Dev Blog #10 - Why friction is good (sometimes)

Hey everyone! What a great couple of days!

I'm personally amazed by the community getting together to find all the little things hidden inside this dungeon. It's a creator's dream coming true.

Since launch, we've been reading a lot of your feedback, and one of the recurring topics is how difficult the game feels sometimes, how little direction it gives you, and how some of its systems can feel frustrating. So I thought it would be interesting to talk a little about why we designed Deep Dish Dungeon this way.

First, I think there's an important distinction between friction that makes a game frustrating for no reason, and friction that exists to support the experience we're trying to create.

We want exploration to be slow, deliberate, and sometimes, why not, uncomfortable. We want you to stop, think, look around, and discuss with your friends what to do next. If you always know where to go, if you carry everything you find, and never worry about resources, our game design vision would not be the same. The dungeon would become a place you walk through, instead of a place you learn to survive in.

This is also why your inventory is small. We don't want you to collect everything you see. We want you to decide what's worth bringing back, what you might need later, and when it's time to return to camp. But I know that it might frustrate some of you, since many other games handle this differently. Also, the backpack, in particular, was designed more as a way to pack up your belongings and move your camp to another campsite, rather than something you carry around on every expedition.

These limitations are meant to encourage planning and resourcefulness. When you play in co-op, it creates these little moments of togetherness, when you and your friends have to figure things out. Of course, mere friction isn't automatically a synonym for good design. If something feels unfair, confusing, or simply gets in the way of having fun, that's something we need to look at.

We're committed to making your time in Deep Dish Dungeon as enjoyable as possible. We're constantly reading your feedback, fixing bugs, and working on quality-of-life improvements to make the experience better. We want to keep improving the game, and your reports and comments really help us understand where we can do that.

Thank you all for the amazing comments and feedback!

Love you all!

Saulo Camarotti

- Creative Director, Designer and Coder