Why Truly Original Games Are So Rare | Semi-Ramblomatic

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This week on Semi-Ramblomatic, Yahtzee dives into the difficulty of making any game with truly original ideas.
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[@Pranaynaynay]

the "type words to kill enemies" is basically what Typing of the Dead was

[@dahn57]

Still love that game, it's so daft

[@CameronVan]

Bookworm Adventures too, which was basically a scrabble based RPG

[@mytunes7401]

There are a lot of typing games, I think the novelty of the idea isnt that its testing your typing speed but your vocabulary/anagram solving ability.

[@ArthurDraco]

Also Typer Shark

[@marvellousm]

The Textorcist had a fun variation on this

[@PilsnerGrip]

I have to applaud the Balatro developer for getting rich off poker, without actually playing it for money. It's like building a gambling site, but ethical.

[@MrMickio1]

Actually quite similar to Vampire Survivor whose dev made slot machines and quit and decided to make a game so addictive and cheap that no competition could beat it and players could not put more money into it.

[@Aura-Of-Syrinx]

​@MrMickio1 wait seriously?

[@soundrogue4472]

@@MrMickio1I played Vampire Survivor and I'm sorry but I don't know why you guys find it so addictive. It's completely BORING with flashy visuals. If I wanted that I'd just play more free H games.

[@MrProthall]

@@soundrogue4472Because it is. It just isn't to everyone. Which you would've known if you thought about it for more than 2 seconds.

[@AegixDrakan]

@@soundrogue4472 Valid feeling. I enjoyed the game (mostly as something to play while blazed out on friday nights), but the genre doesn't really grab me much. But I get why people like it. It's Risk of Rain (with all the upgrades, loot and mass destruction), but with the gameplay boiled down to "just move around, no skill required". That has a market!

[@FidgetBearGames]

This is why game jams exist! Come up with your mad idea and make a tiny game around it in a short time. Inscryption, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Donut County and lots of other games started as game jam games.

[@stonerhino83]

Also Pseudoregalia.

[@JamesVermont]

Also Tunic!

[@9seed.]

also SUPERHOT

[@rileyn2983]

Also Rollerdome Also Celeste Also so many games. Game jams are just cool

[@nagladhar2220]

also baba is you

[@BleachFan2588]

For the slotmachine game, one already exists. Luck Be A Landlord, a rogue like where you collect money to pay increasing rent via a slotmachine that you add symbols to in order to make combos and increase your earnings. It's pretty good.

[@skeleman5883]

Honestly it seems like deckbuilding casino game roguelike is kind of a small trend in the indie game space. There's luck be a landlord and balatro of course but you've also got Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers coming out in the near future which is a deckbuilding blackjack roguelike and on the Steam Deckbuilding sale going on right now you can find Bingle Bingle near the top of the page which is a deckbuilding roulette roguelike

[@nopenoperson8964]

iirc the developer of Balatro specially cited Luck be a Landlord as an inspiration, as a roguelike where your only goal is score and not combat.

[@Draconic74]

And apparently theres a very recent Roulette roguelike that released called Bingle Bingle

[@snackplaylove]

Yes to all of these!

[@respecttheyoshi]

Also a Blackjack roguelite in Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers!

[@RocketSlug]

What Yahtzee 's talking about is basically the gameplay designer's equivalent of The Innovator's Dilemma, which is a great book to check out

[@MegaZeta]

NYT bestseller list slop, imo

[@Crispman_777]

@@MegaZeta Why?

[@--3A44]

Interesting tidbit: During an interview with Dan Gheesling, LocalThunk (Balatro's creator) said that he built the game while intentionally, NOT, playing any other deck builders.

[@NathanBrownisawesome]

Kinda like orson wells saying not to watch movies

[@zedrake]

+1 to this as a product designer. Often times its great to look at apps / websites / products outside of your industry or competition scope to get better inspiration or avoid pitfalls entirely.

[@JPR3D]

"Ants trying to stream-snipe a trapdoor spider" new metaphor aquired

[@avalonhamakei]

"Typing of the Dead" was an interesting twist on an existing genre.

[@MutleeIsTheAntiGod]

Legit improved my words per minute

[@damon22441]

I found The Textorcist to be more fun

[@emilytheimp]

Oh God watching Balatro at the regular speed is making my brain go crazy

[@xdjrockstar]

The purple seal getting put on an Ace sent me.

[@jmcalcy69]

Can you speed it up in client? BRB

[@vxvDREWvxv]

@@jmcalcy69Yeah it goes up to 4x which makes the game much more playable after 20 hours

[@Crocogator]

@@vxvDREWvxv help i'm over 100

[@Yashirmare]

@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 You watch them do it 3:46

[@Brawph]

Additional point worth mentioning: A lot of indie games like this die unseen and unknown due to lack of marketing and publishing resources and end up drowned in the flood of dozens of daily Steam releases. It's an unfortunate reality that Original Games are so rare partially because most of them launch and fade out without ever "going viral" like Balatro did.

[@TheWrathAbove]

It's worth considering that while some of the ones that get drowned out are genuinely great, many more are an example of great idea, bad execution.

[@Brocknoth]

It really is luck of the draw for the game ideas that "make it" and the ones that "don't" Which is really too bad because there are some real gems out that no one talks about I'll bet.

[@lapislarka]

Steam is actually shockingly good at marketing games to their users. There is all sorts of dialogue on it in case you are interested, and even Yahtzee has called it a meritocracy. While it is true some good games die without going viral, good doesn't equal mass appeal. Some games are just inherently more niche.

[@TheThingInMySink]

Can a game really ''die'' unless it's a live service? Pardon my ignorance, because I don't know if Balataro *is* a live service / multiplayer game, but even if it is, I'd say this really doesn't apply to the masses of singleplayer indie games out there. As long as there is even a single person playing such a game, it's not dead, as long as it exists and can be played, the experience is still there.

