Stop Killing Games - Feasible?

Sign the Stop Killing Games UK or EU initiative!

AAA Devs on Stop Killing Games

Repeatedly, I hear AAA developers argue that it is an expensive and infeasible amount of work, as seen in the recent response of Video Games Europe.[VGE25] While I have my own thoughts and beliefs on their overall response, I want to focus on the idea of it being expensive and infeasible. However, I haven't worked in AAA. I am an Informatics: Games Engineering student. Any defense I bring up out of my knowledge and experience might be written off as naivety or inexperience. So instead, I'm gonna make an assumption, a hypothesis. This assumption is: "If it is infeasible and expensive, then no one would be able to do it." Thus, we won't be able to find examples of games that handled sunset or have sunset plans that comply with the Stop Killing Game initiative despite being affected by the changes.

Are There Games That Comply?

game

how it complies

source

Game 0/0

Last Update: 07.07.2025
(Disclaimer: Stop Killing Games does not intend and can't apply retroactively. These are examples to prove the point of feasibility.)

[VGE25] Video Games Europe. Statements on Stop Killing Games, 2025, https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killing-games/ (Accessed: 06.07.2025)

Designing A Gaming Bot For Discord (Initial Approach)

Whelp, I made it. I figured out all the things I wanted to figure out before writing a blog post about making a gaming bot for discord. So, without further ado, let's get into it.

Prologue

When I say gaming bot, I'm not talking about a discord bot connected with your game. Instead, I mean a bot, which responds to user commands. You can compare it to a text RPG. Before making it, I used an approach that I can only advise you to do too. But, make your own decision after reading it.

The Approach

Planning to use any preexisting platform for your game requires you to brainstorm the possibilities. Like with different hardware (mobile games versus PC games), not every game mechanic works. Looking at the input and output methods that are available to us and analyzing these tools allows us to build the game's horizon.

Familiarizing Yourself With The Platform

Discord is a modern chat platform. It allows users to interact with each other on servers, in groups or private chats. All of those three have both voice and text capabilities. The latter also features emojis. Whose are of use to react to others or for usage in your message. Reactions can also be taken back and reapplied.

Additionally, the text message can contain attachments, which will be displayed if they're video, audio, or graphic files. Else they appear as a download instead. URLs are displayed similarly, except for downloads, which are shown as previews instead.

With the ability to edit, delete, and format your messages, there are even more possibilities for bots to do their charm. Unfortunately, we are more limited than that.

Familiarize Yourself With The API

In the end, even a limitless platform restricts the game or bot with its API.

Luckily, all elements listed before, which a text-based RPG would require, are implemented in the API. I could go into the API in detail, but I think I'll leave that for another post when I write about the gaming bot and the design choices in more detail. Anyways, let's look at the capabilities we have for the game.

Screenshot of my RPG Bot
Using Emojis as an input method.

The Input

The primary input we get is user messages. We can search for specific patterns in there or use the API

calls to filter for commands. Another one we can get is through reactions from users to the bots messages allowing us to use arrow emojis to flip through pages of content, for example. While this doesn't sound like much, they are already powerful tools in our tool belt.

The Output

Screenshot of my RPG Bot
Using embed for layout and emojis for
graphics.

There's a lot we can do output wise. From sending simple messages showing content to formatting them, using embeds to implement layouts, emojis to represent graphics, or even posting generated or resource images. Given the list of Discord features, there's a lot more than these I came up here now. But, it is a start if you don't have one yet.

Conclusion

Well yeah, this is the approach I choose when developing games for hardware or platforms that aren't as familiar. I hope it helps you make better design choices. And maybe I'll post about my gaming bot? We'll see in the future.

Discord Dhuum challenge. Anyone?<sup>[1]

[1]</sup>https://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/

I Was Ignorant About Shaders

Congratulations, University. January is the first month on which I didn't post on this blog for a whole month. I've been working on four different projects: Specifically Audio, Assembly, Interactionmethods, and Shaders.

Me And Shaders

When I had first come in contact with shaders, I've been ~8 years younger. Back then, I first started to learn to program with the DirectX SDK. I never really understood shaders back then, and they were annoying. I never really did anything with them. From there on out, it took seven years until I came across them again during studying when I saw the project of a fellow student talking about his shaders. The game looked amazing. One semester later, in the Realtime graphics course, we were taught DirectX as well as shaders. It was- fascinating but pretty technical. It wasn't until I took the "Modern Techniques for Shader Development and Imagesynthesis" course.

The Epiphany

Until then, I didn't think much about shaders, but the courses made me realize how important they are and how easy it is to write them. Most of the animations, particle systems, post-processing effects, and other things making your games more beautiful, are probably done using shaders. Vertex shaders, geometry shaders, fragment shaders, image effect or post-processing shaders, and compute shaders give you the power to push your games to a new level of aesthetics and beauty.

What If Shaders Are Not Your Thing?

Of course, it's not the end of the world if you don't write your shaders. There are shader assets out there that you can get. You can make other people write them for you (like me :P), and most engines come with standard shaders. So, no one is forcing you to get into writing shaders. However, I still want to make you realize how important they are and that it is possible to create great things with them.

How To Get Started?

The university course I took taught all techniques by using case studies. So, get out there, take a game and try to recreate the effect. Oh wait, maybe you should start with some tutorials on the basics first. Read into how Vertex and Fragment shaders work and make your own in Unity since you can get started right away there. Check for some websites that teach shading while using case studies. The tutor of the course has a website called lexdev.net.

Shimmy, Shimmy... Out And Away

That's it from my side for today. I'll come back with more posts eventually, especially after the exam phase. Also, I started to use Grammarly again, given your feedback on the blog posts that didn't use it compared to the ones that do. Thanks for that feedback, btw. Oh yeah, I could write my case study or tutorials in the future.

Game Design: Shout Out To These Creatores!

I've decided to make a bit of a different blog post this time. Instead of talking about theorycrafting, philosophy, game design, or magic, I'm gonna list and talk a bit about some other content creators. The point of this is to give my readers that are interested in this a blog post that features a list of interesting YouTube channels to revisit whenever. Another reason is to show you guys other creators that talk about varying topics of game development but make some great points.

Extra Credits

Extra Credits is probably one of my favorite channels on Youtube and I always watch it. They come from the industry and bring great insight into all the topics that there are. If you plan on becoming a game developer or take any related Job I can only advise you to check out some or all of their videos. And to the Extra Credits team. You've taught me and others a lot and helped me with my Seminar Paper during high school (Berufsoberschule). Keep up the good work!

>> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCODtTcd5M1JavPCOr_Uydg

8-bit Music Theory

8-bit Music Theory is for all your future composers or game designers out there. If you're interested in learning or dipping into music theory for games it is a great channel for that. Since I try to keep my knowledge broad as I want to go into game design mainly with a focus on programming I try to take in as much information as possible. This channel definitely helps there! No doubt about that. If that caught your interest go check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeZLO2VgbZHeDcongKzzfOw <<

Design Doc

Design Doc is a channel that suddenly popped up in my related videos. The focus of this Youtube channel is pretty much anything about designing a game. My favorite videos are the good design, a bad design where Design Doc gets the point across using examples showing both sides. In my opinion, anyone interested in game development should have at least heard or seen these videos, however, if you're planning on becoming a game designer it's gonna be your job to make sure you don't fall into these mistakes that were done. Really "Noice".

>> https://www.youtube.com/user/Warbot40

Snowman Gaming

This is one of the channels I came across while looking for something game design related. Again just like the Design Doc, this one focuses on the overall game design of games but goes more into the complete titles. There are videos for good game design and bad game design and I can just recommend it to any game designers as well as anyone who's taking inspiration from one of their favorite games that may pop-up in this list. Keep it up.

https://www.youtube.com/user/snomangaming <<

Razbuten

I actually came across this channel through a very interesting video in my feed: "What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games". This is absolute gold. When we design games we always think about gamers in mind. We rarely ever think about people who never played video games. And of course, the other videos on this channel are interesting as well. So, if you have the time to check them out go ahead!

>> https://www.youtube.com/user/razbuten

Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

I just came across this channel recently and added it to my list of interesting channels to check out. I haven't checked out much of this one yet, but from what I've seen this one is a good channel if you want to think outside of the box, see things differently. So, if you need some uncommon inspiration there you go add this channel's videos to your playlist!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY3A_5R_m3PXCn5XDhvBBsg <<

Why This List?

Well, it's December and soon it's Christmas. This is the season of giving and so I'll give you stuff that helped me to learn game design. Learning game design is a difficult topic anyways. We don't know for sure if a concept works unless we have case studies. That is where these youtube channels come in handy. If you want to learn game design check out opinions of players, reviews or analysis and game design videos. Feed your brain with what appeals and what doesn't find out why and use that knowledge. I hope this list helps others as much as it has helped and schooled me so far and share your information with others. "Because Games Matter" ~ Extra Credits

Also, I've decided to change my use of Grammarly. So far, I've been using Grammarly and making sure that I get 0 mistakes shown even the premium ones (I don't use premium, because of no income right now). This post, for example, has 30 premium errors. Check out this survey, to help me.

>> Google Forms Survey

I've Designed And Developed A 1D Game

I wanted to spend my time learning for the exam after being fit again. Turns out I'm still ill, and this crazy idea got stuck in my head. And guess what? I did it!

What Is 1D?

Cover art used for itch.io

You probably know the difference If we go down to 2D, we toss aside either the height or the width and keep the other one. This will result in a horizontal or vertical line, depending on which dimension we removed. And that is considered 1D.

between 2D and 3D games. When we switch from a 3D game to a 2D game, we give up on the depth and keep width and height.

You can view it mathematically as well. If 3D is a room and you take away the depth you're left with a plane. Removing another dimension leaves you with a line. Technically, stepping down another dimension will result in a point (0D).

Graphical Dimension Versus Gameplay Dimension

As you might have heard of 2.5D, we have to differentiate in the represented dimension and the one the player moves in. However, it's not standard for the player to move in a higher dimension than the graphics communicate. More about that on another blog post. There is a game made by Tim Ruswick, which shows the player moving linearly, but the game objects are placed in a plane. Just like Flappy Bird, an obvious contender for the 1D gameplay and 2D graphics.

Regardless, my goal was to make a game with 1D gameplay and 1D visuals.

Game Development

I wanted to make this game in Unity since I had the most experience there so far. After setting the release and in-editor resolution to 1x800, the rest of the development of the game is pretty simple. Unfortunately, this is not the case for the UI. We can't represent text or numbers in this format. Even if you would let them scroll they're not distinguishable. Something we can do, however, is to color-code them. If we, for example, say that the digits of a number can be colored the following way:

• red - zero
• orange - one
• black - two
• white - three
• blue - four
• yellow - five
• green - six
• brown - seven
• purple - eight
• gray - nine

While this is confusing to the player at first, there's no better option I can think of. Additionally, the player will learn the coding over time.

Next up, we need a game idea that works. I wanted to think simple since I only want to prove that a 1D game is possible. I had a few different ideas, but Guitar Hero seemed to be a good choice. A rhythm game itself would take quite a while, so let's paddle down. How about... having targets fall down, and you have to hit a key on the right timing? It's more or less the same, just no music or specific patterns.

The Release

Now that things are done, the game is ready for release. Something I've noticed is that it doesn't run well on a dark background, and it is hard to see. I don't think to resize it is a viable option, though. Anyways, after this blog post, I'll be writing the short page and add a link to the itch.io page. So, you can check it out yourself.

Check It Out >>

Next up... a 0D game! Wooo!

Starting Off 2019 With the BEST DREAM EVER!

Looks like 2019 start off great. Seriously, I have no idea how you could ever come up with such a weird idea. Well, technically it's not me that created it who writes this text here, no, it's actually me that's where without me knowing, the unconsciousness.

From Time to Time

I have some weird dreams every now and then sometimes about video games. I remember having a dream about Minecraft and some Albion online, Shakes & Fidget game thingy. So, I guess it's not all uncommon to me. Though most of my dreams do make sense in some kind of way. This one though... it seems like someone had too many drugs. Let's just get to it.

The Dream

The dream started off with me being followed by some weird creature that's kinda like a purple alien hornet similar to the Queen Alien Hornet of Terraria[1], though instead of a longer part on the abdomen or a stinger, it was just flat. And for some kind of reason, it was following me and I had to run away. I suddenly was given a bottle with liquid in it and I felt the need to use it as a skateboard. After using it for a while I thought it would be faster after emptying it so I emptied it and continued skating it. The surrounding area was a mall with people and all kinds of stuff. There were some spots every few meters were you had or could do something that I can't even describe in detail. One time it was carefully smacking the bottle into a wine glass.. yeah, I don't know. At the end of the mall, I didn't know where it continued and I ran into a few dead ends. To get out of one that was quite high I didn't know what to do. I thought about jumping down but I wasn't sure about the damage it could do. So I threw the bottle down to see if it would break. It did not. This still hasn't convinced me from jumping so I went down the stairs which was when the alien hornet already got close and a reaper like a creature that seemed like it was following me as well stood in my way. I jumped over the reaper tried to get the bottle, which was now a coca-cola can that someone took and put into their pants. I followed them trying to get it but wasn't able to outrun the alien hornet that way.

