Things that are fun to code but not to play

I’ve noticed while writing my games that some things are really fun to code up, but tend not to produce the same excitement in players.

-mazes
-wildly branching CYOA (kind of like a text maze)
-Really deeply coded secret endings or hidden areas/scenes that most players don’t see
-Multiple, completely independent paths through a big game (where two playthroughs will be completely different, like Cadre’s Narcolepsy)

What are some other things that you really like coding but don’t like to see as a player?

Writing text dumps can be fun!!! :laughing:

Reading text dumps, no so much. :blush:

Multitudinous and varied responses to “SMELL __________.”

This is like everything I make, especially the elaborate 2-D line of sight calculation and description generation. Also there was this elaborate system in one of my games for generating new room descriptions and occasionally having the player notice things which didn’t come off. Partly because I realized that in a one-room game there isn’t much use for room descriptions.

(I dug the possible alternate paths in Narcolepsy exactly up to the point where the second path stalled out completely in the scene in the restaurant. Which is one problem with the approach, I guess–if you have three different game paths that interact in unpredictable ways, there’s more places for bugs.

Varying/multiple examine descriptions in a parser game. I love going deep into the history and changing attitude of the PC as they look closer and closer at a prop, but I doubt anyone ever dives in that end of the pool.

As a player, I like mazes I can solve in one try! Especially if the solution is simple. It’s tempting to make a large maze with many locations but it’s better to use just a handful of locations perhaps with a navigation puzzle or a secret lock/door.

If you give points for finding areas, the player can notice that they haven’t solved everything. You can list completed endings at the end. Some players have a goal to find all the paths/endings. Others are satisfied with just one path/ending.

A classical technique is to allow the player a choice of starting characters, or let the player choose the profession or goal of the character. Players often don’t try more than one choice. But different players make different choices.

It’s fun to make a my apartment game!