Every game I pick up lately has the same opening. Here is how you move. Here is how you attack. Here is your inventory. By the time the real decisions show up I've already forgotten half the controls because nothing I did with them mattered yet.

The weird thing is we know what works. Portal teaches you to think in portals before it asks you to execute under pressure. It never sits you down with a diagram. You discover the verb, then immediately get a situation where picking the right portal is the puzzle.

Most tutorials do the opposite. They dump the verb list and hope the player connects it to the problem later. That gap is where people bounce off. I watch friends open a complex RPG, sit through twenty minutes of systems explanation, then freeze when the first real encounter hits. The tutorial explained what every button does but not when any of them is the right call.

Building decision-first is harder. You have to construct a scenario where the player feels the absence of a tool before they get it. But it sticks. I keep thinking about whether this is a tooling problem, a scope problem, or if designers just underestimate how much players can figure out given the right prompt.

Does anyone know a game that taught you the decision before the mechanic, and it actually worked at scale rather than in a one-off setpiece?

Take the Mount & Blade series, for example; they chose to set their game in quasi-Europe instead of real Europe. With the same effort, they could probably have set it in the real world. And the existence of popular mods that change the setting to Europe suggests there might have been demand for it.

Personally, I prefer original settings. And I'd say Suzerain would be a much less interesting game if it were set in the real world.

I hate when games play themselves.

In a lot of sims you somehow know exactly what your competitors or enemies are doing. What everyone thinks of you. Even what will happen before you make a decision.

So how much should a sim tell you before it stops being fun to figure things out yourself? Any sims that got this really right or really wrong?

Longer version below if you're curious.

In games I want to experiment and figure things out. Sometimes make terrible decisions because I didn't know enough. Something a bit closer to how business actually works.

Don't get me wrong. I love numbers. But in real life I mostly have my own. Sales, conversions and that kind of thing. I dont have stats on what competitors are planning or what clients really think of me. I have to figure it out by talking to people.

So I'm building Red Creek. A Western business sim/RPG.

It's a hobby project next to my day job. I have a master's in economics and spent 13 years as a startup CEO and advisor. Before that I worked with government data modelling. So I've probably gone a bit overboard on the economy 😅

The model is built around 180+ townspeople. Each has their own money, job, business, family, assets, motivations and relationships. They make decisions on their own and stuff happens whether you're involved or not. You can influence how things turn out though. Right now there are 23 in the game for testing. Build housing and create jobs and more people move in.

But you don't get to see the model.

You only know what you see or hear and what you manage to figure out.

Say a merchant is desperate for cash. If you find out you might be able to help him or negotiate a better deal. Or take advantage of it. If you never find out those options don't show up.

The journal keeps track of what you've learned and the ledger keeps track of your money. I don't expect people to remember every conversation. But you won't get popups or relationship scores explaining what's going on.

You can build businesses, trade, speculate, invest, work for people, become a criminal, or live in the desert with only your pet turtle for company. Personally I play toward money and influence until I can shape how the town grows. But that's just me.

There aren't really any rails. Unless you build a railroad.

I keep going back and forth on how much to tell players. I want mistakes to happen because you don't have all the information. But I don't want people spending hours wondering what the hell just happened.

So yeah. Where would you draw the line?

AI disclosure: I am new to game development, Blender and Unity so I use AI to help with coding, generating and refining some game graphics and polishing dialogue for those characters who need better English articulation than I can provide. Of course I am reviewing everything (most of the fun in building it is when everything clicks, dont want to miss those moments). I use it to improve my English, including this post, since it is not my first language. The economic model, game design and ideas are my own.

Like, we’re obviously long removed from the simple backgrounds from 8 and 16 bit consoles of yore. And as such backgrounds in today’s games that have you play in a 2D plane can have as many details as you could possibly want. But how much is enough? If your gameplay regularly has you go from 3D to 2D and back, some players might inevitably thing if there’s like hidden secrets lurking around that you can actually never get to since by the time you can play in 3D again, you can never return and explore that segment of the level more often than not. Things like visible debris, machinery, ledges etc. can probably have that effect

The inspiration I had for this thread is the game Split Fiction which indeed has ample amounts of such 3D to 2D and back switches. Like this one taking place in a level where you’re both super soldiers (long story) where at one point come across seesaws with an electric object moving back and forth with plenty of identical seesaws ever so temptingly visible in the background of the segment. But since you of course never get to go there, they’re just useless background detail.

One of the first ideas I had for my cozy fishing game was that the fish you find should depend on the time of day and the part of the lake you go

If you fish at night in one area, you can catch a different fish than during the day, and some spots could have rarer fish than others. The idea is to give you a reason to explore and fill out your collection.

I’m still working on it, but I really like the idea that going back to the same lake at a different time can get you something new