[@kaijuultimax9407]

People say this but as someone who is REALLY looking for these kinds of games (Like "I knew about Shotgun Roulette before KZbin did because I check Itch every day" kind of looking), they aren't nearly as plentiful as you might believe and most of the ones worth playing actually do rise to the top. Developers trying new things is almost exclusively limited to game jams.

[@infesticon]

Also the video game crash of the 80s was one region of the world, In europe every one made computer games, In japan they just carried on as normal..,

[@TheWrathAbove]

And even then it was only for the home consoles, the Arcades in America were doing just fine.

[@meej33]

My introduction to video games was the ZX Spectrum in the early 80s. Imagine my surprise when I learned that video games were supposed to be crashing while I played Elite and Lords of Midnight.

[@beeg8615]

@@SimuLord Do you have any eurojank recommends? kinda running out of games to play here.

[@beeg8615]

@@SimuLord thanks for the recommends

[@crediblesalamander8056]

I feel like there's still potential for a math game. The trick is, you'd disguise them as puzzles so people wouldn't be instantly repulsed. Replace everything with arcane symbols and give it some great atmosphere. Tada, now you'd have people unwittingly doing graph theory and group theory exercises and enjoying it.

[@TheAntiCosmic]

There was a recent indie puzzle game called "I wanna Lockpic" that was a essentially just a series of math problem but abstracted to operations involving keys and locks. You just need to be creative with the abstractions.

[@coolkusti]

I recently noticed that a graph-theoretic counterexample I constructed in my research could plausibly be turned into a game puzzle. Gonna have to find a chance to use it sometime.

[@SteamedToast]

There's a few 'music' puzzle games that end up being math puzzle games themed with music, like Sonority. It actually lets you switch between musical notes or numbers.

[@ShadowOfCicero]

The Zoombini games kind of did this.

[@doublepinger]

"What're you talking about? Now, let me get back to Factorio and use these underground belts and long inserters..."

[@Fokaz_]

Hey man! Very interesting video. Thank you for mentioning my game, Pip My Dice! Balatro got me so hooked during the demo at the end of last year. When the demo was closed, I couldn't help but work on a game that is inspired by it! The last game that had me like that was Slay the Spire. Balatro's dev, LocalThunk, is a damn genius, I'm really excited to see what he comes up with after he is done with the planned updates on Balatro.

[@amaryllis0]

Hey, good luck with your game! There's an incremental game called Idle Dice which I like a lot, really satisfying stuff; just reminded me of that

[@bensteinhauser784]

Cool to hear Yahtzee's take on Slay the Casino.

[@Chocomint_Queen]

What's funny about Balatro is, about the same time I started hearing about it, there was a demo for a very similar Blackjack game, called Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, and that one lets you actually put the funny cards in your deck, so I greatly prefer it, and assumed it would do well on the internet; "blackjack where you can play an uno reverse card" seems tailor-built for the hype machine, compared to "poker where you have five jokers and your cards turn to stone or gold sometimes". But Balatro took the world by storm, while D&DG remains a largely undiscovered gem. You never can tell.

[@cattysplat]

There is an unfortunate reality, that the public is limited in quantity of games it's willing to reward quality with sales. They can only really focus on 1 indie darling at a time.

[@reverse_engineered]

I've watched several LPs of Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, and while it has some interesting ideas, it doesn't seem to have the same build up of power and crazy synergies that normally apply to deck-builders. The opponents don't really seem to scale in difficulty either. So it's fun for a while, but it doesn't have the same staying power. Also, marketing is everything for standing out from the crowd, no matter how good your product is. LocalThunk - the developer of Balatro - has been quite active with many Twitch and KZbin creators, including hosting a high-score competition shortly before the full release. They played the hype game perfectly. That's not to say it's success is only hype or that it was overhyped - I think people are enjoying it on its own merits - but I think a significant part of its quick rise in popularity is by a successful application of marketing techniques. By comparison, D&DG had been discovered by many individual creators, but slowly over time and often at different stages of its currently early access development. There wasn't a coordinated groundswell of talk surrounding it, and there was no clear timeline for when it would be ready for release. It's difficult for games to grow in popularity in this situation. The small few I can think of were a result of very unique and compelling gameplay, such as early Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program. There are plenty examples of a failure to rise in popularity without this marketing, such as the obscure Infiniminer versus the much more successful Infinifactory. To that point, I think Zachtronics is an excellent case study in how much marketing matters. Many of his most successful games, including SpaceChem (based on Alchemical Engineering) and Shenzhen I/O (based on Ruckingenur), are iterations on his previous games, which aren't mentioned almost anywhere. I highly recommend checking out his original blog "thesiteformerlyknownas zachtronicsindustries com".

[@CycFlame]

It doesn't help that D&DG's art style is completely awful. I would pass on it without reading the description if you hadn't mentioned it.

[@ShadowDrakken]

Random letters on the screen that you have to hit quickly to destroy enemies? Brings back memories of 70s, 80s, and 90s typing class and edutainment titles like Math Blaster and MasterType.

[@TheSmokingMustache]

God I loved Math Blaster lol better yet, I was homeschooled so could get away with playing those games for hours at a time

[@QuintusAntonious]

That was such an obvious connection that I thought he was setting up for a Math Blaster or Typing of the Dead punchline, but it never came.

[@lukehawksbee]

I thought it was going to end up being an Epistory reference, which is even more similar to the idea described than Typing of the Dead

[@ichijofestival2576]

Once you got a theory of how the thing works, Everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first

[@jakenveina1367]

"And I'm not a robot, I'm not a monkey, I will not dance, even if the beat's funky." A solid pull, friend.

[@ShenDoodles]

@@jakenveina1367 Opposite of lazy, far from a punk, y’all oughta stop talkin’, start tryna catch up mothafucka!

