Notes and ideas

General ideas

Cat platformer (catformer) where you’re knocking things off shelves to fight spoopy ghosts your humans can’t see
Game where health and life underflow is not prevented, and is in fact plot-relevant
Platformer game about SCP-529 breaching containment and traveling adorably through several fun SCP-related levels

Notes on specific implementations

The coins in Super Mario Land are background tiles! Tileswapping is used to make them disappear when the player grabs them.

From this Bluesky thread

Heather Flowers: an underappreciated skill in game design is “lying to players.” games only exist in a player’s mind!! you can change the nature of the game without changing its core logic by just telling players that the logic is something different!! - Trashiest Possum: I think alot about the fact that amnesia completely lies and says that looking at monsters makes them detect you, and the devs admitted it was a lie entirely to make the players more scared of the monsters - davemakes: in my fish game when the stamina meter runs out you actually have a bit more stamina left don’t tell anyone - TESTAMENT✙ENJOYMENT: Thinking about that Dragon Age: Inquisition interview where they admitted that the sprint button doesn’t actually make you go faster but pulls back the FoV and puts speedlines on the screen to make it feel like you do - VinTJ: if something is “50% chance” and I’ve rolled it 3 times in a row and keep failing, the 4th one HAS to be a guaranteed success. - Daniel Ostrowski: In most Fire Emblem games, hit chances above 50% are more likely to hit than the displayed chance, and chances below 50% are less likely to hit than the displayed chance- because players never expect to miss a 99% and never expect to get hit by a 10% - Autumn Oldaker: Similarly, in thracia your jagen actually has a 100% chance to dodge any attack that would kill her. - Alex Lemley (Rocketlex): Remembering those QTEs in No More Heroes that tell you to swing the wiimote in a specific direction but it will actually accept any direction. - CV - yuki nagato number 1 fan. “splicers always miss the first couple shots to freak you out” stays winning - Berserkerkitten: Quite a few action games out there, which secretly make you take a little less damage when you’re near death to make you feel like you managed to get incredibly good and beat the odds. Or when Hellblade claimed it would delete your savegame if you died too much. Reviewers [tried] it, was a lie. - yura: I think Undertale did pretty well at this. It didn’t get to impact me since i experienced it through others’ playthroughs for years before i got to play, but the level and fight systems? Fight being on the far left, basically the first option? Come on!!! LV, EXP, fight, monsters, these are basic rpg things and in any other rpg you fight and kill and get stronger and win. You don’t usually get the option to befriend the “enemy”. It's a shame most people can’t experience it blindly because of how popular it got. - ithayla: a lot of this can be writing. we told the players in the intro to the mass effect board game that a storm is coming and will destroy the ship they’re in giving the sense of time pressure. it doesn’t exist. but it’s a convenient fiction for why the campaign is only 5 missions long. - Keith Hamilton Putnam: tbf this is true of all fiction and all art