Forem: jun yan

Why I Stopped Making Games With "More Content"

jun yan — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:18:33 +0000

There's a trap I kept falling into as a game developer: more content equals a better game. More weapons, more missions, more collectibles, more map area. I thought players wanted abundance. They don't.

Last year I spent three months adding a second weapon type to my survival game. A spear, distinct from the starting sword with different range and combo timings. Playtesters barely noticed. Two of them asked if the spear was in the game at all. Meanwhile, the one weapon that consistently got talked about was a rusty pipe with a swing speed slightly faster than the sword and a 4% higher crit rate against infected.

That 4% number shouldn't matter. It does anyway. Why?

The Scarcity Principle Nobody Talks About

Player psychology in games runs on a weird loop: value comes from scarcity, but engagement comes from consequence. The rusty pipe isn't rare. It's present. It sits in a specific garbage pile on day 3, and picking it up instead of the machete is a decision that stays with you because the pipe behaves differently in every encounter that follows.

More content creates dilution. When I added the spear, I wasn't adding a meaningful choice — I was adding noise. The player now had three weapons, but the third one didn't change how they thought about combat. It just sat in the inventory alongside everything else.

This is the problem with modern open-world design. Ubisoft maps bloat with 200 markers per region. The player's brain stops registering individual significance. A quest marker for a collectible carries the same weight as a quest marker for a story mission. Everything becomes... ambient.

The Decision That Haunts You

The games I remember aren't the ones with the most content. They're the ones where a specific choice opened a door I didn't know existed, or closed one I hadn't visited yet.

In Hades, I picked the Challenger's Boon for my first run — Demeter's cast, slow on enemies. It made the run harder. It also taught me that "cast" builds weren't about damage, they were about control. That single choice reshaped how I thought about every subsequent run. Was the game better or worse because I forced myself into that awkward first attempt? Definitely better.

Compare this to Elden Ring, which I love but also got lost in for 40 hours before finding a weapon that clicked. Too many options, too much freedom to optimize incorrectly, and eventually I was just... grinding. The choices didn't feel consequential because I could always respec, always go back, always try something else. Freedom without friction.

What I Build Now

After that survival game project, I changed my design philosophy. Three rules:

One meaningful branch per chapter. Not three weapons on a path — one weapon that fundamentally changes your approach. If the player can do the same thing with option B as they did with option A, the branch failed.

Scarcity of information, not items. Players should stumble into situations they don't fully understand. A locked door that hints at what's behind it. An NPC who mentions a rumor. The scarcity is in the knowledge, not the loot.

Consequence chains. Every choice connects to three future states, not just the immediate next scene. My pipe-vs-machete example worked because the pipe changed how I approached a specific enemy type, which changed how I approached resource management, which changed how I built my base. One early decision rippling outward.

The Real Insight

Content is easy. It's measurable, schedulable, deliverable. But the thing that makes players tell stories about your game five years later isn't the number of weapons you shipped. It's the moment they made a choice they couldn't take back, and it worked out — or didn't — in a way that felt personal.

The pipe in my survival game wasn't content. It was a lesson. And players remember lessons.

I spent $200 on a gacha game and couldn't stop — here's the psychology they exploit

jun yan — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:17:36 +0000

It was 2:47 AM. I'd already spent more than I wanted to. But there it was: the "Guaranteed SSR in 10 Pulls" banner. I'd been playing this game for eleven months, and I'd never seen a guaranteed banner before.

I told myself I'd only do one ten-pull.

I did six.

This is not a story about willpower. It's a story about game design — specifically, about the psychological machinery built into gacha systems that makes even technically-minded players behave in ways they'd later regret.

The loss aversion trap

Gacha games are built on a foundational insight from behavioral economics: losing feels roughly twice as painful as winning feels good. Psychologists call this loss aversion, and game designers have weaponized it with remarkable precision.

