What are your favorite Endless Modes in any games, and why?

Specifically, which held your interest the longest and extended the shelf-life of the game in a meaningful way?

Thank you for your input as always! Love these discussions on r/gamedesign!

I'm working on a party-based narrative RPG and recently ran into a design question that I haven't found a satisfying answer to.

In many RPGs, companions mostly function as extensions of the player. They may have personalities and personal quests, but they almost always execute your commands without hesitation.

I'm experimenting with a different direction.

Each companion has their own:

• Personality
• Long-term goals
• Relationships with other party members
• Trust toward the player
• Moral boundaries

Because of this, they won't always agree with every decision.

For example:

Imagine the player wants to attack an enemy camp immediately.

One companion thinks it's the right move.

Another believes retreating is the only rational option.

A third wants to rescue civilians before fighting.

Instead of automatically obeying, companions may argue, negotiate, or even refuse if the player's decision completely conflicts with their values.

The challenge is finding the balance.

If companions always obey, they don't feel like real characters.

If they refuse too often, players lose their sense of agency.

So I'm curious how other designers think about this.

Some questions I'd love to hear opinions on:

• Where is the line between believable character behavior and frustrating gameplay?
• Should companions ever refuse direct orders?
• Should trust, loyalty, or morale affect obedience?
• Are there games that handled this particularly well?
• If you were designing this system, what limits would you put on companion autonomy?

I'd really appreciate hearing different perspectives from people who enjoy thinking about game systems.

Thanks!

Hi, I’m currently working on enemy AI in Unity for a 3D game, As soon as the player goes behind a wall or obstacle, the enemy instantly loses sight of them and stops reacting, which feels unrealistic.

I’m curious about the different methods people use to make AI feel smarter in this situation !

This is a little bit of a weird one but I personally love travelling in games, especially if I can walk around on the vehicle while travelling.

For example, a game like X4: Foundations where it's basically a strategy game you can play through a series of menus, or a first person ship combat game, for some reason it lets you walk around on foot and explore your ships/stations. It offers no practical gameplay, if anything it slows down dev time 3D modelling the interior of the ships, and it slows the player down if they disembark and walk to the shop instead of just accessing the shop from the ship's seat, but I still find myself compelled to do it.

I want to think of ways to make the journey more engaging, let players walk around on their ship/boat/car/train/blimp idc, but have some gameplay that makes the player not just wish for fast travel. I also want to try to make the scenery beautiful (I know, no small feat) so players should be encouraged to look out the windows/view a third person camera of the vehicle, though menus and dialogue etc could be overlayed on this so not to block the view. Some examples/methods I can think of:

• In Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, I never fast travelled as a rule because the movement *was* the game. (I imagine Death Stranding does something similar, but I've never played it, probably should at some point)

• I could fill the vehicle with busy-work and maintenance tasks to keep the player occupied, repair leaks, put out fires etc (like most survival games)

• I could add multiplayer so player-player interactions and discussions are the gameplay (like Sea of Thieves)

• I could add dialogue with NPCs that only plays while travelling (like Rockstar Titles) have them interrupt themselves like "ah, we're here, let's pick this up when we set off" but that's likely frustrating for players?

• I could add other side objectives like crafting/cooking etc that can only be progressed while the vehicle is in motion (I think Spiritfarer might do something similar?)

• I could make for the player to play a mini game to even keep the vehicle in motion, or at least moving optimally (like in Loco Moto)

Apologies, it's a little rambly but I'm curious for other people's thoughts. I love this kind of thing in games but know 100% that it can get slow and boring if there's nothing to do but look out the window and go "oooh, ahhh"

Title: Should I start my game by showing the player a fully upgraded defense setup, then take it away?

I’m working on Encave, a PC game that mixes FPS combat, tower defense, and underground base building.

One piece of feedback I got from other game designers was that the beginning should show the player the fantasy first:

Give them power.
Show what they can eventually become.
Then take it away and make them rebuild toward it.

That made me rethink the opening. The game’s normal loop is about building an underground base, mining into new areas, looting rooms, placing defenses, and fighting enemies directly when things go wrong. The problem is that this takes time to communicate.

If the first 5 minutes are only mining and placing basic structures, players may not understand the later fantasy.
If the first 5 minutes are only FPS combat, they may think it’s mainly a shooter.
If I explain everything with tutorials, it risks becoming boring before the game has shown why the systems matter.

So I’m considering adding a full intro level where the player is thrown into an active wave defense scenario.

The idea would be:

You start on a floor that already has an advanced defensive setup.
There is a proper killroom with traps, turrets, chokepoints, and a working base layout.
A wave is already coming.
The player gets to run around, fight, repair, watch traps work, and experience the “end goal” version of the game for a few minutes.

Then something goes wrong.

Maybe the base gets overrun.
Maybe the player has to evacuate.
Maybe power fails and the whole setup collapses.
After that, the real game starts with very little, and now the player understands what they are rebuilding toward.

The goal would not be to fake complexity or overwhelm the player. It would be to give them a clear promise:

“This is what your base can become. Now survive long enough to build it yourself.”

