I learned when I released an unsuccessful mobile game a couple years ago that there are apparently automated piracy sites out there. I say that because we found a seemingly hacked version of the game on some sketchy app sites just a week after releasing it (and nobody knew about our game, so I highly doubt it was done by hand).
As a fellow spare time dev who dreams of having that much success, I feel your pain, and also want to wish you a heartfelt congratulations. That’s a massive achievement! I hope you have success with it whenever you launch. 👏
It’s a shame that multiplayer games really struggle with paid models these days. It heavily cut into a player base if things aren’t free to play. That kind of forces all but the biggest releases to turn to other monetization models in order to keep the base game free.
I think it’s tough with card games because they come from a physical form of lootboxes. Being expensive is kind of baked into their lineage. Collecting cards is a big part of the fun, and if you made it very easy to do I think it’s hard to say whether people would enjoy them as much.
I don’t play any collectible card games anymore because I don’t want to pay for it anymore, but there is something very entertaining about the model even if it’s easy to argue it’s a scummy business model by today’s standards.
I haven’t looked into this game beyond your description, but it does sound like a pretty weird model. Do you also have to pay for cards on top of that?
I remember kind of disliking the arena system in hearthstone because I liked the game mode a lot, but as a casual player it was really hard to get to play it much. I guess they wanted to keep people from spending all their time there since you didn’t need to buy cards to play. I much preferred magic arena’s drafts where you pay an upfront cost but get to keep all the cards you played with. Much more accessible for casual players and more satisfying, too, since you always get something out of it.
This article perfectly sums up the issues with this way of writing. Unfortunately people often don’t acknowledge the nuance there, and will jump down this reviewer’s throat for the take I imagine.
It’s icing on the cake that apparently there was even an in-lore term for something like a trans character of this species that they didn’t use. That makes it seem like they didn’t even study their own lore well enough. Never what you want to be thinking about a writing team. 🫤
If you want to double down on the puzzle aspect, check out Toki Tori 2. It’s a metroidvania side scrolling puzzle game. The wild part of it is you basically only have 2 moves, but you have to figure out how to use those moves to solve puzzles in the environment to progress. There are no actual hard walls like in a regular metroidvania, it’s just your understanding of how you can manipulate and influence objects in the world that gates you from getting to new places.
If you look at old games, the reason they didn’t need this was because they couldn’t have nearly as many props in a scene. I like to use classic WoW as an example. It didn’t have any kind of highlighting for objects to interact with, but you didn’t need it because there just weren’t that many objects period.
Highlighting interactables, whether it be through a pulse like the meme, or just based on proximity, is a compromise in modern games to make things playable while also having dense, prop-filled environments. The infamous white or yellow paint for climbing surfaces is another example.
I doubt many designers love these solutions, but they’re currently the best we’ve got. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but I hope a more immersive solution comes along someday. In the meantime, having it is better than not, I totally agree with you.
Context: I like immersion and getting the most out of a game’s systems.
I see someone said the opposite, but I’d recommend playing the one difficulty above normal. If you don’t you’ll barely ever need to interact with some parts of the game like the alchemy system.
Also the game lets you heavily customize the interface. I personally hate being led around by a dotted line/arrow, so if you feel the same know you can turn all of that off.
To this day LBP 1 has some of the most incredible level design I’ve ever seen. I know some of the later entries had wilder stuff going on, but the original limiting itself to almost entirely using basic blocks and shapes with visible logic switches/machines, was so magical to me as an aspiring game dev. It was like they were putting their money where their mouth was. You can create stuff this crazy, too, because we just built it out of basic shapes.