Here's how it works in practice. Most gacha games show you a "pity counter" — a visible progress bar that tells you how many pulls away you are from a guaranteed rare drop. This counter is not there to help you. It's there to make you feel like you're losing progress every time you pull and don't hit the pity threshold.

That feeling of loss — watching your counter reset to zero after a failed pull — is psychologically distinct from the neutral state of not having pulled at all. The reset feels like a setback. Players will spend real money specifically to avoid that setback, even when mathematically it makes no difference.

I tracked my own pulls across 90 days. Out of 847 total pulls, I got exactly zero SSR (the top rarity) before pity. Every single SSR came from the pity guarantee. The pulls in between were pure loss — but the visual counter made me feel like each individual pull was almost a win.

The math nobody reads

Every gacha game publishes drop rates. Most players never actually calculate what those rates mean.

Take a typical SSR rate of 1%. Intuitively, people read this as "I'll probably get an SSR in about 100 pulls." That intuition is wrong. The probability of getting at least one SSR in 100 independent pulls, each at 1%, is actually:

1 - (0.99 ^ 100) ≈ 63.4%

So in 100 pulls, you're not likely to get an SSR — you're slightly more likely than not not to get one. To have a 95% chance of seeing at least one SSR, you'd need 299 pulls. To be statistically certain (99.9%), you'd need 460 pulls.

Gacha games know this. That's why pity counters exist — not as a safety net for players, but as a way to make the 99% of pulls that aren't winners feel less like failures.

The sunk cost that won't sunk

I kept a spreadsheet. I don't recommend this, but it was illuminating.

After eleven months, I'd spent approximately $340 on this game. The total value I could extract from that spending — if I quit immediately and never played again — was about $85 in genuine in-game value. The rest was entirely psychological: the hours I'd invested, the rarity tiers I'd pulled, the social proof of my collection visible in guild chat.

This is the sunk cost fallacy in its purest digital form. I didn't spend $340 because the game was worth $340 to me. I spent it because stopping felt like admitting those 11 months were wasted.

What I'd tell the designer

I don't actually think gacha systems are categorically evil. The business model exists because it funds games that players enjoy for years. But I do think there's a meaningful difference between "monetization that happens to exploit psychological vulnerabilities" and "monetization that deliberately engineers those vulnerabilities."

The games I think are being honest about their model are the ones that give players actual control: guaranteed pity on every banner, pity that carries over between banners, clear statements of expected spend to complete a collection. The games that aren't honest bury this information under layers of visual noise and design their pity systems to reset as aggressively as possible.

I still play gacha games. But I've changed how I engage with them. I set a monthly budget and treat it as a purchase decision — "I'm buying entertainment this month, here's what I'm paying" — rather than letting the pull-to-pull feedback loop make those decisions for me.

The $200 night still haunts me a little. Not because of the money, but because for about 40 minutes, I was genuinely not in control of my own behavior. That's worth thinking about — both as a player, and as anyone who designs systems that other people play.

The Game Feature I Keep Redesigning (And Why I Keep Getting It Wrong)

jun yan — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:00:43 +0000

I have a love-hate relationship with inventory systems.

Not with games' inventory systems — with my own. Every time I start a new project, I swear I'll build something elegant. Clean. Intuitive. And every time, by the third iteration, I'm staring at the same pile of design decisions I've already made twice before and somehow still got wrong.

This is the story of my inventory system, and what it taught me about scope creep in game design.

Version One: The Naive Stack

The first version was simple. Items go in slots. Slots fill up. When slots are full, you can't pick up more. Clean. Limited. Fair.

The problem: it wasn't fun. Players started hoarding — keeping one healing potion for 40 hours because they were afraid they'd need it later. The entire economy of the game stalled because nobody wanted to spend anything.

Classic. I thought the answer was more slots.

Version Two: The Expanded Grid

More slots. Stack limits per item type. Categories — consumables here, quest items there, equipment somewhere else. Also not new. Also not my idea.