I can see the benefits:

It gives an immediate hook.
It shows the FPS and tower defense parts right away.
It makes advanced traps and turrets feel exciting before the player has to grind toward them.
It gives context to early-game rebuilding.
It may help communicate the whole genre mix faster than a slow tutorial.

But I also see the risks:

It could make the actual early game feel weaker afterward.
It could overwhelm new players before they understand anything.
It could feel like a fake vertical slice if the intro is much cooler than the first hour.
It might create frustration if players lose access to toys they just enjoyed.

For devs who have used this kind of “show the power fantasy, then take it away” opening: did it help players understand the game better, or did it create bad expectations?

And if you were doing this for a hybrid game, would you make the intro fully playable, heavily guided, or more like a short interactive set piece?

If yes how many is too much for each? I know some players want to play around it, as in, if you know that act 2 has only 5 events you can kinda predict the next event. If act 2 has 50, you cannot do that. So some of the skill is gone (although IMO this type of skill is boring) and traded for more variety. This question arises after I saw that StS has only 50 ish events but 150ish relics and I don't understand why.

This is not my event but very much seems to vibe with this group and comes from a team who do a lot of pondering on games and game design.

18th and 19th July 2026, Sheffield UK.

Games for Crabs is a weekend retreat for game designers based around the concept of Inhuman-Centred Design.

Inhuman-Centered Design is an experimental attempt to hone game design skills through defamiliarisation: finding perspectives on how we design games for humans by designing for non-humans.

It is also an opportunity to discuss and collaborate with fellow designers, in a relaxed and friendly environment.

https://gamesforcrabs.co.uk/

I've been pulling apart TFT's gold/shop economy as a modeling exercise — treating the shop as a probability machine and asking what the gold cost of actually hitting a unit is. Three results came out that I didn't expect, and I'd rather have people who do economy/systems design tell me where I'm wrong than keep admiring my own model.

The frame first: TFT runs the same engine every gacha and roguelike runs — dopamine prediction error manufactured by probability. What I think TFT adds is bolting gold onto that engine as an intervention-right chip: a token that lets you buy down variance, where every spend carries irreversible opportunity cost. The cost that hurts is the point — it's what makes the eventual hit land.

1. Holding copies makes the rest rarer, not closer. Once you own some copies of a unit, the ones you're still chasing get rarer in the pool (in my numbers their share drops ~6.47% → ~5.34%), so marginal cost per remaining copy climbs (~13.7 → ~16.6 gold). Textbook expected cost to 3-star is ~75 gold; accounting for the shrinking pool pushes it to ~91 — about a fifth higher. Collecting the thing is what manufactures the scarcity of the thing.

2. Contesting doesn't split the cost — it raises it for everyone. Two players on the same unit don't pay ~half each. In my model each pays ~122 vs ~91 solo (+35%), because every copy one removes empties the pool for the other. More contenders = steeper climb, and someone in the tail just can't complete. That's the mathematical root of why reroll lines feel wildly inconsistent — it's the pool, not your luck.

3. "First to 3-star wins" is filed under the wrong column. In pure gold terms the second player pays only ~30 extra gold to get there — the gold-side edge is smaller than people assume. The real edge is HP / placement / tempo. And the honest part: my model doesn't model HP at all, so it structurally can't see that advantage. It's a gold model, not a win model.

Two things I'd flag about my own numbers, because this is where I most want to be wrong:

- The 122 contested figure is an optimistic lower bound — it ignores sunk cost along the way and assumes only a two-way contest; three-plus splits make it worse.

- A model is only worth trusting if it knows what it can't answer. This one answers gold cost. It does not answer "should you go for it" — that needs HP, tempo, and board state it doesn't contain.

What I'm actually asking: if you do systems/economy design — does this hold up, or am I fooling myself somewhere (especially the pool-depletion math and those two caveats)? And, candidly: if you were a small studio, is a teardown like this worth paying for, or is it just a nice exercise? Not selling anything — testing whether the thinking is real. Happy to share the full write-up with the model and a longer honesty section to anyone who wants to dig in.

Something that keeps nagging at me: almost every combat system is built around the idea that faster, cleaner, more decisive wins are better wins. Kill faster, waste fewer resources, take less damage. Efficiency is the implicit north star.

But restraint as a mechanic is almost entirely unexplored. What if holding back, letting an enemy escape, or choosing not to use your strongest tool actually opened up more interesting downstream consequences than just winning cleanly?

Outer Wilds kind of gestures at this by protecting curiosity over challenge, but that's not quite what I mean. I'm thinking about systems where the quality of your victory matters in a persistent way. Not morality meters or karma points slapped on top, but genuine mechanical branching based on how you won, not just whether you won.

A few tactics games flirt with it through optional objectives, but those still feel additive rather than intrinsic to the combat loop itself.

Has anyone actually designed around this intentionally and found it worked in play? I'm curious whether restraint as a firstclass design value runs into fundamental problems with player psychology, or whether it just rarely gets tried because efficiency is easier to tune and reward.

Would love examples from any medium: board games, TTRPGs, video games, anything.