Challenging Iteration

[@viscarious1]

Yes! Another Craig video.

[@4thHorsemanEntertainment]

Extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, love this stuff.

[@mightyn8]

I've thought about replayability a lot as I'm trying to figure out what kind of game I can make myself, and one huge part of these self-imposed challenges seems to be offering enough interlocking systems to the player that can combine in interesting ways, plus of course the randomness and iteration that you mentioned from pokemon. The Elder Scrolls games are quite popular on YT due to many people doing all sorts of weird self-imposed challenges. Some do that with Fallout 3/NV/4 as well. Of course, those are huge open-world games so they may not be so feasible to create by a solo dev or a small indie team, but the core principles of various systems you can combine is still useful to keep in mind (melee/ranged/magic combat, stealth, alchemy, enchantment, random leveled loot, followers, etc.). These self-imposed challenges are also highly dependent on growing a large or loud enough community that will not only find it fun to challenge themselves, but also share these challenges with others online, which shows other players the possibilities of these challenges and inspires them to try them out.

[@liberulagames]

Really good stuff!

[@juamibenito2558]

after finishing metaphor refantazio in a 100 hours in a week after never having done that for any game in years, ive recently been obsessed with a new forever WIP indie game project combining transformable metaphor archetypes, persona/SMT recruitable/fusable demons, and draftable slay the spire cards (unlocked thru upgrading bonds) in a deckbuilder rpg. fixed non-grid battlefield tiles but the player can recall and summon allied party characters, summoned demons, etc. onto tiles as they cycle through their deck so that everyone's abilities can be maximized. in theory this video is implying that their might be merit to allowing all starter non-fused demons to be not completely overshadowed by fused/multi-fused demons (unlike SMT where it's always better to fuse from what i can tell) so that they remain as mediocre but not unplayable options in the late game for potential challenge runs and to not delete them from the iteration process, did i understand this correctly? hahaha

[@CraigPerko]

A Persona-style mixing system largely devalues caught monsters in the mid/late game largely because you can restore and re-mix your catches. So your mix monsters become your main monsters, and any caught monsters are largely just fuel for the mixer. New grist to blend with your mixes for better mixes. There are a few things you can do to slightly mitigate, like hiding mix-compatible powers behind level gates, but for the most part the two approaches aren't terribly compatible.

[@juamibenito2558]

@@CraigPerko ahh so i should just all-in on the mixes approach and make that be one of the focuses of the iterations for the player instead of trying to make non-mixed demons borderline viable, will keep that in mind as i continue the eternal slog of infinite forever WIP indie game projects as masochistic hobbies ahahaha

[@timmygilbert4102]

Pokemon is a rogue lite lite 😂 What's kerbal? I'm from the glorious future multiverse where kitten space agency is all i know 😅