This worked better in some ways. Players stopped hoarding as aggressively. But now they were spending time navigating menus instead of playing. The inventory had become a chore.

I started noticing something in playtests: people would avoid fights because fighting meant sorting through their bags afterward. That's a design failure.

Version Three: The Auto-Sort

Version three tried to solve the chore problem with convenience. Auto-sort after every combat. One-click inventory cleanup. Stack merging on pickup.

The result: players still had too much stuff. They just sorted it faster.

What I hadn't fixed was the root issue — I was giving players too many items and too many ways to get more. The inventory was a symptom of a loot system that didn't respect the player's time.

What I Eventually Figured Out

The real problem wasn't the inventory UI. It was the design assumption underneath it: that more options equals better gameplay.

It doesn't. More options creates decision fatigue. Decision fatigue makes players avoid choices entirely — which means they stop engaging with your carefully designed item variety.

The inventory system that actually worked for my project had fewer item types, more meaningful drops, and a hard cap on total items carried. It felt restrictive. Players complained at first. But they also engaged with every single item in the game, because there were only so many to think about.

That's a lesson I keep relearning: constraints create engagement. An inventory with 20 slots and 20 items is more interesting than one with 200 slots and 500 items.

The best inventory system I've ever used was in a game that didn't let you carry anything between levels. You kept what you had, used it or lost it, and every pickup mattered.

I keep trying to build something more complex. It keeps being worse.

Maybe next time.

Why Open World Games Are Getting Bigger — And What That Means for Game Design

jun yan — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:53:06 +0000

There's a quiet arms race happening in game development right now — and it's not about graphics, or physics, or even AI. It's about size.

Open world games keep getting bigger. Breath of the Wild was considered expansive at launch. Elden Ring made it feel small. Then came Starfield, GTA Online maps, and titles we haven't even named yet — all pushing the boundaries of what "large" means.

The Size Problem

When a game world grows, the challenge isn't just content creation — it's coherence. A world of 200 hours becomes a liability if players can't answer simple questions: Where am I? What should I do? Why does this matter?

The problem isn't storage. Players have room. The problem is attention budget. Every developer has a finite amount of design energy to spend on meaningful interactions. When that energy gets spread across 400 square kilometers instead of 40, something has to give.

What Shrinks When Worlds Grow

Looking at the trend, three things consistently degrade as open worlds expand:

Quest density drops. More area means fewer handcrafted encounters per square meter. The result? Padding. Fetch quests. Radiant systems that feel procedural because they are.

Signposting disappears. In tight, linear games, players always know where to go because the game carefully directs them. In sprawling worlds, developers rely on compasses, quest markers, and waypoints — crutches that can undermine the sense of discovery.

Worldbuilding gets thinner. A focused 20-hour game can build a coherent lore, nuanced factions, and meaningful NPCs. A 100-hour open world often feels like a series of zones loosely connected by a map.

What Works

That said, some games have cracked the code. Elden Ring's approach is worth studying: massive scale, but every area has a distinct visual identity, its own threat profile, and carefully placed discoveries that reward exploration without requiring it.

The key is density of meaningful interaction, not raw acreage. A courtyard with three things to discover, thoughtfully arranged, beats a field with thirty meaningless markers.

GTA V's map is large but tightly designed — each area serves a narrative or gameplay purpose. Breath of the Wild's empty spaces feel intentional, designed to create the sensation of traveling through a real landscape rather than touring a content checklist.

The Industry's Reckoning

We've reached a point where the question isn't "can we build a bigger world?" — we clearly can. The question is "should we?"

More studios are starting to answer that honestly. Focusrite design, vertical slice development, and carefully scoped worlds are making a comeback. Not because big worlds are bad, but because a smaller world done well will always beat a bigger world done halfway.

The best game world I've explored this year wasn't the largest. It was the one that made every corner feel like someone cared about what was there.

That's a lesson worth remembering as the arms race continues.