MAKING ANNOYING BUT NEVER STUPID GAMES AS A CHALLENGE

bad things are more enjoyable when you know an author tried their hardest to make something good but something along the process went misunderstood. you can't really force that kind of thing. it's really easy to intentionally make a bad game.

so this isn't really new or interesting to me tbh.

If I wanted to play something with shitty but passable game design I'd fire up the NES emulator.

theres a word for games like that, its called 'average'

Don't worry I've read your post. The examples given just sound like bad games to me. Everything you have suggested exists in bottom of the barrel steam games. If you shoot for making an average game (or badly paced game or game that throws a lot of repetitive annoyances at you or whatever you're describing) you're likely going to end up with a bad game anyway should you fall short of execution. It's hard enough as it is trying to make a good game.

If you're talking about things like fear or anxiety in a horror game then that might be something to talk about. Where in essence the goal of isn't always to get the player to have fun, but nowhere in your original post do you indicate that very well. I mean if you're going to suggest people make these "thinking outside of the box" games you have to precisely explain what you're getting at, we can't read your mind. Don't assume everything you say is at razor sharp clarity.

I mean I've heard arguments about Drakengard being such a repetitive game because it's trying to get you to experience Caim descending into madness. But I'm pretty sure Cavia just didn't have a good design team that could make the Dynasty Warriors-type gameplay interesting. So a game with a really interesting story about madness and subpar game design is really just a slog to playthrough at the end of the day. I mean I also love janky ass russian games that feel like they're held together with duct tape, it does add to the charm. But again, not a thing you can really force or "achieve" that's just the nature of games like Pathologic, STALKER or Silent Storm. Though what I mean by jank is build quality, lots of bugs, the game crashing, really meh user interfaces etc. Not a thing you'd want to intentionally do really.

The difference between a bad game that's frustrating to play and a bad game that's entertaining and fun to laugh at can make all the difference in which of the two goes down in memory.

No one will remember Beyond the Beyond but everyone remembers Sonic Boom.

author=Tw0Face
How about making a game where you can only win if you lose? Every Game Over gives you a certain number of points and you can beat your own highscore by losing as fast as possible. So it's frustrating because you're constantly losing every single try, but it's also motivating, because you win anyway.

That world be rewriting what the winstate contextually is and not fundamentally changing anything. There is a game that's sort of like that where the goal is to find obscure ways to die. And the game is designed as such that dying gets harder and harder to do, but at the end of the day the flagpole is just changed to death-spikes.

A neat little context gimmick, but it's the equivalent of swapping the labels of doors.

What comes to mind with this thread is...


...this game. Though, to be perfectly honest, I've never actually played the thing, so I can make no further commentary there.

I am told that I perfectly matched the theme of "irritation" for my Theme Roulette (That Damned Redhead). The Let's Play reviewer said the word "irritating" no less than five times during the playtest.

The game was incredibly punishing, but (and here's the key) I understood the message of the game. It was hard, it was supposed to be annoying, and it was, from the puzzles, to the general plot (the game was literally about a couple that got on each other's nerves), to the challenge throwing curveballs at you, to the fact that your group had to literally work together or die easily. Yet somehow it still had humor and romance, down to the minor details like the best item in the game being a gift from the girlfriend, to incorporating part of their annoying quirks to be an asset in battle (she runs a shop in his house, so the final boss, she gives overstock as infinite items).

The difference between a brutal/annoying game and a stupid one is message. Does your game speak to the player? If it has nothing to say, it's a dumb game (in both senses of the word). Whatever you do, an annoying game is like a good horror, get under the player's skin.