus to be on polished boss mechanics.
Dungeon Defenders is also close, but 1) you’re defending instead of delving, and 2) it is also focused on killing waves of trash mobs rather than boss mechanics.
Destiny bosses are sometimes well designed, but 1) don’t care for the gunplay, 2) classes hardly matter, 3) it’s a max of 6 people, and I think closer to 10 is the sweet spot.
Gauntlet from a few years back was probably the closest, but still far from the mark. It could have used more mechanic heavy bosses, more meaningful gear, and a larger party size.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne