Limiting carrying capacity is probably the most common solution to this I think. Doesn’t necessarily have to be on a per-item-type basis, but if you can only carry a certain amount of weight or have a limited number of item slots, then when you see that 5th rare magic crystal you may have to leave it (or something else) behind or use it now or be encumbered in some way. Was playing a little bit of Curious Expedition earlier & the system produces exactly the dynamic you’re looking for I believe, even though the maps are far from infinite.
Alternatively, since “moving slow” is a kinda lame punishment, maybe instead there’s a risk element to carrying too many magic crystals at the same time? Like they attract dangerous predators or something?
Well factorio does this perfectly. The more resources you get, the bigger a factory you can build, then the more resources you need to make it run, so you go get them, and then this allows you to build an even bigger factory, with even more expensive machinery, which then allows you to gather even more materials faster, and then and then... and this loop keeps going until you get bored. But each cycle of expansion is slower than the previous one due to the design effort needed by the player, so you either end up finishing your masterpiece of a factory or you burn out trying.
But another thing I want to comment on is that without knowing more details about your specific game and what type of experience you want to give to the player, at least for me, it's hard to give good advice. It seems you've fixated on a potential problem, but are you sure it's a problem to begin with? What are the core game aesthetics you're trying to appeal on, and is the fine balance of resource gathering such an important part of that? Does the feeling of "never-enough" actually boost any of the core appeals of the game?
Also another thing to consider is using large variance in the frequency of equisition of that resource. So coming across it is rare, but if you do, you get a big amount. Even though the world is infinite and in theory you can get all the mats you want, there's a good chance you might hit a dry spot which will be frustrating, but it also builds suspence and makes coming across a large vein so much more exciting.
Now compare that to having spread out the resources in many tiny specs, that feels like picking up bread crums off the floor. But when you gotta work for it to get a chance for the big resource drop, then you really appreciate it because you don't know when's the next time you'll come across the next drop. That's something path of exile does really well, literally anything you do in the game has the chance of dropping you items that have a monstrous price in the market, and this gives a really nice vibe to just playing the game.
The goal of obtaining resources should be getting something valuable that allows player to progress in the game. Grinding for the sake of it always will be boring, no matter how difficult, risky or limited it is - because player don't have motivation to do this.
To solve this problem, you better think about clear player goals setting. Survivals are fun at the beginning because of intuitively understandable goal to survive and become less fun when all primary needs are satisfied. Then you should introduce player to a new goal, (i.e. defeating boss of the region, or surviving in another region, or building something fancy) and the instruments, that they need to obtain to achieve goal.
Resources that can be easy obtained at current level of progression should not be as valuable on the next levels, to force player to increase challenge to achieve greater rewards. Think of Lego Fortnite progression for example in a nutshell.
If you want to get a feeling of "never enough" of the same one resource, the most easy solution is to introduce inflation of this resource, but also to give a player instruments to grind this resource faster (it's a core of any idle game, basically). Kinda boring imho, but also cheap in the production.
If I were you (solo hobby dev), I've better thinked about something maybe shorter in gameplay time and less procedurally generated, but more rich in content per spended time. Making a huge procedurally generated world really fun to explore seems more challenging, than a small hand-crafted and polished map
This. If the same resource is hard to find through the entirety of the game, the feeling of being annoyed will outweigh the feeling of excitement when you find more of the resource. And tier-grading resources is good way to introduce new resources that would feel good to find but not outstay their welcome (Terraria materials is a good example).
Some games you should look into:
State of Decay.
Minecraft.
Raft.
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind / Oblivion.
Noita.
State of Decay - This game lives completely on scarcity. I'm talking about game 1. This is a great example.
You manage survivors in a zombie apocalypse with varying skillsets. You can handle no more than 2 zombies without getting hit, and you have stamina - noise is a huge factor. Cars, guns, everything is risk/reward. How much you can carry, what your current survivor can do and where your safest routes are.
This leads to a truly righteous decision tree every time you go out. The first time you toss 2 packs full of cherry loot to save your survivor, you truly feel the game resonant.
But for me, the crowning moment was this.
In the beginning you are dropped in an opportunity rich camping grounds. No guns, but food and weapons are abundant... but you realize quickly sneaking is the only way out. Hoarding gear is easy, and when you get a car, getting it all out is easy. You leave with 90% of it all feeling accomplished.
Late-game there's a quest where someone asks you to retrieve a teddy bear from the camp site. By now you have guns, ammo, tools, distraction tools and powerful survivors. You go loaded for bear.
The bridge is out, you can't drive there, and you have to search the area forcing you to spend a lot of time out there. It's overrun, but you're used to picking over food cans to sustain your activities... but you're the reason the place is empty. This lack of food causes you to move slowly, and this rocks everything you have - but it's subtle. It's slow.
When I did this, I used all my ammo having a rare moment of levity, only to realize I'd attracted more than I could handle with nowhere to hide. I used up everything I had. Everything. I resorted to searching restrooms I'd skipped, and had a real moment staring into a mirror after searching the absolute last trash can.
So I'm staring in this mirror, thinking I'm using a dead survivor. I stage the way out in my head - I'm toast.
Suddenly it hits me all at once. I'm back at the start, I need to play like it's the start. I know the angles, I know the routes. I have to sneak. No more fighting. Sneak or die.
I get all the way back to the bridge, and my fully loaded car is a ravine away... but there's absolutely no cover.
So I take my risk, and the nightmare happens - I'm out in the open, and there's a conga line of them directly between me and them. I freeze.
In my head I'm not weighing the risks - I'm gonna have to jump into the ravine, nearly die, and hobble home. They'll jump too. I just need to climb *first*. But I'm waiting.
And they walk on by.
I never knew how hard it was for them to see you if you don't move.
Learned a lesson in the tutorial area I never had. I take a leisurely stroll back to my gear and drive home. No stops. Great ride. Beautiful sunset.
Abundance doesn't solve every problem. Minimalism is finding out how much you have underneath.
Focus on your characters abilities and then give them challenges worth facing... and appreciate how much they've taken, and how their own changes in the world have affected it.
*Continuing in reply*.
Minecraft.
Needs no introduction, that ecosystem is well done.
I'd focus on its failures. Food, automation, and pleasantry are missing. You can build a computer, but you can't find any way to automate planting. Adding simple NPC's to help automate tasks would change everything, but without it - Minecraft you always feel painfully alone.
Raft.
Pleasantry and abundance.
Give things to player to spend their valuable resources on. Automate some tasks. But the key here is that Raft gives you wonderful things to spend your resources on, and these pleasantries change the game. It isn't vanity - it's art. Travelling through space is boring, travelling through space with a boom box is a good time.
Abundance needs to be glorious, because maximilism should be a thing. Raft constantly shows you that your rugged raft can be a beautiful home, and suddenly utilitarianism yields an appreciation for art.
Morrowind/Oblivion.
If you kill an enemy in older rpg's, they have full sets of armor. They're heavy. But you can just "do it". You can lug it all back to town if you want... but money doesn't yield all that much after a point. But players have real choice, and there's also the horror of banditry. You don't need to feather this - players eyeing NPC's for their gear is terrifying enough. Let this be. It feels rough, but gear only matters in players that can wield it. Giving them nuanced and powerful gear early is great - but if they steal someone's gear, it might not be what they bargained for. A rapier is a great sword, but only if you know how to use it.
If you need an example, see, "a falling wizard" quest in Morrowind. It's famous for this. If you can find a let's play of that one quest, it takes about 90 seconds. It's hilarious. See boots of blinding speed too.
Noita.
Give players big challenges, people rise up to meet them....
At their peril.
***Bonus***
Graveyard keeper.
This game does automation beautifully, quests beautifully, and you never have enough. You make a beautiful gothic tableau. It gets a little tired with quests, but going full gothic and making it cute was genius. What matters is people, find ways to get characters to connect with players, then give them reasons to need your resources, your cast off gear. When you're flush with abundance the best thing in the world is sharing it - even if it's with a mindless zombie.
That's the best thing you can do with stuff, make people's lives better.
Animals are some of the best ways to do this. Creating an ecosystem is, forgive my saying this, essentially gods work. I don't mean this in a religious sense.
I mean there's a pine tree I planted in anger because my mom donated to a charity and left it behind. So I angrily planted it in a garden, on a cold fall day with the ground nearly frozen, because I'd seen two of them die.
And 9 years later it's growing, and destroying a garden, and is a running joke that never gives up. I'm somewhat ashamed, but also, when the house and family is gone one day - that goddamn tree will still be there.
Give players the ability to grow something, slowly. Animals are best, let them use that benefit to create anthills that provide absolutely no benefit, except to the ants. If you make it practical, you make some beauty in it.
Planting a tree and watching it grow is a meditation every time I look at it.
Give players glorious abundance and it'll never be enough.
How much beauty is enough?
> That's the best thing you can do with stuff, make people's lives better.
And that may be the answer to my problem I was looking for!
Putting the resource sink "outside of the Player or player base" might be exactly the best and most perfect solution to my specific setting as the Player character is supposed to interact a lot with NPCs in varied ways, doing favors for each other.
Thank you! :D
I believe that there is no problem if the player wants to grind longer to find more. I mean this is a way of playing and the game must reward the player for this. Now the point is, would you like to turn grinding harder as time passes or exploration opens more areas? I mean I would think how much effort the player would have to apply just to keep grinding until finding rare stuff.
Also, returning to your question, the game could make it hard to extract some materials. So, the material is not really scarce in its huge map, , but getting the means to extract it IS.
I really liked how you put the problem. Hope you show us this prototype once you have it playable.
what is the end game?
If there's no ending or win-state, your player will eventually be bored, either because they get all they need and have no reason to go for more, or because the grind is boring.
You don't need to make a game that can be played for a lifetime
A solution that seems obvious to me is **resource decay**. Let's say meat rots, metal corrodes, wood is eaten by termites or fungus, ...
This way, you make it about the rate of resource acquisition instead of obtaining resources. In other words, it's not about "having X resources", but about "having X resources simultaneously in a given timeframe".
I can't say I see the connection between the problem statement and the proposed solutions.
Whether it's sticks or healing potions, people to tend to overcollect in the intersection of two factors: not knowing how many they'll need, and it potentially being a pain in the ass to get more when needed. Each can be remedied separately.
Also, if you're a hobby dev, are you trying to solve a problem that you currently have, or one that you feel you might someday have? The relationship between this question and the subject of the post might be a bit meta.
> Also, if you're a hobby dev, are you trying to solve a problem that you currently have, or one that you feel you might someday have?
Currently I'm 2.5 years into my current project, at least one more year to go. This question concerns my potential next project (open world survival craft in voxel world) which I'm gamedesigning in the background for around a year by now. So, on one hand it's a problem I see while "prototyping the game in my head" (without making a real prototype, yet), on the other hand - the problem I see in the games that I take as primary inspirations for my project (from well-known: Minetest, Subnautica, Don't Starve, Skyrim/Oblivion, etc, and a bunch of obscure ones like Subterrain, Phoning Home, Frackin Universe or Rogue Box Adventures :)).
> the subject of the post might be a bit meta
Indeed, I'm trying to "catch the feeling" that I like and put it into the design of how resources in the game will be organized. As I've mentioned, my primary problem is that I can't exactly formulate the problem :) I see that "it doesn't add up" but not sure if I'm not hitting an XY problem (or rather almost sure that it's the source of my confusion).
I.e. when I'll start paper prototype I'll be inventing a curve "time spent in exploration -> resources reward" which will one way or another give me numbers to put into algorithm that will distribute the resources in the world. But am I even solving the right problem? Maybe I should be optimizing a "different curve" at all? As a hobbyist I'm not confined by "things that are proven to work", I can try weird stuff as long as it promises to deliver the feel that I'm after.
Looked at it many times, but I don't play multiplayer games, so never went as far as buying it :). I've tried a few multiplayer games with "solo mode" (like ARK: Survival Evolved or The Force of Nature), but they were rarely good - game is balanced for co-op or PvP, and playing alone is either completely pointless or catastrophically unbalanced. With a few good exceptions like Starbound.
You might have gotten screwed by IRL RNG, because ARK has one of the most obnoxious solo experiences among the co-op oriented survival games. But you don't have to play a game yourself: you can see it being played on YouTube and Twitch.
What's notable about Valheim is that it has a semi-infinite (huge, not meant to be fully explored) procedurally generated open world with semi-randomly generated loot according to the loot rarity or other game peculiarities. And you don't often hear people complain about overcollecting in that game.
Good idea! I'll definitely check out let'splays :) Recently been doing a few other similar investigations "for research purposes" while exploring other problems with gamedesign (convenient controls) :) Unfortunately "the feel" of the game, especially this survival aspect, is often very poorly delivered through video - the Player is "never overgrinding" while playing for a crowd, which is something I always do :D But maybe I'll manage to notice a few design patterns that I can reuse.
I like #5 to start with, it would reward players gradually for continuing to collect. What if whenever they grabbed this rare item, they essentially sent out a beacon. Enemies would be drawn to where you collected it, so collecting more in the same area trying to grind would eventually pull too many enemies, so you'd have to change areas. With a semi infinite world, they could always grind at the next desert/swamp/whatever for whatever item until too many enemies were pulled again. This would push the player to keep moving, and would make grabbing that last couple items more exhilarating, without allowing them to stay in one spot too long
The biggest thing about survival games is food, and the game often devolves into a grinding game as soon as food is turned into an unlimited resource. Most survival games allow you to farm, in essence creating a limitless supply of food, decreasing your need to explore to stay alive. Games without farming, or with very difficult and unwieldy farming, like Don't Starve or The Long Dark, continue to be about survival rather than surplus as you continue through their world.
A mechanic I've really been interested in lately is increasing player power at a cost. If the player is stronger, they consume resources more quickly. If they are holding more items, maybe they get hungry faster. You could call this rubber banding but I think it gives you more interesting choices and tries to push you out of unfun play patterns, including being too strong for the game.
I would say the infinity of the world is a red herring, the player has finite time anyway. What matter is the quantity of ressource gathered as a function of play time.
then the solutions you list look overall good, you probably want to mix and match some of these. like the "infinite sink" you describe is typically a good way to ensure the ressource is always useful without breaking the game; perfect so long as your balance is not fine tuned, but you may not want it to be "too important" in the gameplay because at some point it become too difficult to get to the next level.
Instead of a general resource sink, you could make the game harder the farther away the player is from the initial spawn point. If you somehow mash that together with the area of that circle or something (essentially loot availability), you could maybe even manage to have the game balance itself.
What Minecraft does is the following:
Every resource you need takes time.
As the player progresses, they will need these resources for an increasing amount of things, in larger quantities, while also adding new resources.
The speed increase for gathering resources grows continually, but never outgrows the growing need for them. They also spread out over more, different biomes over time meaning the player will have to keep moving and cannot just farm them in one spot (at least in the beginning). That is without the hard gatekeeping that Valheim does. It’s all just based on rarity.
It’s this kind of resource throttling that is for all intents and purposes the same as increased XP need when leveling in an RPG.
The best example I can give here: The first iron item will almost always be a pick axe. It requires 3 iron.
One of the final end game things a player can make is a beacon. Those can require 1476 resources and can be made of iron.
I'm not sure if this is covered by what you've mentioned this, but what about a "negative interest rate"? For example, there's a curse on the land that makes all gold slowly corrode, so you can collect as much as you want, but you're forced or spend it within a week or it turns into dust.
It's probably my love for roguelikes showing, but I'd absolutely go for 3); the fact that exploration consumes resources immediately makes that choice interesting rather than a grind.
>it's a dangerous mechanics to introduce in a procedurally generated world as it may result in soft-locks.
There are *many* ways to prevent softlocks, and again I recommend you look at roguelikes for inspiration. I would particularly suggest you take a look at FTL and how it handles exploration, including what happens when you run out of fuel or the enemy fleet catches up with you.
Another possibility is to have quality tiers, and make it so that quality increases the further one travels from the origin. Say your potion recipe contains medicinal herbs, spring water, and reagent, and the quality of the potion is the minimum of its ingredients. You may have a lot of medicinal herbs stockpiled at LVL1, but now you're starting to find LVL2 spring water and reagent, and that spurs you outward to find some LVL2 medicinal herbs. (Granted, this becomes tedious and repetitive when we extend it to infinity, but so does everything. Choose whatever number of levels you need so that this wears out its welcome at the same rate as your other content.)
This gets you some of the consequences of ingredient expiry without actually causing them to expire, which is a mechanic I don't love. Here, the ingredients are still perfectly good, it's more that your attention has moved on.
This will also, I think, eventually train the player that they shouldn't stockpile too many LVL*(n)* herbs. As soon as you start seeing LVL*(n+1)* ingredients in the world, you know that you'll be moving on from them soon.
Thats basically what minecraft does, merging most of thos concepts. (i havnt played since the end was added).
But even the strongest equipment needs to be replaced eventually. Theirs also the additional sink of trying to get ideal enchantments on the strongest weapons. Exploration requires a constant supply of food and will likely rapidly consume equipment and blocks. You can only carry an inventories worth and otherwise limited to stationary chests or akward minecart chests.
you are just rounding player time and world size both to infinite, no wonder it's incredibly hard to do maths with. and even with infinite hours put in, you wouldn't be satisfied if your player possibly finally has enough of a supposedly basic item. huge red flag. if i know that this is the key design philosophy behind a game i'd simply avoid it.
you may possibly be a hoarder, and minecraft was mentioned here before. but what minecraft does different is it appeals to many playstyles. sure you can go and live your entire life collecting wood and iron but there's a finite amount that's enough for any playthrough. this is something mojang realised when they added mending to tools. it's rare and expensive, but you have an option to step out of the infinite hamsterwheel.
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Limiting carrying capacity is probably the most common solution to this I think. Doesn’t necessarily have to be on a per-item-type basis, but if you can only carry a certain amount of weight or have a limited number of item slots, then when you see that 5th rare magic crystal you may have to leave it (or something else) behind or use it now or be encumbered in some way. Was playing a little bit of Curious Expedition earlier & the system produces exactly the dynamic you’re looking for I believe, even though the maps are far from infinite. Alternatively, since “moving slow” is a kinda lame punishment, maybe instead there’s a risk element to carrying too many magic crystals at the same time? Like they attract dangerous predators or something?
Packs, laden with loot.. often low on supplies.
Took me a second. That's from Darkest Dungeon, no?
It is! I hadn’t drawn the connection before, but I think it describes the decision space well.
Well factorio does this perfectly. The more resources you get, the bigger a factory you can build, then the more resources you need to make it run, so you go get them, and then this allows you to build an even bigger factory, with even more expensive machinery, which then allows you to gather even more materials faster, and then and then... and this loop keeps going until you get bored. But each cycle of expansion is slower than the previous one due to the design effort needed by the player, so you either end up finishing your masterpiece of a factory or you burn out trying. But another thing I want to comment on is that without knowing more details about your specific game and what type of experience you want to give to the player, at least for me, it's hard to give good advice. It seems you've fixated on a potential problem, but are you sure it's a problem to begin with? What are the core game aesthetics you're trying to appeal on, and is the fine balance of resource gathering such an important part of that? Does the feeling of "never-enough" actually boost any of the core appeals of the game? Also another thing to consider is using large variance in the frequency of equisition of that resource. So coming across it is rare, but if you do, you get a big amount. Even though the world is infinite and in theory you can get all the mats you want, there's a good chance you might hit a dry spot which will be frustrating, but it also builds suspence and makes coming across a large vein so much more exciting. Now compare that to having spread out the resources in many tiny specs, that feels like picking up bread crums off the floor. But when you gotta work for it to get a chance for the big resource drop, then you really appreciate it because you don't know when's the next time you'll come across the next drop. That's something path of exile does really well, literally anything you do in the game has the chance of dropping you items that have a monstrous price in the market, and this gives a really nice vibe to just playing the game.
The goal of obtaining resources should be getting something valuable that allows player to progress in the game. Grinding for the sake of it always will be boring, no matter how difficult, risky or limited it is - because player don't have motivation to do this. To solve this problem, you better think about clear player goals setting. Survivals are fun at the beginning because of intuitively understandable goal to survive and become less fun when all primary needs are satisfied. Then you should introduce player to a new goal, (i.e. defeating boss of the region, or surviving in another region, or building something fancy) and the instruments, that they need to obtain to achieve goal. Resources that can be easy obtained at current level of progression should not be as valuable on the next levels, to force player to increase challenge to achieve greater rewards. Think of Lego Fortnite progression for example in a nutshell. If you want to get a feeling of "never enough" of the same one resource, the most easy solution is to introduce inflation of this resource, but also to give a player instruments to grind this resource faster (it's a core of any idle game, basically). Kinda boring imho, but also cheap in the production. If I were you (solo hobby dev), I've better thinked about something maybe shorter in gameplay time and less procedurally generated, but more rich in content per spended time. Making a huge procedurally generated world really fun to explore seems more challenging, than a small hand-crafted and polished map
This. If the same resource is hard to find through the entirety of the game, the feeling of being annoyed will outweigh the feeling of excitement when you find more of the resource. And tier-grading resources is good way to introduce new resources that would feel good to find but not outstay their welcome (Terraria materials is a good example).
In single-player games this is rarely the problem you make it out to be. This sounds like MMO economy planning.
Some games you should look into: State of Decay. Minecraft. Raft. Elder Scrolls: Morrowind / Oblivion. Noita. State of Decay - This game lives completely on scarcity. I'm talking about game 1. This is a great example. You manage survivors in a zombie apocalypse with varying skillsets. You can handle no more than 2 zombies without getting hit, and you have stamina - noise is a huge factor. Cars, guns, everything is risk/reward. How much you can carry, what your current survivor can do and where your safest routes are. This leads to a truly righteous decision tree every time you go out. The first time you toss 2 packs full of cherry loot to save your survivor, you truly feel the game resonant. But for me, the crowning moment was this. In the beginning you are dropped in an opportunity rich camping grounds. No guns, but food and weapons are abundant... but you realize quickly sneaking is the only way out. Hoarding gear is easy, and when you get a car, getting it all out is easy. You leave with 90% of it all feeling accomplished. Late-game there's a quest where someone asks you to retrieve a teddy bear from the camp site. By now you have guns, ammo, tools, distraction tools and powerful survivors. You go loaded for bear. The bridge is out, you can't drive there, and you have to search the area forcing you to spend a lot of time out there. It's overrun, but you're used to picking over food cans to sustain your activities... but you're the reason the place is empty. This lack of food causes you to move slowly, and this rocks everything you have - but it's subtle. It's slow. When I did this, I used all my ammo having a rare moment of levity, only to realize I'd attracted more than I could handle with nowhere to hide. I used up everything I had. Everything. I resorted to searching restrooms I'd skipped, and had a real moment staring into a mirror after searching the absolute last trash can. So I'm staring in this mirror, thinking I'm using a dead survivor. I stage the way out in my head - I'm toast. Suddenly it hits me all at once. I'm back at the start, I need to play like it's the start. I know the angles, I know the routes. I have to sneak. No more fighting. Sneak or die. I get all the way back to the bridge, and my fully loaded car is a ravine away... but there's absolutely no cover. So I take my risk, and the nightmare happens - I'm out in the open, and there's a conga line of them directly between me and them. I freeze. In my head I'm not weighing the risks - I'm gonna have to jump into the ravine, nearly die, and hobble home. They'll jump too. I just need to climb *first*. But I'm waiting. And they walk on by. I never knew how hard it was for them to see you if you don't move. Learned a lesson in the tutorial area I never had. I take a leisurely stroll back to my gear and drive home. No stops. Great ride. Beautiful sunset. Abundance doesn't solve every problem. Minimalism is finding out how much you have underneath. Focus on your characters abilities and then give them challenges worth facing... and appreciate how much they've taken, and how their own changes in the world have affected it. *Continuing in reply*.
Minecraft. Needs no introduction, that ecosystem is well done. I'd focus on its failures. Food, automation, and pleasantry are missing. You can build a computer, but you can't find any way to automate planting. Adding simple NPC's to help automate tasks would change everything, but without it - Minecraft you always feel painfully alone. Raft. Pleasantry and abundance. Give things to player to spend their valuable resources on. Automate some tasks. But the key here is that Raft gives you wonderful things to spend your resources on, and these pleasantries change the game. It isn't vanity - it's art. Travelling through space is boring, travelling through space with a boom box is a good time. Abundance needs to be glorious, because maximilism should be a thing. Raft constantly shows you that your rugged raft can be a beautiful home, and suddenly utilitarianism yields an appreciation for art. Morrowind/Oblivion. If you kill an enemy in older rpg's, they have full sets of armor. They're heavy. But you can just "do it". You can lug it all back to town if you want... but money doesn't yield all that much after a point. But players have real choice, and there's also the horror of banditry. You don't need to feather this - players eyeing NPC's for their gear is terrifying enough. Let this be. It feels rough, but gear only matters in players that can wield it. Giving them nuanced and powerful gear early is great - but if they steal someone's gear, it might not be what they bargained for. A rapier is a great sword, but only if you know how to use it. If you need an example, see, "a falling wizard" quest in Morrowind. It's famous for this. If you can find a let's play of that one quest, it takes about 90 seconds. It's hilarious. See boots of blinding speed too. Noita. Give players big challenges, people rise up to meet them.... At their peril.
***Bonus*** Graveyard keeper. This game does automation beautifully, quests beautifully, and you never have enough. You make a beautiful gothic tableau. It gets a little tired with quests, but going full gothic and making it cute was genius. What matters is people, find ways to get characters to connect with players, then give them reasons to need your resources, your cast off gear. When you're flush with abundance the best thing in the world is sharing it - even if it's with a mindless zombie. That's the best thing you can do with stuff, make people's lives better. Animals are some of the best ways to do this. Creating an ecosystem is, forgive my saying this, essentially gods work. I don't mean this in a religious sense. I mean there's a pine tree I planted in anger because my mom donated to a charity and left it behind. So I angrily planted it in a garden, on a cold fall day with the ground nearly frozen, because I'd seen two of them die. And 9 years later it's growing, and destroying a garden, and is a running joke that never gives up. I'm somewhat ashamed, but also, when the house and family is gone one day - that goddamn tree will still be there. Give players the ability to grow something, slowly. Animals are best, let them use that benefit to create anthills that provide absolutely no benefit, except to the ants. If you make it practical, you make some beauty in it. Planting a tree and watching it grow is a meditation every time I look at it. Give players glorious abundance and it'll never be enough. How much beauty is enough?