If I remember correctly I woke up after that. It was too early yet since it seemed to be dark out. So I tried to get back to sleep. Successfully!

I had the same dream then, well, sorta. Again similar mall, still a bottle but I was followed by a zombie this time. Well, multiple so it seemed, as every few meters a new zombie followed me if I outran one, but I was much slower this time around, I tried to use a shortcut through some stairs down into an alley, but I wasn't able to skate the bottle slowing me down even further I tried to throw one of the mall humans in the way of the zombie... err... let's say at this point that the dream did feel like a video game, I wouldn't ever do that in real life. I even feel bad about hurting insects and try to avoid even that.

A Game?

Let's see.. so the goal was to survive or get as far as possible. We were followed by an alien hornet at first, later on by a reaper. There seemed to be a different mode or difficulty that had zombies follow the player. The player is given a bottle that can be between full and empty which influences the player in some way. and is used to skate through the level. In both cases the levels were malls. Different paths can give speed boosts if used correctly to outrun the enemy. Additionally, there were multiple mini-games and things that speed you up.

So, yeah. This can be translated into a game quite easily. It does take a few extra steps. There are too many uncertainties yet.

Also... no idea if people would play this. That's the issue with these... weird... games.

By the way, if you're a game dev and you want to make this at minimum giving credits would be more than appreciated. I'm certain my unconsciousness wouldn't appreciate you claiming this as your own, I guess?

[1] https://terraria.gamepedia.com/Alien_Queen

3D Game Development.. Beware the Rotation!

Less serious post this time around, I just want to share the fun I had during the Game Engineering lecture.

A Little To Read Before...

So to get you on the same terms. I'm currently studying Games Engineering at the Technical University Munich and we have a Unity 3D platformer project as one of the practice tutorial things. We did an STG or Shoot 'Em up before the platformer that you might see in the future that's another story though. Anyways according to the tutorial we're supposed to make different kinds of platforms and we want but there's a list of possible options. There could be falling platforms, spinning platforms, etc.. I liked the idea of a spinning platform as it reminded me of Super Mario 64. Thus I tried to implement the spinning platform and that's where the fun came out of.

A Spinning Platform, Not So Hard, Right?

Oh, boy. I created the mesh in Blender since I wanted an octagon and it was a perfect opportunity to get into Blender. Created, imported, materialized, added the script to make it spin, tested, worked.

See, it is easy. After a week or two, we were supposed to make a box that can be pushed by the player. Simple. Our player has a Rigidbody, adds another to the box. Done. Added fancy normal map and height map to the box to make it look even better and programmed it to be able to swim in the water in which the player drowns. All nice a perfect.

I went to test it and pushed the box off into the water while testing the swimming as well. Seems good, but then something happened. The boxes changed their scaling. 

"Why the hell did they do that?", I was thinking to myself. After trial and error, I started to kinda realize what it has to do with.

The Culprit Was Found

Every time a box came near the spinning platform it's scaling was changed. There was no doubt about it, it was the spinning platform. After testing some more I finally also figured out the problem, sorta. So the issue was that the spinning platform works like so: if something collides with the platform it is considered a child of the platform and spins like the platform spins. Makes sense right? Unfortunately, if some Rigidbody actually rolls or rotates the two rotates interact with each other resulting in the scaling of the object to change. The result got me my own game idea and a lot of fun even though I just wanted to do a tiny little bit of debugging during the lecture.

What's So Funny About That?

Well.. imagine the player being pushed kilometers into the air, being shot out of the map outside of the death zone, like a homerun ending up soft locked, boxes resizing into all kinds of shapes and with a short amount of code change the player changing to weird kind of shapes, scales and sizes as well. Yeah, I had my fun with this.

Let's Get Serious Again

But, let's be serious. I haven't figured out how to solve this issue. As a reminder: we have a spinning platform and different game objects with Rigidbodies that are supposed to move with the spinning platform. How do I stop them from changing their scaling? I'm currently thinking about calculating the movement and then adding velocity to the Rigidbody without rotation... I don't know.

---

(HD) Pixel Art: Zoom & Fidelity Way

I'm fascinated with pixel art. I'm not good at drawing because I'm unhappy if the drawing isn't perfect. This is what pixel art allows me to do. Unfortunately, pixel art takes a lot of time and can be quite complicated, especially if you start off on zero. Luckily there are some ways on how to start off.

What Is Pixel Art?

In case, someone doesn't know pixel art, this is basically a different technique on doing art, which most often results in the art looking differently. Anyone who has played an SNES, NES or Arcade game you may remember the sweet 8-bit or 16-bit graphics. Maybe you have played Minecraft with standard graphics which is the same thing. Pixel art is usually done by placing pixel after pixel ending up with a full picture at the end. There are multiple techniques included in pixel art to get the results you want and there some more strict or less strict rules on color picking and techniques, but I'm not going into these in this post.   

Starting Off On Something

Now let's see how you can start with pixel art. Of course, it's possible to start off of nothing but it makes things harder, especially for people who are new to pixel art. I've done multiple small pixel arts of sizes up to 64x64. Going higher than that is not as easy anymore, even more, if you haven't gathered any experience. Luckily, I found some ways to get your first bigger art started. Here are some ways to start off I found on the internet:

Using Real-Life Drawing

One strategy I found, starts off on a real drawing that's scanned in or drawn on the computer. Afterward, they use this concept to clean up the lines and thus transform it into the pixel art concept instead. Then all normal techniques can be applied.

Creating Pixel Art Concept

This goes into the direction of starting off without something. Basically what you're doing here is draw a concept pixel for pixel until you get the result you want and then apply all the normal techniques. I can't suggest this to anyone who hasn't gained enough experience. You need to know the techniques and need experience for certain shapes and how to do certain things. Without it you're gonna have a bad time. (Yep, that meme is probably dead... "INVOKE THE DED!")

Zoom & Fidelity Way

Heart using Zoom & Fidelity with
8x8 chunks

By coincidence, I got this weird idea to do it differently. I want to make pixel art and I want it to explode out of proportion. No more 64x64 or smaller. So, what I did was, I created the pixel art using 8x8 chunks of pixels. As you can see, the picture on the right represents a heart drawn out of pixels. However it's not one pixel per black square, it's 64 pixels for each black square. Additionally, this does not look fine or high quality or however you may want to describe it, it looks very very pixelated. It has a low fidelity or amount of detail.