[@douglaswolfen7820]

Yup. They want it to have everything they loved about the first one, _including_ how original it was Something I once heard about Hollywood executives is that they always want something which has never been done before… and which has always done incredibly well in the past

[@firockfinion3326]

When he mentioned fighting game mechanics becoming like guitar hero, that made me think of the One Finger Death Punch games.

[@SpikeRosered]

Balatro is a game I can actually recommend to older adults because it uses a standard card deck at its core and everyone knows what that is. It's ingenious.

[@reverse_engineered]

Agreed. I think it also does a great job of gradually introducing new mechanics. You start with a purely normal poker game for the first round, with the minor exception of how the scoring works, which is quickly pointed out. Then they start adding jokers, which initially have trivial +mult or +chips mechanics. Toss in a planet card that upgrades the points for a hand and an arcana card the modifies the rank or suit of a card, and you're already most of the way to introducing all of the mechanics. Each individually isn't too hard to think of as a minor change to the original game of poker, but once they are combined, those synergies are what really makes it come to life. Even those don't have to be stated explicitly, because the early jokers and arcana cards synergize in ways that are quite straightforward, like getting +mult for each club and converting your cards into clubs, or getting +mult for a flush and upgrading the flush base score. As a player starts to show an understanding of those basics by winning games, the game then starts introducing new cards with more complex interactions and that's where the high-level play really starts to unfold. Before they know it, mom and dad have a solid intuition for how to win a game despite never hearing the term rogue-like or deck-builder.

[@shiv3rcubesolver664]

My uncle is a game designer and he actually came up with a sort of similar idea to the anagram game about 15 years ago. It was called clockwords. It was a Tower defense game where damage was based on your scrabble score, kind of.

[@auraLAZAH]

I think it's important to note that the developer for Balatro was not setting out to make his own spin on a deck builder roguelike - he freely admits he didn't know the first thing about roguelikes, deckbuilders, or even poker before making the game.

[@nickmajora]

There is no way in heck the game dev of Balatro (or any videogame really) didn't know the first thing about roguelikes, deckbuilders or _poker._

[@fabe61]

@@nickmajorayou missed the key word ‘before’. Obviously he did by the time he was finishing the project.

[@nickmajora]

@@fabe61 I don't know in what conditions you have to grow up to not know the first thing about poker but regardless he made a fantastic game and deserves all the success.

[@Cadaveralien]

One thing I believe about innovation: it works better when you are NOT focusing on making something "original". Poker but roguelike is smashing together two very well know concepts, but the execution is fresh enough to offer a new experience to someone familiar with poker and/or roguelikes. While checking the current Deckbuilder sale on steam, the games that stood out to me were not completely alien ideas, but stuff like "solitaire BUT with deckbuilding", "Werewolf BUT with deckbuilding" or "PT (the silent hill playable teaser) BUT with deckbuilding"

[@snackplaylove]

Both of Yahtzee’s examples are on steam as full releases - Sums Puzzler: Block Buster Billy (aka Baba Is Maths) Words Combat: Touch Type Tale (aka Total War/Word) Both well worth the entry price (or wish list sniping) If you like original and under-the-radar stuff

[@galenwilds3273]

I figured this vid would be more about how "you can't make anything truly unique, because just about everything can be considered derivative of SOMETHING". Case in point, Balatro is basically roguelike deckbuilder plus poker. Based on the other comments the developer made the deckbuilder part out of whole cloth instead of iterating on something existing, but the feeling's still there. Even with all these fantastic new ideas, there will still be parts you recognize. It's like how you can't write a story that's completely free of tropes or cliché. When the term encompasses aspects as broad as "there's a bad guy" or "two characters didn't get along before, but now they do", trying to avoid them for the sake of avoiding them is counterproductive.

[@amaryllis0]

Yeah, I mean Dark Souls was pretty revolutionary, right? But when you actually look at it, is it really doing anything fundamentally new, or is Soulslike combat just a consequence of a certain calibration of existing systems? It's a gestaltic uniquity

[@Spelonker]

I randomly played No More Heroes for the first time and it simply having a high v low attack backbone was a breath of fresh air, but then it also doesn't care about combos so much as knowing how to pace when you and don't button mash. And then, while I haven't played it, something like Yomi Hustle where they take high end anime-tier fighting game moves but break it down into a turn based mind-game because you see the action play out at full speed as also genius. I would be very happy, after seeing those two in action, if I never encountered light attack v heavy attack ever again. It's simply not what's interesting about fighting IRL.

[@KingOfElectricNinjas]

No More Heroes is a funny one given how it's built around the Wiimote and motion controls in arguably one of the few ways that works. When playing III on the Switch I ended up quickly switching from the Pro Controller to the Joy-cons just because it didn't feel right at all without the swinging finishing slashes. It's something like QTEs where in theory it doesn't add much to the game but the feedback is wonderful, especially when you don't really have to think about it.

[@nalivai4862]

Hey Yatz, so, regarding your anagram idea and the problem with words. Andrew Taylor, creator of Cell Tower, the word puzzle daily game, had the same problem with identifying the words and assigning a category to them. What he did is incredibly clever, he wrote a quick tinder-like interface, it gives him a word and it swipes it to a category (granted he only needed two, but it's not important). It's kind of mindless but slightly gamified so he managed to swipe his way through the entirety of the english vocabulary quite quickly, doing this shit while listening to podcasts and walking a dog. The idea of gamification of gamedev isn't exactly new, but every iteration of it is clever af

[@copyrightsmopyright]

TypoMan had a similar idea about using words for interactivity and combat.

[@Mark73]

Unfortunately it's very short.

[@iantaakalla8180]

Furthermore, that is not about typing words until the last chapter.

[@gamemasteranthony2756]

Apparently, there's a game called "Bingle Bingle", which is Balatro but roulette instead. I now want to see an entire casino game filled with games like these two.

[@gamemasteranthony2756]

@@SimuLord (“Synapse” from Deus Ex - Conspiracy plays in my head upon mention of Triads)

[@nerdrage3626]

Ever since High-School I've had this idea for a 1st-Person Combat System: Shoulder Buttons - Punch, Trigger Buttons - Kick, Holding Both Triggers does a Charge Tackle, Left & Right Face Buttons (Y & A, Square & Circle, B & X) Fire or Swing whatever Weapon you're holding! And there'd be an In-Game Achievement Checklist tied to a (near) Limitless amount of Combos you can do, kinda like Bulletstorm

[@U.Inferno]

I once had an idea to modify Texas Hold'em where the River-Flop becomes spaces on a game board and every action you can take is directly tied to the bets you make, so in order to take more actions every turn, you have to bet harder, but because of how betting works you also make your opponents take more actions as well.

[@ricks5756]

1:22 "The Typing of the Dead" ( PC release: 2000 --- Steam release 2013 )

[@vincentleonard3797]

I'm still tickled by the Days Gone ZP, where Yatz threw in "football simulator" while describing the game just to ensure we were paying attention, because that gave me an idea for a zombie game where the player is a professional football player in the middle of a game when the apocalypse hits the stadium, and has to fight his way out with little more than the cleats on his feet and the ball he just received. Having combat centered around football moves would certainly breathe some life into this corpse of a genre.

[@robertbernard7844]

I'm imagining a 3D beat-em-up a la Hi-Fi Rush, where the gimmick is to juggle a ball in crazy ways and build up combos to really lay it on the opponent, all while not getting hit or dropping the ball. Basically turn the Tekken Ball minigame into a beat-em-up.

[@Crispman_777]

Something like FIFA Street

[@vincentleonard3797]

@@Crispman_777 What's that? For cataloging purposes, if nothing else.

[@Crispman_777]

@@vincentleonard3797 The EA FIFA franchise had a spinoff under that name. KZbin it

[@connordarvall8482]

I immediately remembered the game "Skeleton Boomerang" where it's just you and your boomerang against an army of skeletons where the game starts becoming more about playing off your boomerang to get better combos.

[@TheCandyManTeam]

Funnily enough balatro isn’t even the first poker-deck builder-roguelike. Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers is the first I heard of the concept.

[@dahn57]

That is still not even close to being released though sadly

[@lillypad6936]

And that one is specifically blackjack

[@reverse_engineered]

It does seem like a lot of games came out around the same time frame with similar applications of deck-builder to casino games. That's a thing that tends to happen a lot in innovation and research - when all the pieces come into place, several people recognize an interesting combination of them at the same time. There are plenty of examples throughout history, such as the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, which was also discovered at the same time by Whittaker. Many people are quick to see the overlapping similarities and claim they were influenced or plagiarized, but often they are just simultaneous developments. I think that becomes quite clear with the game Bingle Bingle, which many people are labelling a Balatro clone, but if that's truly the case, then it's impressive how that dev managed to make a fleshed out and polished game with an excellent adaptation of that style of mechanics to roulette instead of poker. It's certainly not a direct copy, so they would have had to do a lot of things very well in a short period of time for it to truly be inspired by Balatro. And then there's Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers that released not long before Balatro, also dealing with poker but taking a rather different approach to it. Can it be said that Balatro was inspired by that game? I don't think so. Instead, with games like Luck Be a Landlord and Roll coming out a couple of years ago, I think many people took inspiration from those games and rather than copy them directly, came up with ideas of how to apply them to new games. This tends to be how new genres are born.

[@alanmiller7875]

Yahtzee but with fantasy elements and deck building was already done... it's called dicey dungeon and it's excellent.

[@iantaakalla8180]

Dicey Dungeons was also fairly popular when released as well, so it is not some nothing game or some obscure game.

[@aeloswindrunner]

I remember an old game in the 360 era called Quarrel, which was like risk meets scrabble. You had patches of territory and squads on them to hold territory. Clashes with enemies were based on who made the better word out of a shared set of letters and the nunber of dudes you had on the territory was the length of word you could make. You won by capturing all the zones on the board

[@CrookiNari]

I feel like it's worth keeping in mind that the first video game crash only affected home consoles in North America. Computers and the rest of the world were basically unscathed. If another crash happens I believe it'll only affect the AAA space, while indie games are the tiny mammals that survived the extinction of the dinosaurs.

[@reverse_engineered]

It was also the result not of a deluge of games, but a deluge of really bad shovelware. There were many games that were direct clones of other games, games that promised great graphics and gameplay but consisted of little more than a square moving around in a box, and plenty others that were broken, buggy messes that may be impossible to beat (e.g. ET), and these were often the ones that were the most marketed and therefore made up public perception of games. While there are still plenty of those crap games today, there's always a steady stream of really well-made games that you can readily find through Steam recommendations and games journalists. Even when AAA/AAAA games aren't particularly innovative, they can still be fun to play, and when crappy games do make a major public appearance, there are plenty of resources to quickly warn you that they are crap before you invest $80 into them. So long as we have this supportive environment around games, I don't think we will see that same lack of confidence in gaming as a whole that resulted in the video game crash of the 80s.

[@Whalerguy]

It's comforting to have a trapdoor spider reference again.

[@Trassel242]

I think that honestly, most people don’t really care about the game mechanics by themselves, unless you also add a good visual style and hopefully some good music too. People remember the way games made them feel, not necessarily the way they work on a mechanics level. You can have a game that’s got hackneyed mechanics as long as it still feels good and fun to play.

[@cattysplat]

Just look at Escape from Tarkov and Dark and Darker. Insanely janky gameplay resulting in infuriating lack of control but the high risk/reward loot gameplay makes extraction games addictive.

[@burningsheep4473]

It's also much easier to find those types of games and then have them work properly. Something like Planescape Torment for instance is just an RPG with less combat if we are just talking about gameplay and mechanics. Yet its setting, aesthetics, atmosphere and characters are still pretty unique. Games that push innovation in the gameplay department on the other hand are always in danger of falling on their face or simply not being appealing to most people.

[@askthepizzaguy]

I like the objectively inferior diamond suit because it looks the best with gold seals and gold cards and lucky enhancements, especially with the greater color contrast option turned on. "I love gooooooooooooold the look of it the schmell of it the texture...." It makes a great sound effect when it earns money. I can't otherwise recommend this as a strategy. It's not game mechanics that are making me play those, it's the sound of money and the sparkly jangly noises.

[@shadebug]

Was not expecting a lament for a Typing of the Dead sequel

[@acewar7]

I'm just going to comment that Yatzee needs to check out cryptmaster. Someone literally did make that game with every word in the English dictionary programmed in with word types and attributes. All the combat is typing and so is everything else

[@cliftonchurch6039]

I've got a concept that rolls back the city building genre to 1989, then takes it in a more "arcade-styled" gameplay direction that uses deck building mechanics to create a gameplay loop that can be played at your own pace, but at the highest level should feel very active, much like playing an RTS.

[@FatTonyBBX]

I got Balatro purely based on the praise in this video and holy cow, what a fun twist on the genre. Reminds me of the Idle Dice game basically being an idle version of Yahtzee

[@Crocogator]

I've sunk over 100 hours into this masterpiece of a game. If you start to feel burnt out, DEFINITELY check out the challenges. Some are fun, others absurd, and others insanely difficult.

[@mhutt333]

The anagram game sounds like Word Realms, from the Kingdom of Loathing people. You basically were given scrabble tiles to make a word, and if the word was appropriate for the enemy (or was resonant with your equipment) it did extra damage.

[@stevenglowacki8576]

I'm glad that someone else remembered this. All I remembered was that the Kingdom of Loathing people put together a game like Yahtzee described, but I couldn't remember what it was called. I was wondering when people were mentioning other games whether it was this one, but finally someone mentioned Kingdom of Loathing, because that's all that I remembered in terms of a name.

[@ByteBitson]

"No-one thinks maths is fun" i play warframe

[@WMan37]

Honestly, excellent example, cause the fun in warframe comes not just from moving really really fast but also from the math itself, considering like, even a mk1-braton is sortie ready, and unairu armor strip makes level cap not so much of a pain with your builds but the real fun of the game is the path to multi-million damage red crits that light enemies in a 15m radius on fire.

[@AegixDrakan]

As a lapsed Tenno, this made me laugh and feel nostalgic. XD

[@Onyxthegreat91]

Also, Eve Online players exist.

[@zachdude4284]

Well I was considering trying out warframe, but this made me reconsider haha.

[@burntbacn]

@@zachdude4284 Tbf you can just copy builds other people have already made and watch as the room is filled with multiple nuclear blasts and lots of big damage numbers.

[@LagiacrusHunter]

Your description of the anagram game awakened memories of an old Flash game called Clockwords that I haven't played in over a decade. You have a cannon, a bunch of randomly generated letters, and waves of steampunk robot spiders trying to bite your legs off. You type in words and your cannon shoots 1 bullet for each letter in the word. If you use one of the provided letters in the word, that shot gets a damage bonus or special effect, otherwise the letter does 1 damage. I think there are also damage reductions for repeating the same word multiple times in a round. It was great fun ages ago, I'm going to have to look it up and see if it's still as fun as I remember.

[@justanaverageferret]

One thing I find really admirable about Balatro, besides the novelty of what it did working well, is that it's actually quite difficult, but in a good way. Especially so for someone like me who, prior to playing, knew little about poker, in particular the hands. Couldn't have told you what a flush was before picking it up. But the game does a good job visually explaining the hands and hierarchy, and the games challenge feels fair. Restarting a run is also near the instant, which helps.

[@imbw267]

There's a new wave of casino rogue-likes: Slot Machine -> Luck Be a landlord Video Poker -> Balatro Roulette -> Bingle Bingle Blackjack -> Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers Now all that is needed are Stud Poker and Craps roguelikes.

[@nsb6206]

The typing-based game reminds me a bit of a game that currently only has a demo out called Cryptmaster, something loosely inspired by the old british gameshow Knightmare, where you're exploring a strange dungeon and most challenges revolve around figuring out the right words to type.

[@aruretheincomprehensible20]

There already exists a roulette roguelike, and it's called Bingle Bingle. Immaculate name, I know. There's also a roguelike with an interesting color-based combat system called Hieronymous Bosch's Brutal Orchestra (or simply called Brutal Orchestra on Steam), and its color mechanics are not only incredibly innovative but also fit into the story of the game (which I won't spoil).

[@oni-linkle4880]

2:35 "Nobody thinks maths is fun" Plays Balatro. The irony is strong in that one

[@askthepizzaguy]

Well, the computer does the actual math for you. You just have to know to stick the multipliers at the end of a sequence and addition in the front for maximum value, which is more of a general point than a specific math problem.

[@flummox3d]

1:27 That's like Typing of the Dead but with more focus on the wording. Scrabbling of the Dead.

[@sharkkebunni]

There are a few games I found on steam that use typing, Type King, Type Knight and Type Fighter and a newer one coming soon called Roguetype, I dunno if they are any good but seems most are 2D scroller type games.

[@sharkkebunni]

ah found it "Words Can Kill" deckbuilder with letters to play the game lol

[@doublepinger]

I hate to say Balatro is "new". I had to check, and "Luck Be a Landlord" is a quoted inspiration for it, which the only differences in concept are like... the jokers are sellable. Nearly everything else is consistent, though effectively transformed for the different game. I won't say Balatro is bad, nor was it completely un-original, but when comparing Unreal Tournament had mutators, or, you know, any game that allowed one to vary the rules, we've been doing this for a very long time, to mind numbing levels, see Magic the Gathering. Someone just hadn't done it *here* with as potent of a skinnerbox.