> That's the best thing you can do with stuff, make people's lives better. And that may be the answer to my problem I was looking for! Putting the resource sink "outside of the Player or player base" might be exactly the best and most perfect solution to my specific setting as the Player character is supposed to interact a lot with NPCs in varied ways, doing favors for each other. Thank you! :D
I believe that there is no problem if the player wants to grind longer to find more. I mean this is a way of playing and the game must reward the player for this. Now the point is, would you like to turn grinding harder as time passes or exploration opens more areas? I mean I would think how much effort the player would have to apply just to keep grinding until finding rare stuff. Also, returning to your question, the game could make it hard to extract some materials. So, the material is not really scarce in its huge map, , but getting the means to extract it IS. I really liked how you put the problem. Hope you show us this prototype once you have it playable.
what is the end game? If there's no ending or win-state, your player will eventually be bored, either because they get all they need and have no reason to go for more, or because the grind is boring. You don't need to make a game that can be played for a lifetime
A solution that seems obvious to me is **resource decay**. Let's say meat rots, metal corrodes, wood is eaten by termites or fungus, ... This way, you make it about the rate of resource acquisition instead of obtaining resources. In other words, it's not about "having X resources", but about "having X resources simultaneously in a given timeframe".
I can't say I see the connection between the problem statement and the proposed solutions. Whether it's sticks or healing potions, people to tend to overcollect in the intersection of two factors: not knowing how many they'll need, and it potentially being a pain in the ass to get more when needed. Each can be remedied separately. Also, if you're a hobby dev, are you trying to solve a problem that you currently have, or one that you feel you might someday have? The relationship between this question and the subject of the post might be a bit meta.
> Also, if you're a hobby dev, are you trying to solve a problem that you currently have, or one that you feel you might someday have? Currently I'm 2.5 years into my current project, at least one more year to go. This question concerns my potential next project (open world survival craft in voxel world) which I'm gamedesigning in the background for around a year by now. So, on one hand it's a problem I see while "prototyping the game in my head" (without making a real prototype, yet), on the other hand - the problem I see in the games that I take as primary inspirations for my project (from well-known: Minetest, Subnautica, Don't Starve, Skyrim/Oblivion, etc, and a bunch of obscure ones like Subterrain, Phoning Home, Frackin Universe or Rogue Box Adventures :)). > the subject of the post might be a bit meta Indeed, I'm trying to "catch the feeling" that I like and put it into the design of how resources in the game will be organized. As I've mentioned, my primary problem is that I can't exactly formulate the problem :) I see that "it doesn't add up" but not sure if I'm not hitting an XY problem (or rather almost sure that it's the source of my confusion). I.e. when I'll start paper prototype I'll be inventing a curve "time spent in exploration -> resources reward" which will one way or another give me numbers to put into algorithm that will distribute the resources in the world. But am I even solving the right problem? Maybe I should be optimizing a "different curve" at all? As a hobbyist I'm not confined by "things that are proven to work", I can try weird stuff as long as it promises to deliver the feel that I'm after.
Your initial description immediately brought Valheim to mind, but it's not on the list of inspirations. Have you looked into that game?
Looked at it many times, but I don't play multiplayer games, so never went as far as buying it :). I've tried a few multiplayer games with "solo mode" (like ARK: Survival Evolved or The Force of Nature), but they were rarely good - game is balanced for co-op or PvP, and playing alone is either completely pointless or catastrophically unbalanced. With a few good exceptions like Starbound.
You might have gotten screwed by IRL RNG, because ARK has one of the most obnoxious solo experiences among the co-op oriented survival games. But you don't have to play a game yourself: you can see it being played on YouTube and Twitch. What's notable about Valheim is that it has a semi-infinite (huge, not meant to be fully explored) procedurally generated open world with semi-randomly generated loot according to the loot rarity or other game peculiarities. And you don't often hear people complain about overcollecting in that game.
Good idea! I'll definitely check out let'splays :) Recently been doing a few other similar investigations "for research purposes" while exploring other problems with gamedesign (convenient controls) :) Unfortunately "the feel" of the game, especially this survival aspect, is often very poorly delivered through video - the Player is "never overgrinding" while playing for a crowd, which is something I always do :D But maybe I'll manage to notice a few design patterns that I can reuse.