Heart using Zoom & Fidelity with
4x4 chunks

This is the base of the picture representing what I want to make, next up I'm adding more fidelity or detail to it by smoothing the lines with smaller chunks of pixels. This time 4x4. As you can see it looks much smoother but weird. It sometimes happens that it looks weird and that's totally fine. We can still clean up and fix it in the upcoming processes. For now, we just want it to look smoother and have more detail - more fidelity.

Heart using Zoom & Fidelity with
2x2 chunks

Alright, next up we decrease the size of our pixels again. So far I've been using the 8, 4, 2, 1 chain. I expect others to work as well but I'm a fan of binary numbers / the power of 2 chains. Anyways, we're further smoothing out and adding fidelity to our image and you can see the result. We've smoothed out the shape much more it looks much more like a non-pixelated heart now. This is not the end, however.

Heart using Zoom & Fidelity

Last but not least next up we use single pixels to further smooth it out and add fidelity. This is going to be the end result. Now we need to use all the pixel art techniques to make it look the way we want. Obviously, if you see something wrong with the heart that's me showing my inexperience with using the techniques correctly. I just recently started, but you can see how good it looks in comparison to the first one. Additionally, it's now 128x128 and not 15x15 and yet it's still made the same way pixel art is made.

Beautiful.

Conclusion

I've been using these techniques for one of my games and to gain more experience with pixel art as well, whether or not this technique is perfect or can be applied to everything is hard to say. This is something I came up with myself, I don't know if someone else had the same idea. (I'm not claiming anything :P though I could use the money probably haha xD) In the end, this is a technique that did it for me and maybe it helps other people too in either gaining more experience or in making bigger pixel art.

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Senses

We use devices for radio waves and magnetic waves to detect the unknown. Is focusing our sensory skills to pick up the unknown far fetched?

For now, looking for:

- 1 Game Programmer
- 1 Modeler
- 1 Artist
- 1 Sound Designer

There will be no payment before release - Project in-come will be split evenly if no other agreement will be achieved.

#horror #gamedev #lfdevs message me if interested

Game Genre: Collect-a-thon

It's been a while since the last post. I'm still researching several big topics for theorycrafting. Since I'm working solo and have a job at the same time and I want to play games as well don't expect it anytime soon.

Anyways I've been playing Hollow Knight for a while now and recently I looked up for 3D Metroidvania games. I found a post where people called Banjo Kazooie a Metroidvania.
I disagree and here's why.

The Collect-a-thon

Collect-a-thons were the top games back in the old days. With titles like Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Spyro the Dragon, Donkey Kong 64 and many more. We even got an attempt of reviving the series with Yooka & Laylee. So let's go into it and analyze these genres and what's typically for them and why people may mistake these.

Collecting Pointless Objects

"Now then, in line with Banjo tradition, your challenge will consist of collecting as many pointless objects as possible" 

~ Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

 Is a collect-a-thon about collecting pointless objects as rare sarcastically states in their 3rd installment of the Banjo-Kazooie series? Well, let's see our examples.

Super Mario 64 Collectibles

In Super Mario 64 we've got five collectibles.

• Yellow coins that increase your coin score and health reaching a score of 100 rewards a star
• Red coins that increase your coin twice score, health twice and collecting all eights gives us a star
• Blue coins that are timed and give five times as much coin score and health.
• Stars that are used to progress through the worlds and levels
• Keys that are used to progress through sections of the game.

Banjo Kazooie Collectibles

In Banjo Kazooie we've got ten collectibles.

• Honeycombs to increase your maximum health
• Red feathers that are used for the flight ability
• Golden feathers that are used for the invincibility ability
• Eggs that are used as ammunition
• Notes the primary currency for abilities and progressing the open world
• Jigsaw pieces/Jiggies the primary currency for unlocking more levels
• Cheato Pages are used to unlock cheats for the game
• Honey to fill up your health
• Jinjo's collecting five of these will give you a jiggy. Each level has them.
• Mumbo Tokens these are required for unlocking transformations at Mumbo

Spyro the Dragon Series Collectibles

In the series of Spyro the Dragon, not counting only the first three, there are 12 collectibles.

• Crystal Statues collectible to progress the first installment of the series
• Diodes collectible to progress the second installment of the series
• Dragon Eggs another collectible required to progress later worlds of the first installment
• Red Gem main signature collectible and currency but also required to progress adds 1
• Green Gem main signature collectible and currency but also required to progress adds 2
• Blue Gem main signature collectible and currency but also required to progress adds 5
• Yellow Gem main signature collectible and currency but also required to progress adds 10
• Purple Gem main signature collectible and currency but also required to progress adds 25
• Orbs a currency to progress the second installment of the series
• Skillpoints can be found, gained and unlocked, increases your health and unlocks lore when all have been collected
• Spirit Particles required to unlock temporal power-ups
• Talismans another currency to progress the second installment of the series

We could go through other games too but I think you already notice something. These collectibles are not useless. There's always something connected to them.

Conclusion

So, collect-a-thons are all about collecting objects. You need to collect objects to progress the game. This is the aspect that makes the game differ from others. At the same time, we see this mechanic used for different purposes. However, there's always a limited amount of the progress-oriented currencies and they cannot be farmed.

Different Purposes

Furthering Access

Future content or levels require you to collect currency. If you don't have enough you can't enter new areas.

Unlocking Abilities

Collecting a currency allows you to learn new moves that either helps you gain more currency or make the game easier.

Improving Status

Similar to abilities but more on the passive side, collectibles may be used to increase your chances of surviving, like health upgrades.

Resource

There may be collectibles used to fill up your resources. These usually aren't limited and can be collected over and over.

Sub-goals
Sub-goals, inception or whatever you want to call these, these collectibles are there for you to do things to get the main collectible that furthers your progress.

 

Game Dev - Update Post December 2017

The initial goal of my blog was to keep people up-to-date on what I'm currently doing. Aside from all the theorycrafting I now do - which I don't mind, since I really enjoy it - I also try - when I find the time, which I don't lately - to work on my current game projects. Of course, I have to differentiate between Patreon members and non-Patreons somehow. So what I'm going to do is talk a little about my ideas and projects without going too much into the detail.

General

Lately, I haven't picked up the game development, though I've considered it two to three times. The only code I've written is the picross game on this blog, which you can play by clicking on the "Play Picross". I have several projects at the same time already, though I don't mind, since I'm able to work on one project until I'm stuck, allowing me to work on the other. Also, the motivation to work on the projects is fluctuating extremely. This is probably due to my unstable life situation right now. I don't have a stable income and I don't know what the future holds up. As long this keeps on I occasionally - very often even - feel rather demotivated to work on projects. Anyways going over my projects from the oldest to the newest.

Drakonur

Drakonur or Knights of Drakonur is a project I've created during my apprenticeship as a school project. I've put a lot of time into it designing the prototype. However, I wasn't too happy with it. It was missing something. After working on the game design and starting to develop it for desktop instead of mobile using OpenGL and SDL I switched back to mobile development but instead of using the API I've created with the help of a tutorial I instead wanted to use Unity at the same time one of my friends suggested to make it a web app. So much back story. Anyways it's inspired by games like Guild Wars 1 and Shakes & Fidget. The goal was to make a round-based RPG with multiple classes, dungeons, places to explore, enemies to defeat and villages to visit.

Arcana Magika

Arcana Magika is a project I've created when trying to revive the panel de pon genre. It has first been developed in C++ with OpenGL and SDL but I've ported it later to Unity for mobile devices. The base game is supposed to be a remake of panel de pon featuring all the modes the game "Tetris Attack" did. The full game will allow you to select players like in "Tetris Attack" but with abilities.

Against the World

Patreon members already might've heard about this one. Against the World is a game that is planned for mobile and will be developed in Unity. The goal is to create a game where you have to fight any kind of objects from the real world. The premise is to catch the essence of fighting the Negative Man in Earthbound while going creative with the possibilities. The fighting system will be similar to Earthbound with options like in Undertale. It's the last project I've worked on.

Other Ideas and Plans

If you expect me to tell you more you'll be wrong. However, if you want to check out more ideas of me, I'll keep Patreon members up-to-date with ideas projects, blog posts, streams, youtube videos, education and to be up-to-date on all just costs $1. I mean seriously. $1 doesn't hurt anyone with an income and if every person in the world would give me one I could go full-time game development and game development education.

Scaling Content: WildStar vs Guild Wars 2

Games that have a gear grind or a power creep, in which you get stronger and stronger, too strong for the previous content have a problem. At some point, your equipment and character are completely overpowered, too overpowered for the current content. So you're too strong for the current content and even stronger than that for the older content. Where's the challenge? That's why game designers and developers came up with a new concept.

Scaling Content

The idea behind this is, that the content scales in difficulty. To name a few games that have implemented this: Diablo III, Guild Wars 2 and WildStar.

Looking at Guild Wars 2 and WildStar we have:

Guild Wars 2 to allows the player to select between 100 different levels with a handful of different scenery in the Fractal of the Mists dungeon. The higher the level the more difficult.

WildStar uses a prime system. With level 50 you can start working on a primal matrix by collecting essences from different types of content. This matrix allows you to be stronger for higher prime content. There's the selection between prime 0 to prime 15, although the maximum item level drops at prime 13. The higher prime levels are just for essences and the kick of difficulty.

So What Changes Between the Levels?

In Guild Wars 2 with each level, the number of standard mobs and their levels increase. Also, these creatures have more health and do more damage. Comparing different difficulty tiers, some enemies also get new abilities. From level 20 on it also implements a new mechanic called agony. This is a damage over time that either comes from the presence of big bosses or from certain attacks of bosses and mini-bosses. Agony deals with a percentage of your health as damage and can be reduced with agony resistance. From level 26 on the fractal levels start to get debuffs from stacking deals damage and agony damage when attacking an enemy to enemies explode after death. At level 71, when a player gets downed a Fractal Avenger will spawn and try to stomp the downed player.

WildStar, on the other hand, decreases the player's damage, while increasing the enemy's damage and health.

Comparison: Guild Wars 2 vs WildStar

As you can see compared to WildStar in Guild Wars 2 a lot more changes between the levels happen. Of course, if the enemies live longer by having the players damage decreased and the monster's health increased the fights take longer. If the fights take longer mechanics play a greater role. Additionally increasing the damage of the monsters requires healers to heal more tanks to be able to work with more incoming damage and it decreases the allowance for errors. Aside from scaling up to dodge-able attacks that kill in two hits, Guild Wars 2 does the same. The health of enemies increases and their damage increases. So here too, enemies live longer requiring players to survive mechanics much longer. Compared to  WildStar, Guild Wars 2 raises the stakes further though. From level 26 on players are limited in their playstyle due to the instabilities. At level 51  it's two instabilities already and with level 76 it's three instabilities.

The following instabilities are currently available:

• No Pain, No Gain     - Enemies receive protection (33% less incoming damage) might (increased damage) and fury (increased critical hit damage)
• Last Laugh                - Enemies explode when killed
• Afflicted                    - Enemies apply random damage over time effects
• Social Awkwardness - Receive agony and damage from nearby allies when you attack enemies
• Toxic Trail                 - Enemies leave a trail of toxic sludge behind them as they move around
• Flux Bomb                 - you are periodically afflicted by a flux bomb. (an AoE that explodes with another AoE lying around afterward
• Adrenaline Rush        - Enemies become enraged for a time when low on health
• Hamstrung                 - The lower your health, the slower you move.
• Fractal vindicators    - The Fractal Avengers are replaced by more powerful foes.
• Mists convergence     - Different enemies, effects or mini-bosses from other fractals spawn at random 

Additionally, some enemies gain new skills and abilities the higher the levels are and to top this all another death mechanic is added to the stack at level 71.

What Makes This Better?

It's not necessarily the amount of changes Guild Wars 2 implements. Actually, it's just one big thing that can be summarized as: "Feels different". That's all it needs. The higher the difficulty the more difficult it should be, obviously. However, it should also be a different difficult, even just a little. Scaling the same content up higher and higher doesn't change the difficulty much. If you were able to get a gold dungeon in WildStar, running higher levels that equal your groups new equip and damage will still be gold. The only interesting part is the levels higher than your group's equip and damage. Unfortunately scaling enemy damage and lengthening the fights makes them more annoying and boring. It's nothing new, it's the same fight like every other time only difference it goes longer and being unconcentrated or making a mistake is punished more heavily. This doesn't work as good since Guild Wars 2 applies new mechanics, which makes fights more difficult. Enemies attacking faster, more to take care of, more to think about during the fight and new things to learn while increasing the time of the fight just by the amount that is required for it to feel longer but not too long.

So What Should We Take From This?

If you're implementing scaling content make sure that there's a difficulty curve. Additionally adding new mechanics on higher levels even if it's just a small attack or some little thing the players need to do, with increasing levels all this will play together resulting in a difficulty that feels much better. Combine this with increasing health and damage of the enemies and you've got a good scaling system.

Keep in mind though, this is all just my opinion on the topic! So don't take it for granted!

Stats in Games - Brainstorm

I heard that some games have these things that are called equipment, I think? And so apparently this equipment has some weird numbers and words on it.