[@reverse_engineered]

I disagree. The entire genre of rogue-like deck-builders includes the same idea of modifying your deck, global modifiers, and increasing challenges to overcome. But that's such an abstract description that, as you pointed out, could apply to almost anything. That's not what makes this unique. What makes Luck Be a Landlord unique is both its application to slot machines and it's representation of your "cards" as everyday items and people. One particular unique aspect is interactions based on adjacency between the items on the wheels. Again, adjacency is nothing new, but it's a very abstract concept; the application to this environment is a unique take on it. In the same vein, Balatro has a very unique application by starting with the game of poker, recasting the scoring based on "chips", "+ mult", and "x mult" (which, even with the names removed is a unique approach to scaling score), and overall having a rather impressive variety of ways to modify the deck and get global modifiers. For example, I've never seen the concept of "negative jokers" where modifiers that are normally applied to limit quantity slots are exempted from counting against that limited quantity. I'm an engineer. My entire job revolves around applying existing technology and mathematics to the design of things that are built and used by everyone. On their own, technologies and mathematics are not products, just concepts; it's only by finding a way to apply those to real-world problems that you create concrete solutions. Each problem is unique and each solution is unique, even if the technologies and mathematics underlying those ideas are the same. Innovations like computers and the internet - as amazing as they are - are fundamentally feats of engineering; the technologies were invented decades earlier, but the application of them in those ways hadn't been done yet. I don't think it's fair to say they aren't new simply because they are based on electronics, computational theory (developed centuries earlier), and so on. All of the examples you used are themselves unique and interesting applications of concepts that existed long before those games existed. What makes them interesting and enjoyable are how those concepts have been applied.

[@doublepinger]

@@reverse_engineered Overall, if you haven't seen this kind of thing before, I pity your gaming experience. Specific examples of "adjacency" are in so, so many things. "Modern" games, such as Team Fortress with Fall-off damage, headshots vs bodyshots, nearly every tower defense, most strategy games with range-based modifiers from certain units, abilities, etc. Hell, anything but an old "only the middle" linear slot machine has adjacency modifiers. Every played Tic-Tac-Toe? Scratch offs? Uno? Can't get away from em. Negative jokers are the same as enchantments in some contexts, "intrinsics" in another, and even with jokers, they're only beneficial! Not a single joker that's bad in sight! Is that original? Not in the slightest, nearly every THING that has positive modifiers has negative ones. Including things that are just a cherry on top... like a cherry on top. p.s. I really need to take the FE exam 😂👌

[@celinagarza8001]

What I'm hearing is that Yahtzee wants to play typing of the dead. Yes, it is a zombie game. Yes, you kill stuff by typing.

[@inquisitorgrand]

Funny thing is there are a few concurrent other tabletop game roguelikes out there. There's a roulette one called Bingle Bingle with a lot of depth put into bets and controlling what number or color you land on. There is also a Yahtzee-inspired game (more interesting than Pimp My Dice imo) called Slice and Dice, wherein your party has different dice to roll and you can choose when to apply them or reroll while also messing with the faces and class you're using. Dicey Dungeons filled a similar niche but this leans more on specifically Yahtzee I feel. I think there's also a blackjack one in development which leads me to believe that all the indies saw Luck Be A Landlord and realized that they could do casino roguelikes too.

[@RaptieFeathers]

I've come to believe that Balatro may be the perfect game, especially for introducing new people to gaming in general. In fact... It's a game that teaches critical thinking skills that can apply to all areas of life. Being able to plan ahead, managing resources, mitigating randomness, etc. At first, it seems like it's all just based on getting lucky, but once one grasps a few core concepts, it becomes clear that one actually has far more control than it first appears. ...I wanna do an essay or something on this game.

[@hazama4478]

The roulette wheel concept is also pretty funny to me, because I saw a streamer who I was watching play Balatro took a break and played a Roulette game in the same vein as Balatro, where instead of editing your deck, you're editing the wheel.

[@NickersonGeneral]

Literally what Yahtzee is describing is what I've been going through trying to create my first game. I'd come up with what I thought was an interesting idea, try to work out the logistics, realize it's not feasible, try to re-work it, and then realize I'm just "re-creating" something that already exists and is practically industry standard. So fuck it, just making a metroidvania. Why be original when you can just strive to do the basics well?

[@reverse_engineered]

There's nothing wrong with executing well on an established formula, so long as you make it unique enough in other ways: environment, characters, story, etc. As a quick example, Bejewelled seems amazingly unique (despite being cloned a million times after), but long before that there was a similar game called Yoshi's Cookie. The games are quite similar in their main mechanic, but between some small yet impactful variations on that mechanic, and a completely different theme and setting, you would be hard pressed to say one is just a clone of another - they are both fun in their own right even if you've experienced the other.

[@FrinniferFran]

6:19 idk why that made me chuckle. Probably cause I was on Lexapro before.

[@TheFerrett3]

Roll it has existed for years in the 'pimp my dice' game type

[@GuyYouMetOnline]

The real reason it's hard to be original is because basically everything has already been done. Even Balatro merely combines things that haven't been combined before. And some of Yahtz's off-the-wall ideas have already been done, even aside from the one he mentioned was being done. It wasn't as in-depth as his version, but typing to attack was done in Typing of the Dead, and there's also already a deck-building slot machine game in Luck Be a Landlord (which actually predates Balatro). You can indeed e original by combining things, but you then have to make those things work together for the game to be good, and that's hard to do. You can also be original by taking something that exists and approaching it from a different angle, but a lot of those have been done, too. Not to mention the fact that it still has to work as a story/game/whatever from that new angle. It can be very hard, and I say this as a (strictly amature) writer myself who prides myself on having original (though probably not unique) plotlines. It's not easy to do.

[@bright2518]

Correct me if I'm wrong but the typing game he described at the start of the video is just typing of the damned but with some RPG elements thrown in for good measure

[@ZaydinTTV]

I am just reminded of a line from your review of the OG Lords of the Fallen: If something comes out that is both unique and successful, it's all but a guarantee that it will not be remaining unique for very long.