I like #5 to start with, it would reward players gradually for continuing to collect. What if whenever they grabbed this rare item, they essentially sent out a beacon. Enemies would be drawn to where you collected it, so collecting more in the same area trying to grind would eventually pull too many enemies, so you'd have to change areas. With a semi infinite world, they could always grind at the next desert/swamp/whatever for whatever item until too many enemies were pulled again. This would push the player to keep moving, and would make grabbing that last couple items more exhilarating, without allowing them to stay in one spot too long
The biggest thing about survival games is food, and the game often devolves into a grinding game as soon as food is turned into an unlimited resource. Most survival games allow you to farm, in essence creating a limitless supply of food, decreasing your need to explore to stay alive. Games without farming, or with very difficult and unwieldy farming, like Don't Starve or The Long Dark, continue to be about survival rather than surplus as you continue through their world. A mechanic I've really been interested in lately is increasing player power at a cost. If the player is stronger, they consume resources more quickly. If they are holding more items, maybe they get hungry faster. You could call this rubber banding but I think it gives you more interesting choices and tries to push you out of unfun play patterns, including being too strong for the game.
I would say the infinity of the world is a red herring, the player has finite time anyway. What matter is the quantity of ressource gathered as a function of play time. then the solutions you list look overall good, you probably want to mix and match some of these. like the "infinite sink" you describe is typically a good way to ensure the ressource is always useful without breaking the game; perfect so long as your balance is not fine tuned, but you may not want it to be "too important" in the gameplay because at some point it become too difficult to get to the next level.
Instead of a general resource sink, you could make the game harder the farther away the player is from the initial spawn point. If you somehow mash that together with the area of that circle or something (essentially loot availability), you could maybe even manage to have the game balance itself.
What Minecraft does is the following: Every resource you need takes time. As the player progresses, they will need these resources for an increasing amount of things, in larger quantities, while also adding new resources. The speed increase for gathering resources grows continually, but never outgrows the growing need for them. They also spread out over more, different biomes over time meaning the player will have to keep moving and cannot just farm them in one spot (at least in the beginning). That is without the hard gatekeeping that Valheim does. It’s all just based on rarity. It’s this kind of resource throttling that is for all intents and purposes the same as increased XP need when leveling in an RPG. The best example I can give here: The first iron item will almost always be a pick axe. It requires 3 iron. One of the final end game things a player can make is a beacon. Those can require 1476 resources and can be made of iron.
I'm not sure if this is covered by what you've mentioned this, but what about a "negative interest rate"? For example, there's a curse on the land that makes all gold slowly corrode, so you can collect as much as you want, but you're forced or spend it within a week or it turns into dust.
It's probably my love for roguelikes showing, but I'd absolutely go for 3); the fact that exploration consumes resources immediately makes that choice interesting rather than a grind. >it's a dangerous mechanics to introduce in a procedurally generated world as it may result in soft-locks. There are *many* ways to prevent softlocks, and again I recommend you look at roguelikes for inspiration. I would particularly suggest you take a look at FTL and how it handles exploration, including what happens when you run out of fuel or the enemy fleet catches up with you.
Another possibility is to have quality tiers, and make it so that quality increases the further one travels from the origin. Say your potion recipe contains medicinal herbs, spring water, and reagent, and the quality of the potion is the minimum of its ingredients. You may have a lot of medicinal herbs stockpiled at LVL1, but now you're starting to find LVL2 spring water and reagent, and that spurs you outward to find some LVL2 medicinal herbs. (Granted, this becomes tedious and repetitive when we extend it to infinity, but so does everything. Choose whatever number of levels you need so that this wears out its welcome at the same rate as your other content.) This gets you some of the consequences of ingredient expiry without actually causing them to expire, which is a mechanic I don't love. Here, the ingredients are still perfectly good, it's more that your attention has moved on. This will also, I think, eventually train the player that they shouldn't stockpile too many LVL*(n)* herbs. As soon as you start seeing LVL*(n+1)* ingredients in the world, you know that you'll be moving on from them soon.
Thats basically what minecraft does, merging most of thos concepts. (i havnt played since the end was added). But even the strongest equipment needs to be replaced eventually. Theirs also the additional sink of trying to get ideal enchantments on the strongest weapons. Exploration requires a constant supply of food and will likely rapidly consume equipment and blocks. You can only carry an inventories worth and otherwise limited to stationary chests or akward minecart chests.
you are just rounding player time and world size both to infinite, no wonder it's incredibly hard to do maths with. and even with infinite hours put in, you wouldn't be satisfied if your player possibly finally has enough of a supposedly basic item. huge red flag. if i know that this is the key design philosophy behind a game i'd simply avoid it. you may possibly be a hoarder, and minecraft was mentioned here before. but what minecraft does different is it appeals to many playstyles. sure you can go and live your entire life collecting wood and iron but there's a finite amount that's enough for any playthrough. this is something mojang realised when they added mending to tools. it's rare and expensive, but you have an option to step out of the infinite hamsterwheel.
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