Power, Precision, Critical Hit Chance, Attack Speed

 Really weird stuff.

Stats In Games

Okay, enough playing dumb. There are a bunch of games especially RPG or MMORPG and AMMORPG, which have equipment with stats on it. These stats increase your survivability, outgoing damage or your ability to heal others. I've played... a few games but kinda the right ones to get introduced to a handful of these. So I kinda want to list them all in this post and maybe add some of my own? Anyways here we go.

Brainstorm Time!

Power 

Assault Power, Intelligence, Strength, Dexterity, Might

This is the main attribute. It scales either the effectiveness of your assault abilities or the direct damage you do with your attacks.

Critical Hit Chance
Precision, Accuracy, Luck, Critical Chance
The concept is the same, though. This stat is basically a chance that your attacks deal more damage than in hitting enemies critically. This one also goes hand in hand with the next one.

Critical Hit Severity
Critical Hit Damage, Ferocity, Critical Damage
As I said, hand in hand with the previous one: It increases how much more damage you deal when your attacks hit critically.

Vitality
Health, Max Health, Stamina, Health Bonus
This one simply increases your health pool. The amount by how much your health is changed differs from game to game.

Armor
-
This stat is usually gained from only the equipment you have. It is either used directly or converted and added on another stat to later decrease the damage you would normally take.

Resistance
Toughness, Mitigation
This is the stat armor that may be added to. It decreases the enemies damage you would normally take.

Multi-Hit Chance
-
The result is the same as with critical hit chance and critical hit severity the idea behind it - not so much. The idea is the higher your multi-hit chance the more likely you are to hit your enemy with your attack another time but this time weaker. It also synergizes with critical hit chance. The weaker multi-hit can hit critically too.

Multi-Hit Severity
-
Goes hand in hand with a multi-hit chance. Usually, this is below 100% as the multi-hit is usually supposed to be weaker.

Vigor
-
In WildStar it increases your damage respective to your health. The more percent health you have the more effective vigor is. In Skyforge vigor increases your damage when you chase an enemy.

Tenacity
-
Compared to how vigor works in WildStar this one scales with the enemy's health instead. The less health the enemy has the more damage you deal.

Armor Pierce
Armor Ignore
It's kinda possible to read it out of the name: the higher the stat is the more armor or resistance your attacks ignore. So the decrease in your damage is lower.

Attack Speed
-
The stat that increases your... attack speed. Simply put: you attack faster the higher this stat is.

Condition Damage
-
Some games split direct damage and damage over time. These games may use an attribute such as condition damage which increases the damage over time.

Expertise
Condition Duration
Having damage over time and direct damage split? Why not increase the length of damage over time? That's what this stat does.

Concentration
Buff Duration, Boon Duration
Damage over Time isn't the only thing you can increase the duration of. This stat increases the duration of buffs or in Guild Wars 2 of boons to be specific.

Healing Power
Support Power
Sometimes the damage isn't the only thing. Let's go with an attribute that increases your out-going healing.

Intensity
-
Similar to vigor this stat increases your healing by a certain percentage. However, it increases the cost of those skills as well.

Mana
Mana Pool, Focus Pool, Focus
If your skill cost increases you should increase your currency as well. This stat increases the currency of your skills.

Strikethrough
-
A stat that increases your chance to hit the enemy.

Deflect Chance
Agility
The opposite, a stat that increases your chance to deflect or completely avoid an enemy attack. Strikethrough is subtracted from this value.

Glance Chance
-
This is the chance for an attack to deal less damage than usual.

Glance Mitigation
-
By how much is the glanced attack reduced? The glance mitigation value determines that.

Critical Mitigation
-
Critical hits really hurt. Luckily this stat reduces the damage you get from a critical attack.

Deflect Critical Hit Chance
-
Or give up on ever being critically hit again with deflect critical hit chance. It decreases the chance enemies have to critically hit you.

Energy Recovery
Mana Recovery, Focus Recovery, Mana Regeneration, Energy Regeneration
Your resource needs to come from somewhere. This stat will increase your regeneration of the resource. Usually per second.

Cooldown Reduction
-
Having problems with your skills being on cooldown all the time? This attribute reduces the time you have to wait for your skills to be ready again.

Lifesteal
Life siphon
Regardless of being a fan of necromancy or not. Lifesteal removes health from your enemies and adds an equal amount to your health.

Focus Cost Reduction
Mana Cost Reduction, Energy Cost Reduction
Sick of spending all your resources on one expensive skill? This attribute reduces the price you pay by a certain percentage.

Reflect Chance
-
This attribute is the chance you have to punish a foe for dealing damage to you, by reflecting said damage.

Reflect Damage
-
And this is the amount of damage that is reflected. Either as number or percentage.

Movement Speed
Speed, Swiftness
Feel like a slowpoke? This is your solution. This stat increases the speed at which you move through the world.

Regeneration
Life per Second
The resource isn't the only thing that can regenerate. Health can too. This attribute increases your health every second.

Life per Hit
-
Similar to life steal but not quite. Increasing this attribute increases the health you gain every time an attack of you hits the enemy.

Ranged Damage
-
This one increases your damage dealt if you're further away. In Skyforge it was 20 yards. However, you could make it a percentage like with vigor.

Adaption
-
If you like to be hit over and over again this might support your play style. This stat reduces incoming damage when you're hit multiple times.

Control Efficiency
CC Duration
Are you a fan of Crowd Control? this attribute increases the effectiveness of your CCs.

Control Suppression
-
The opposite of the previous one. This will decrease the effectiveness of CCs on you.

That's a bunch of stats I came across, not all but most of them and I guess that's enough already for today.

Leveling: Tutorial or Part of the Game?

Ah yes, you start a new MMORPG and the first thing you'll have to do is level your ass up to the end game, what a great way to start off your game. No wonder some games scare people away. Sometimes the leveling goes too fast, sometimes it goes too slow, but why?

Leveling As Tutorial

Some might argue leveling is a tutorial. The problem with this statement is that leveling takes a lot of time in many games. Tutorials usually take a few seconds up to some minutes in other games and now you want to tell me these tutorials take days and up to or more than 40 hours? What am I supposed to learn? Well, I guess there's a lot in some MMORPGs. Let's check out what you can learn in WildStar.

WildStar Tutorial

WildStar has a tutorial but that hasn't gotten much to do with leveling. So let's just look at what you unlock when leveling.