[@Bmacthesage]

I'm hoping theres a fully ramblomatic video coming for Balatro. The game is so damn good. I also remember watching a game dev video you posted where you had an idea of a "reverse progression" type game that i found rather interesting. If i knew how to code and make games i would have tried something like that

[@jongroskin729]

That photography pokemon game back in the day was pretty original

[@TheEveningEconomies]

Ok fellow Brits, pull the drawbridge and shred his passport, he called it soccer.

[@askthepizzaguy]

Ok fellow MURICANS, he's no longer foreign. He called it soccer. Gib him one of yer guns and a cowboy hat, yeeeeehawww

[@EvilSandwich]

As a recreational mathematician, I can confirm that I am completely batshit insane and you do not want to be caught in a conversation with me at a party. Besides, we all know that the best sequences are geometric sequences. Integer sequences don't really converge to anything.

[@lionusoctavus6444]

The word typing game you described is a lot like Nanotale Typing Chronicles and you type out the power you want to use then the name above the enemy to knock them back

[@S2violetS2]

Slice and dice is basically d&d mixed with yatzee

[@bagseys]

just have been playing that recently too, it quite spectatular and holds so much more depth than i even initially imagined

[@Nowolf]

"Die in the Dungeon" also seems to have something there

[@jmxtoob]

The idea with categories of words is one thing that I'd actually trust ChatGPT to "just do" unmoderated

[@GenesisAkaG]

Semantic clustering doesn't even sound that much of a pain to implement yourself without paying by the token for some magic API. For a single digit amount of categories you could probably DIY your own LM/ create a database that does it on high end gaming GPU in a reasonable amount of time.

[@jmxtoob]

@@GenesisAkaG probably true, too. It's just the first time I saw something that an LLM was truly born to do with minimal input

[@andrewmurphy2093]

That point of overthinking game mechanics reminds me of that dev diary Yahtz did where he wanted to make a dialogue system where you responded by not pressing any button and stopping dead in your tracks. Walk up and press a button has worked for years and is more intuitive for a game than not doing anything. I wonder how many devs over complicate such things when trying to make their game stand out. At this point especially it must be hard to make your game stand out in the sea of new releases.

[@reverse_engineered]

It's a natural part of research and development. You consider and test variations on existing ideas without knowing whether or not they will be better or worse. We might look back at the results and say they were overcomplicating things, but that's not what they set out to do. Instead, they were trying something they thought we be more fun, immersive, and intuitive, but when we tried out the result, we found it was actually more cumbersome. Often it only feels more complicated or confusing because it's different from the idiom we've grown accustomed too. There are lots of everyday appliances whose interfaces are objectively overcomplicated and difficult to learn based on everything we know about user interface design, but any attempt to improve it has been met with frustration because people approach it expecting the old, familiar interface and find themselves having to learn some new, "unintuitive" interface. It's common knowledge in user interface design that "intuitive" is synonymous with "familiar"; it's easy to figure out what to do with something because it's similar to something you are already used to doing. This is also why a lot of games tend to have the same mechanics over and over. Video games rely heavily on familiarity with idioms to relay information. Any game that tries something new that doesn't rely on existing idioms - or worse yet, contradicts existing idioms - is going to start out feeling awkward and difficult, starting them off with a negative perception regardless of what else they do right. Some games actually take advantage of that, such as "QWOP" and "Getting Over It" - they aren't necessarily difficult to control, but the control is completely unfamiliar to us.

[@wolfiechica]

Your DnD Yahtzee deckbulider thing already exists btw. It's called Slice & Dice. Give it a shot. I like it way better than Balatro and they just had an update recently.

[@NorthernSeaWitch]

Epistory Typing Chronicles has the letter based combat you're looking for.

[@lionusoctavus6444]

Loved that game

[@Buffaloguy1991]

on the deck builder yahtzee thing that's already been done is called Dice throne and it's a bunch of fun

[@syaieya]

Colored shapes corresponding to button inputs boiling down to fighting, rhythm, and with a stretch puzzle games really hit that thing in my brain that makes the happy happen

[@Dw7freak]

That mention of typing out words and/or anagrams to inflict damage. Sega already did that with Typing of the Dead.

[@98jiMM]

I made it 3 minutes into the video before pausing to play a game of Balatro

[@RobinClower]

I would have, but my switch is across the room and my dog's on my lap. Balatro University it is, I guess

[@RaptieFeathers]

​@@RobinClowerMuuuhhhney.

[@BurntL]

I opened Steam on the day that I heard of Balatro and immediately stumbled upon a game that appeared to be a roulette wheel version called "Bingle Bingle" Additionally, I found a game called "Slice & Dice" that's sooooort of like Yahtzee (the game, not the man) but it's a dungeon-crawling roguelike which has turned out to be really quite fun, if my 20 hours in it are anything to go by.

[@Shadyguy111]

There is a game called Luckland that is sort of a deckbuilding roulette game. It's been out for a while and I've really enjoyed it.

[@CuriousMoth]

Luck Be a Landlord. It was one of the games that inspired Balatro.

[@richardconnor2871]

When he was explaining his first idea for a novel game idea, I was really expecting him to just say, 'wait, that's Typing of the Dead, which already exists!"

[@redgreen2453]

I’ve always thought connecting dominos was fun. You could make a game where the combat system is based around being dealt a random assortment of dominos and trying to build the longest domino train you can with added bonuses for doing it quickly and stringing together doubles and stuff. It could even have the added wrinkle of where the numbers (or symbols) on the dominos are basically your character’s stats so the more dominos with that number/symbol you use in the train, the more powerful the attack is. That’s just off the top of my head lol no idea how the ui would work but free game idea if anyone wants it, no credit needed

[@MoomLoveEternal]

Bookworm adventures deluxe is already about fighting enemies by spelling words. And infinity craft has already loosely found a way to create conceptual associations between words using AI technology. Combine the two with a bit of polish, and you'd have Yahtzee's impossible-to-develop game.

