How can you create a game with clear progression?

Start with defining the end goal, the "mountaintop" your player aims to reach. Then, lay out the path, segmenting it into stages, each with its own sub-goals and increasing multipliers (both for the reward and difficulty). Introduce mechanics and different progression layers gradually to engage players without overwhelming them. Use cues to signal progress, like checkpoints or level-ups, and provide tangible rewards that are both useful and gratifying. Balancing challenge and reward is key; the progression should feel EARNED, never GIVEN — yet always within reach. The clarity of progression is what turns a game from a pastime into a quest.

Define Core Motivations: Align your game's design with player motivations like challenge, exploration, or story to make progression feel meaningful. Meaningful Feedback: Clear, genre-appropriate feedback on progression, such as visual indicators, narrative developments, or new gameplay elements. Guide Next Steps: Ensure players always know what to do next to maintain engagement and prevent frustration. Anticipation of Future Goals: Keep players engaged by offering glimpses of future challenges or rewards. Clear Stakes: Make the ultimate goal and its significance clear, ensuring players understand what they're working towards. Variability in Goals: Introduce variety in how goals are achieved to maintain interest and avoid monotony.

Your core loop is the most important and must be the strongest aspect of your game. Your game should be easy to be onboarded but also open to layers to strengthen it while user progresses.

Understanding and implementing the core loop boils down to ensuring the most used and engaging mechanics feel good and intuitive to use. Without that, the rest of the project falls apart and/or gets confusing for a consumer. I've found that this can feel like the easiest part of the project, but is often the piece constantly revisited to refine, tweak, and make feel the best it can be before release.

First, define what your game is: - What are the main mechanics/systems? - What is the goal? - What obstacles are preventing the player from winning - What's the main experience.

Avoid creating stale core loops, try to always raise the stakes. Make is so that with each completed milestone the overall difficulty and rewards are greater. Be mindful of the power-creep principals. Each 5 or 10 levels, make the step bigger and bigger. Try organizing the experience into episodes even if there are no episodes in the game/level.

While varying your core loop, you should keep your main mechanics stable and build on top of it. But remember adding too much stuff too soon or on top of each other makes user frustrated, and users gets lost in content.

In my experience progresion is one of the most difficult parts to foresee by the team as developers. As the team already knows the game, the challenge & frustration and new feature organic learning are a blind spot. To ensure a good progresion we need to test well with players that are not infected by the knowledge the developers already have about the game. ??

Variation is key to creating a reason and feel to both keep playing and come back for more. These can be systems that add on to the core loop, such as boosting and power-ups in a kart game or weapon choices in a hack-and-slash game. Once these first variations are refined, add variation to them, and further enhance the core loop with player choice and replayability.

While planning & developing a progression in your game try building layers on top of each other and try avoiding overwhelming them with content. Let user enjoy the content then give them some more to enjoy.

Try not to overwhelm the players. - Start simple with a story or rank progression. - Add a level/skill progression - Add an item progression - Add META features that happen outside the main game and are completed indirectly by the main game: An item collection system, a rewarded chest, etc.

Define clear milestones, define rewards for each one. I would suggest perhaps have smaller and bigger milestones so each time the player finished a smaller one, they get rewarded a small amount but for each big milestones, they get a huge rewards. This will give the sense of progressing in a game and the enjoyment as well of playing it

If a game is too hard to begin with, it's not a nice game to play. If a game is too easy to begin with, it still isn't a good game to play. Try to imagine it in the form of a curve, from 0 to 1 on the y axis, where 0 is easy and 1 is hard. Try to start off at 0.2 and gradually increase the difficulty curve to 1. Maybe even sometimes include some dips, that makes the game become easy at times so it isn't too tiring

Start low and slow ... and add milestones. Be aware of the power-creep! Don't give too much all at once but don't be stingy. If you can't give them power then give them a visual reward, like a cinematic or slideshow story.

Use carrot on a stick method in all progression steps , the most critical part about this is not balancing your progression. An example would be; giving player too much power that he is easly overcoming the challenges and your game is not fun anymore. Remember to show the carrot, content ( shops & talent systems can be good way to do this ) the reward player a smaller version of it untill he deserves one.

Don't panic when your balance isn't perfect on release. It's much easier to fine-tune the balance over time after the release, when you have data and feedback, than doing it closed up alone with the sheets before release. Unless you are making the next WoW-killer MMORPG. Then you better have it super-polished on release ??.

Apart from yourself and team members, always make sure the testing data oriented; If possible make continuous A/B tests , if not make sure to test it with random users. Always remember, the game is not made for you and your team only. You should be enjoying it but always consider auidence while testing in house.

You are not your worst critique, therefore your are not the best person for the job. Find somebody within the industry, like your colleagues, to play your game or level. Once you have a good enough concept, find some scruffy/angry QA testers and let them shred it into pieces. The insults and criticism thrown at you will be more valuable than any praise you will receive.