There are 50 levels. The first two levels do not unlock anything with level 3 you get the looking for group-tool, Player vs Player, the skill tree basically and two new zones. Level 4 and 5 each unlock one new skill and another skill slot. Level 6 unlocks three skills of your alternative role (e.g. healer), your first instance and the first PvP instance, as well as two new maps. Level 7 gives you the 6th skill slot and two new abilities. Level 8 unlocks salvaging and another skill. Level 9 gives you 2 new abilities and a 7th skill slot. Level 10 unlocks crafting, two skills, the last skill slot and the first point for the skill tree and the first point for upgrading your skills. From here on out every level unlocks another point each. Level 12 gives you the ability to create guilds, the next instance, and two more skills. With level 14 we get two more skills, housing and two new areas including our main city. Level 15 gives us the ability to craft upgrades for our gear, the ability to upgrade our skills further and a new PvP and PvE instance. The next level unlocks just a new skill, followed by unlocking of another instance. Two more skills with level 18. With level 20 our skills can be upgraded even further, we get two more skills and access to a new PvE instance. New area and two more skills are unlocked with level 22. Two more skills with 24. 25 allow us to upgrade our skills further and we get two more PvE instances, followed by another instance at level 26. Now it takes a while until we unlock more upgrade possibilities for our gear as well as raising our skills further, two PvE instances, one PvP instance and a new map with level 30. 31: a new PvE instance. Now it takes until 35 to unlock another PvE instance and the ability to upgrade our skills further and a new map. With level 40 we get skilled riding, the ability to further improve our skills, three PvE instances and a new map. Level 45 gives us the ability to push our skills to the maximum and a new map. Another map with level 46. Two new maps with level 49. And we did it. Level 50 with PvP arenas, more PvE instances, raids,  improved riding, special quests (contracts) and some more maps.

Alright, that's a bunch. But as you might have seen some levels do not unlock anything but points for the skill tree. Nothing wrong with this, but for a tutorial hardly meaningful. However, there is a reason leveling may take this long. Let's look at the possibilities you have.

Build Possibilities

You start off with three skills and three skill slots. Only one possibility for your build. With level 4 and 5 we get each another slot and another skill. We have five skills and five skill slots now. With level 6 we unlock three skills. Now we have eight skills but only five skill slots. The number of combinations is now:

C(n,r) = C(8,5) = 8! / (5! * (8 - 5)!) = 56.

So with level 6 we already have 56 combinations. With level 7 we get a 6th slot and two new skills. We now have 10 skills and 6 skill slots.

C(n,r) = C(10,6) = 10! / (6! * (10 - 6)!) = 210

210 possibilities now. Of course, not every possible build is also useful or makes sense. Anyways the next change we have is at level 8 with another skill:

C(n,r) = C(11,6) = 11! / (6! * (11 -  6)!) = 462

To speed things up here's a list of levels and combinations:

• Level 10: C(15,8) = 6435
• Level 20: C(24,8) = 735471
• Level 30: C(28,8) = 3108105
• All abilities: C(32,8) = 10518300

This is only taking into account the skill bar. The skill tree and the ability points that can be spent on upgrading our skills allow for many more combinations. Especially since they go hand in hand with the combinations above.

Guild Wars 2 Tutorial

Like in WildStar the actual tutorial only consists of a small instance. The leveling here goes up to 80.

The level rewards can be found here: Guild Wars 2 Wiki: Level Rewards

In Guild Wars 2 it's even more complicated than in WildStar. We have a lot more combinations here. For example, you can wear a two-hand weapon or a one-hand weapon in the main hand and off-hand. Each weapon gives you class and weapon-specific skills. There are already several different combinations here and that's only the start. There is even more with the utility skills, heal skill and elite skills you get and you can combine one weapon set with another weapon set.

Well Sounds Like a Lot

And it is a lot and learning to use it all takes some time, but it might not take as long as the developers may have anticipated. In some cases like Guild Wars 2, the developers want people to test different builds and skills creating a higher leveling time but also having the time not to level too fast enjoying the area and beauty of the world.

Guild Wars 1 Tutorial

Anyone who has played Guild Wars 1 knows: Once you have reached the maximum level you're done with the tutorial. Now the real game starts. This tutorial only took a few minutes to a few hours. Nothing compared to the leveling nowadays. This is a fine example of how leveling as a tutorial works

Path of Exile Leveling

Path of Exile is an extreme opposite of this. Here the leveling doesn't stop even in the end game. At level 90 the continued leveling is extremely tedious and time-consuming. Especially since you lose the experience of your current level when dying. So it often happens that people don't reach the maximum level of 100 in a season.

Is Leveling a Tutorial or Part of the Game?

Going through all these examples I'd say it can definitely be used as a tutorial and also as a part of the game. Whether you like leveling or not is something everyone needs to know for themselves. There are ups and downs to this system. Also, it helps out to prolong unlocks to not overwhelm the player. Especially in MMORPGs which nowadays should and partly do focus on offering people all kinds of different content from achievement hunt to costumes to difficult content and even a little grind here and there. So with growing content and possibilities for the players to come these need to be introduced slowly. However, developers should keep in mind that the leveling doesn't go too slow nor too fast. Finding the right speed for the players is hard though.

Another way to use leveling would be like in real life. You never stop learning new things, you never stop leveling in real life. So you could make a leveling system in similar games. Keep in mind that this doesn't work well with people who seek to "complete" everything though. They might not like something infinite.

Designing Difficulty In Games

For a long time, difficult games have been rather rare. There's a good reason for this. If you make a game too difficult people might not enjoy it. If they don't enjoy it, it will fare badly economically.
So the question is.

How To Design Difficulty Well?

To answer this question we need to check what makes something difficult in the first place. What are the elements we can use to raise the difficulty? How does the difficulty change over time? (difficulty curve) And why even bother to make content difficult? What's the gain?

What Makes Something Difficult?

Let's start with our first question. There are several ways to make something difficult. But to boil it down to make something difficult you need to make the player push their limits. Which limits? The limits I'm talking about include reaction time, hand-eye coordination, memory, fast thinking and several more.

What Elements Can Be Used?

One way to make things more difficult is to increase punishment when failing.

The most common way this is implemented is, taking higher amounts of damage from avoidable damage such as AoEs (Area of Effects) or from mechanics. The highest difficulty would be if everything one hits. 

Another way would be to challenge the player's multitasking capability.

People might be able to do one boss mechanic and then another without problems. However, the layering of mechanics playing at the same time requires people to set a priority and solve multiple problems at the same time. 

The reaction speed of the player can be tested as well.

Boss animations, marked areas, casts that need to be interrupted, turning away from the boss, regardless of the details if the player needs to react fast to a certain mechanic of the boss the faster he needs to react the harder it gets. However, this ability decreases with age. So when using this have older people in mind as well.

Or the player's ability to check their surroundings.

