Honest answer? Dancing stick figure guy on the title screen. I did it very early in the project, in a fugue state at 3am. It lingered and lingered there, with ppl wondering "Is this real? Is this the actual title screen?" and luckily by the end I think everyone had drank enough psychedelic koolaid to agree - stick figure man stays. The artist made some better art for his hands/feet, and that was that. He's divisive, but everybody at least remembers him :)
Lesson learned that I didn't expect - hmm. Ah, one good one: I spent a LOT of time worrying about stuff being "OP" or degenerately good. Well, turns out, people like OP stuff, or degenerately good stuff, at least in single player score attack games. My biggest lesson learned on the project: people experience your game individually. If they find something broken, in their head, they are the one to have found something broken, and it feels good. You don't have to design for the entire community at once. Don't over-balance your game. Embrace the jank.
> Ah, one good one: I spent a LOT of time worrying about stuff being "OP" or degenerately good. Well, turns out, people like OP stuff, or degenerately good stuff, at least in single player score attack games.
One of the greatest joys in score-attack games like Ballionaire is discovering certain combos that feel brokenly good.
During one of my early playthroughs, I got some combo that would spawn a crazy number of balls on every drop. The game would seriously lag for about half a second while the playing field absolutely exploded with balls. It was incredibly entertaining!
Some developers see this happen and will nerf things into the ground to prevent them, but that's an absolute fun-destroying choice. In a PVP game, yeah, absolutely you should prevent broken builds like that. But a single-player score attack? Nah. Leave that in.
Balanced games feel like a chore: you just sit through them, trying to avoid those mistakes that aren't balanced away and there's never any hope for some positive discovery. Decisions do not matter and the pro-balancing crowd even thinks that this is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, discovering the city-per-tile problem in Civ would ruin the game for you (I never did). That clearly is the bad kind of overpowered. But sending that single chariot to the edge of the known universe before it gets constrained by phalanxes? Awesome.
Agree. Over-balancing everything in single player games sucks out the fun.
"Single-player" here is key - minutely perfect balancing is often a necessity in multiplayer games, and I suspect sometimes that mentality is carried over to single-player experiences without stopping to question it.
The trouble with the internet is that it's hard to stop competitive mentality leaking in; the game may be single player, but there are lots of people playing it, and they can watch each other and show off.
(this basically killed puzzle / mystery box games, which survive only in a weird corner for not-very-online people playing on mobile)
Sure they do: stock assets are the most obvious market that AI is taking direct aim at in games development, and the AI tools on the game dev market were largely trained on stock assets. If you need anything from a sound library to a 3D model to an animation to an icon set to background music to network gameplay code… sure you can get it through stock asset marketplaces… but AI tool vendors have ingested many of these stock assets and hope game developers will buy their tools to generate assets rather than buying the stock assets they built their tools with.
The minute I read “dancing stick figure” I knew exactly what game we’re talking about.
I’m not a stoner and am not really into stoner culture but I’ve watched that figure dance for like 10 mins once, entranced by it. I dunno what exactly it is, but it’s just an absolute home run.
I’m not joking, I’d pay for an app that’s literally just that guy dancing to some music.
I think that's a great lesson about art: trying to polish things into "objectively good" doesn't work, while human connection and weirdness and jank stay in the memory.
Lesson learned that I didn't expect - hmm. Ah, one good one: I spent a LOT of time worrying about stuff being "OP" or degenerately good. Well, turns out, people like OP stuff, or degenerately good stuff, at least in single player score attack games. My biggest lesson learned on the project: people experience your game individually. If they find something broken, in their head, they are the one to have found something broken, and it feels good. You don't have to design for the entire community at once. Don't over-balance your game. Embrace the jank.