Recently I play some games, and these games inspire me on treating the player unfriendly.
Loots with debuff or foods with side effects
In “slay the spire” every relic has a negative attribute, and you have to give up something to receive the benefit of the relic.
In “project zomboid” there are foods with side effects.
When the player level up, not only give good trait but also bad trait.
In “Darkest Dungeon”, I think the player has 50% to get a bad trait when leveling up.
Random events with bad things.
In “rimworld”, there are a lot.
Trade offs between positive and negative traits are pretty standard at this point. An archer can’t usually wear the strongest armor, a player with a chain gun may move slower than someone with a smaller and less damaging weapon, etc. Even table top RPG’s have this, where building your character you often allocate points to various traits, resulting in traits with high points being a positive while it is unavoidable that other traits will have lower points allocated as a result.
Random negative events in some games are part of the fun itself, even if they are a set back at the moment. In Sim City even though you may have spent hours building your city, there is nothing quite as fun as when a large fire breaks out and you’re trying to bulldoze firebreaks to save as much as you can.
But the best answer I can give for now, “is to try not to overdo it.”
Because if you overdo it, the player might get fed up, frustrated, or bored, and might consider the game, too hard and unplayable.
I think you can harm the gamer indirectly, continuously. For instance, in the game world, create a NPC as the player’s little daughter, while the daughter get a rare disease and needs continuous consumption. Then the gamer is distracted, he can’t put all his time on upgrading or spend all his money on equipment.
While this method has a side effect. Saving the little daughter maybe become one of player’s main goal. It will change the original game to some degree.
If you don’t want this side effect, you have to add other somethings.
@hongwaixuexi overcomplicating things.
This way could consider that putting zombies, or other enemies is unfriendly
One zombie too much, and game cane be unplayable (not fun).
We talk about ways to constrain the player. If the player kill zombies, and he will get upgrade and loots. Zombies make the player stronger. So let the player get a disease to reduce his power for balancing game.
Whatever mechanics you like to apply. But nothing of these are new past 2 decades.
So what is unique about it?
Or thread’s point is just sharing, what you going to implement?
I think @hongwaixuexi is just meaning to understand how these concepts work… maybe to find an innovative alternative?
Also:
I think we call that “neutral”.
Me, myself, and I have been working on perfecting both code and mechanics for so long we never got to gameplay balancing… ugh! <<I don’t mean to hijack the thread.
You’re joking but you’re likely not too far from the truth. Players have a tendency to jump to the conclusion that a game is being unfair to them when it may have been completely fair.
I’ve known some games to have random numbers that are weighted more towards positives to make the player feel like they’re getting more lucky than they truly are, and I’ve even known of some games that guarantee you a positive result if you have too many negative rolls within a certain time period.