Again boss animations and marked areas, encounter timer, mini-map, changes in the boss arena, there's a lot you can focus on or watch. 

Requiring you to improve your performance.
Damage checks in games where there may not be better equipment require you to improve your play-style and/or movement.

Having new mechanics to learn.
As simple as it is, a new mechanic requires practice and time.

That's a bunch of them, there are more but that's something for now. Another thing we should look at is the difficulty curve.

The Change of Difficulty

The change in difficulty in games is usually represented by a curve. This curve starts slow and gets steeper over time with increasing progress. The easiest way to implement this is by starting off with a new mechanic and keep it simple having the focus on this new mechanic. After solving this mechanic you should create more complex systems that depend on this mechanic and on the next step mix it up with other already implemented and taught mechanics.

But Why Bother?

Non-difficult games get a lot of players, so why should I bother all this trouble for my game? The reason is simple. If the learning curve is done correctly you might get both hardcore and casual gamers under one. Alternatively, you can implement a way to play content in higher difficulty for hardcore players and lower difficulty for casual gamers. Whatever the case is, some people are interested in difficult games and it would be sad to skip those.

And Now We Have Loot Boxes

I've heard a lot about loot boxes in the past days and I've decided to take my stance on them.

Image from dorkly.com
see the post 65536

It started with DLC's (Downloadable Content) followed by P2W (pay to win) and then they started releasing unfinished games.

And now

And Now We Have Loot Boxes

So what's the issue with those loot boxes?
I've heard many things about them. Only negative. I even heard people call it a cash grab. Are those people right? Are loot boxes evil or bad?

Well, luckily I don't believe in things being inherently bad or evil. Like.. a weapon isn't inherently bad. It may have been created with bad intentions but the weapon itself can also be used for good. That means its usage is important. Exactly just like in game design. If you create a feature and it was implemented badly, it's bad. So to fix something bad you either remove it from the game or make it good.

What's the Problem With Loot Boxes?

To figure out how to make something good you need to know what's wrong with it and to know what's wrong with it you need to know what it is. A loot box is a virtual box which contains several or a single virtual item. This item is decided by chance from a pool of items.

Now from our explanation of loot boxes we already have some aspect catching our eye. If not I made the word bold.

...

It's Chance.

So we have chance and money involved. By the definitions of the word gamble:

"play games of chance for money; bet."

"take risky action in the hope of a desired result."

No wonder China, Japan, Australia and the Isle of Man regulate loot boxes under the gambling law.

The Perfect Lootbox

The perfect gambling would be where the gambler and the provider - when doing infinite runs - average on no win and no loss. Why would that be perfect? In this case, no one has an advantage compared to the other it's a game of chance for both and even if the balance changes for one to gain more than the other in the end it averages out.

The same would be for loot boxes. If you pay $5 and you get rewards that average out at $5 you're happy and the provider (developer) gets the money.

Life's Not Perfect

However, doing it this way can easily result in a loss for the provider. In a classic gambling environment if the win and loss average out at $0 the provider might make no income. Well, then it's not worth doing it at all. Might as well search for a different job. Thus the odds are on the provider's side so he will win more often. But our example uses the money to gamble for money. We're gambling with money to get in-game items through loot boxes.

Loot Box Value

So then what's a loot box worth? That depends on what you get from it. The pool of items you have a chance of getting from the lootbox is calculated into it.

How? Well let's say we have a loot box that has

• 5 items that are worth $1
• 3 items that are worth $3
• 2 items that are worth $5
• 1 item that is worth $10

Additionally, the chance to get each item is equal: 1/10 for each.

We can calculate the value we expect to get from the loot box each time we buy it by multiplying the value of each item with the chance of it dropping.

expected value = 5 * ($1 * 1/10) + 3 * ($3 * 1/10) + 2 * ($5 * 1/10) + 1 * ($10 * 1/10)

expected value = $3.4

What does that mean? On average you will gain this value on your account.

Problem With Lootbox Systems

Good to know! Unfortunately, this is not so easy. If we have a loot box that contains unlockables, how would you handle this? 

To explain the problem here:

If you've unlocked something on your account and you get the same thing from the lootbox again it's useless to you. If it was $5 before after unlocking it is $0. That means the expected value changes:

expected value = 5 * ($1 * 1/10) + 3 * ($3 * 1/10) + 1 * ($5 * 1/10) + 1 * ($0 * 1/10) + 1 * ($10 * 1/10)

expected value = $2.9

The worth of the lootbox dropped! That's a bad thing if players figure it out. So how do you solve this? Of course, you could say "hey let's just use the average expected value". You could do that, however, this means the first loot boxes are sold cheaper than they're worth!

Changing Prices Dynamically

One way to solve the problem could be to keep the price up to date respective to the expected value. Thus if an item has been unlocked the price changes accordingly being the most optimal all the time. However, the user might wonder what's going on.

Replacement Currency

Another way would be to replace the item that has been unlocked already with another currency that allows you to buy one of those in the pool of the lootbox. This change results in the value of the unlocked item to stay the same, thereby solving the problem.

Make It a Surprise Egg!

Maybe you've heard of it at some point in your life but in some parts of the world, there are these surprise eggs. They consist of chocolate with an inner white chocolate coating and a yellow plastic egg containing a plastic toy.

Usually, you get some random toy but every 7th egg is supposed to have the promoted toy that is limited.

So let's see what we get here.

You pay £4.00 according to google for one of those eggs and you get:

• White and Black chocolate snack (20g)
• A random toy with a 1/7 chance or ~14.28% to get the promoted toy

And this is what your loot box could be! Give your users a fixed reward from the loot box that is not worth the price but nice to have and add the random item rare or not to it additionally. Or just look at rewarding loot systems of games.

Examples in Games

Guild Wars 2 contains

• Black Lion Chests opened by Black Lion Keys containing a guaranteed item and 2-3 random items
• An unlock item at the price of 400 gems (~$5) that unlocks one of 36 skins. Unlocking a skin removes it from the pool.

Heroes of the Storm contains

• Loot boxes rewarded for each level up that contains any unlockables from skins to voices, to playable characters. If you get an unlockable twice it is replaced with an alternative currency that lets you buy unlockables without using more real money.

Conclusion

So there we go. Huge post talking about everything that came to my mind when talking about loot boxes. Keep in mind all this is just my opinion and my analysis of things.

Now I'm only a junior game developer so I'm not so firm with the reasons companies implemented the lootboxes the way they did. In the end, even if my post didn't help directly I hope it inspired people to think about it and maybe both developers and gamers come to an agreement on how to make loot boxes enjoyable for both sides.

Also, I'm open to discussion and/or disagreement. :)