@Summer thanks! That's my pre-canada-day avatar.

yes. risk does indeed figure into it. But I am thinking of dynamics where the work/risk are not worth the payoff.

You don't want game time that isn't "worth it", right? So what if that was the puzzle. Solving what's worth it.

I hoped it was homage the Red Star.

@Summer Binding of Isaac has deliberately imbalanced balance - it's been tweaked over time, but there's combo & challenges that are intentionally over & under powered. Some of it is from RNG roguelike genre, but some of it is player desire to take on more or less challenge. Playing as the Lost is incredibly difficult. Some of the unlock rewards are nice, but for me at least, there was a huge rush just from accomplishing runs where the deck was stacked against me.

yeah, that makes sense. But from a meta perspective, the reward is balanced. The pleasure of defeating the highest difficulty is a rewarding experience.

then again, that might just be seen as a different type reward.

What I mean is, a lot of games get gamified. People like to find out how to cheese it. or exploit it. They calculate DPS etc... what if that was the game.

The game is to figure out how to game the game.

I am talking in circles.

I am starting to think this is just some absurd thing my ADHD came up with to avoid doing my Physics homework.

The Red Star was a raelly good PS2 game

I was there when it didn't hit xbox because acclaim went under

@Summer In my experience players don't like that part of games. They already don't like having to grind and just look up the best place on some wiki. Sitting there with a spreadsheet to figure out which area gives the most xp per second is just not fun.

If you want to go that route consider making the puzzle not writing down numbers and doing math but instead a point and click game like Myst where you have to figure out which pixel to click. I don't like that genre, but at least there is some logic to the puzzles.

A better example would be Factorio. You get rewarded for good setups, but you can do without the optimal strategy. And even in that game people just look up how to make an optimal 7 to 5 belt condenser because it's just not an interesting problem.

I was also told to use Cinemachine. No orbiting camera for me anymore.

Hmm I am seeing some weird stuff in Unity. When 1/Time.deltaTime = 60 fps minimum over a certain timespan, I am seeing weird stutter behaviour that represents something more like 5-20fps min.

Either I'm doing something wrong, or this isn't an accurate way to capture FPS, both of which I'm doubting

Monobehaviour Update()

says pretty much the same thing as my frame counter

the worst spikes being around 50 fps

but the stutter I get is far worse than that

pastie.io/hgwnpm.vbs

I think it actually captures FPS fairly correctly, but the spikes (max frametime) can't be right

I don't know why but my idling animation is going up and down, like in this question: answers.unity.com/questions/1249822/…

As a result, the feet of the character are never exactly on ground

@nwp See, I'm not sure that it is all that 'not fun'. I mean for some people. A lot of people even. It is. But there are a LOT of people who sink a lot of hours into writing those guides that the rest of us look up. This would be a game for them. That was 100% who I was thinking of targeting when I came up with the question. Basically, how do I write a game just for them? Then they don't have to metagame. They are just playing a game designed around what they want.

I don't think they write those guides for fun. I think they write them as a community service. If you remove the element where others look up their solution they are no longer interested in making the guides.

But there are genres that revolve around busy work. All sorts of management and clicker games, so I think you totally can make a game around that.

I think "Find the optimal farming strategy" becomes interesting once you can then use it. Like a game where you can write farming bots. That way your strategy translates to rewards.

"Railway Empire" comes to mind. You have to think of good supply lines and then they are automatically serviced by trains.