[@Ohmargod]

Achron sounded like it will be the most innovative RTS ever conceived of. A RTS with time travel as a mechanic? Grandfather paradoxes? Multiplying units through sending them back in time? Teleportation through time travel? The game we got was disappointing, but like the sanity system in Eternal Darkness, we need to dig up these gems and polish them.

[@burningsheep4473]

That was my impression unfortunately. That Achron was interesting, but ultimately not worth playing.

[@rsherhod]

Classifying words as "animal related" etc. is what those new fangled LLMs are good at. Maybe try them.

[@ltbq]

god the SR theme is so funky, the FR one is great too but it honestly feels more like a remix of this one than the other way round

[@TyroKitsune]

Reminds me of my Final Year Personal Project based on an old Escapist Article Yatzee actually wrote about MMORPGs levelling backwards. Intreiged and up for a challenge, I ended up with a vertical slice I could actually do: a Turn-Based RPG that replaced Experience with Fatigue. While the final game is clunky because I had to build it almost entirely by myself, while modifying the ORC Unity Addon to level downward (because why would that ever be a thing, right?), all while completing ny other assignments, I did have grander ideas of being able to develop builds as you went on. Sort of management game about handling your team's dwindling strength, relying more and more on whatever strategies you could: including barter or intimidation as combat might require more effort. Interesting details was that unlike Darkest Dungeon, your team is at max level when you start, levelling backwards and having to lose abilities. Equipment and buffs from defending the settlement the story revolved around would grant needed progression. Furthermore, opportunities to rest and recouperate would have to be a big component in a larger version of this as you look to handle the likely-hex crawl around you. The downside to this is that its also pretty brutal to play. If you're having trouble and planned a combat poorly, other systems such as attempting to talk or barter enemies out of situations would have to be complex enough to still be satisfying. Or just save scum till you get the RNG you need to brute force it. Furthermore, grinding is now a risk. You might be able to find an item to get equipment but it's now whether its worth the time and Fatigue if you get into a fight. Or resources to bargain with. Lastly, I found precious little games that do anything like this when I researched this in 2019. The one that did this the best was 'A Quest Too Far'. An aging hero straps on his old kit to save his grandchildren from certain doom. It models fatigue, magic items are usually only a few uses but can drastically help you along as even moving can drain you. Its all about carefully sizing up the challenges around you. Its simple but works really well as a quick challenge. Would still like to try my sized up version someday.

[@APassingCloud_]

I found The White Vault from this ad, and I listened the whole series. More ads like this please.

[@SecondWindGroup]

We try to sponsor things we think our audience would actually be interested in! Lots of indie games and such.

[@seevernet1]

Man your first idea reminded me of my first computer game Typing Arcade where you had to type words as part of a shootout. The harder shootouts had longer words and the hardest shootout had numbers and symbols and stuff.

[@specificityarchives9920]

Thank you for pointing out how easy it is to criticise a lack of originality. In my view whenever someone tries to do something original and fails they are labelled as "pretentious". Look st Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. An original game that was desperate for a polish but it also came with some of the most memorable moments I've ever had while gaming.

[@adamgashlin7551]

My favorite integer sequence is OEIS A331968, thanks for asking.

[@thenumberIX]

The lexapro line made me audibly giggle

[@NickdeVera]

yea i thought of Typing of the Dead too. i've often thought the quasi rhythm game style combat in Vagrant Story, with the chain combos and defense combos, is pretty unique

[@Kisai_Yuki]

I think the solution to "anagram solver" as the input, is actually to go back to how text parsers worked in the first place. The game doesn't understand ALL words, it only understands verbs and nouns. It doesn't understand all verbs, only 6 or so action verbs. It doesn't understand all nouns, only the nouns for the objects in the game. "sword" = "sword" but "excalibur" or "masamune" might yield a better "sword". Adjectives, adverbs, (modern) slang, conjunctions, contractions, all in the bin. Basically you make an english pidgin subset that the game understands, and if users are cheeky, you could have the game just have a "spellcheck/autocomplete" type dictionary that restricts them from typing in anything it does not understand. So your game would be like "sword"+"enemy", and it would attack any enemy. "sword" + "self", depending if the character is stupid or not would either parry or would self-immolate if it was disposable.

[@kataphrut7740]

Yahtzee: Spends two minutes gushing about how much he likes solving anagrams. Also Yahtzee: Maths? What are you, some kind of nerd?

[@moosemaimer]

I actually did some of this recently... someone on the Python forums was trying to get help with an anagram program they'd written, and so I coded one from scratch just to figure out how it would work, including finding a text file with ~400,000 words in alphabetical order, and crunched that down to only those words that shared all their letters with at least one other word. And there was an old Flash game called ClockWords where you did a sort of tower defense thing against bugs, where it would give you a bunch of letters, and you did damage by coming up with words that used them; the longer the word and the more letters, the more damage.

[@lordofheckfire51]

5:39 I’ve had an idea for a game percolating in my head that’s basically a mashup of jalopy and receiver but this is kinda a blow to that lol

[@baconlabs]

The irony would be gourmet-level if Yahtzee were to develop a _Yahtzee_-inspired game

[@kryptonianguest1903]

That's not what irony means.

[@kryptonianguest1903]

Irony. noun. The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

[@seanaugagnon6383]

One is the best days of my life was booting up my xbox360 and seeing the added the indie store. I spent $20 on 4 games and they were some of the best games I had ever played. AAA title? I'll wait six months before buying to see if it's good. A $6 indie about spelunking? Yeah I'll take 120 hours of that.

[@czarkiddy9543]

That first game idea for a fighter focused around spelling out words reminds me a bit of the Bookworm series by Popcap Games, the creators of Plants vs Zombies. It was a turn-based fighter where you had a selection of letters to make a word from, and you did stronger attacks if you spelled longer words or used specific letters, if i remember correctly.