i’ve had a lot of different game ideas over all my years, none of which have come to fruition at all. some i wouldn’t dare tackle without years of experience under my belt and a team of people to help me out (and at least one of those is just a total pipe dream), but most were stabs at what my first game should be. i haven’t been in a situation yet where i could really focus on creating any (at least not without unacceptable risk), but that’s honestly been just as well since i’ve fallen out of love with basically all of them, at least in terms of realizing their inviability for a first project. (i will be ignoring that i’ve technically published games online in my youth, which will intentionally remain lost to time.)
i think i’m going to actually make this latest game idea though. when it struck me almost out of nowhere a few months ago, i was so immediately overwhelmed by the possibilities that i proceeded to pace for half an hour straight while piecing together all the mechanics and concepts in my head to form a cohesive gameplay vision. now, unfortunately you won’t get to hear about what those mechanics actually are in this post — i’m a firm believer in developing games largely in secret without driving up public expectations and “hype” — but i do want to talk about some of the reasons why i think this is the first game i’ll end up making.
the first is that my 30‐minute pacing episode was far from the end of my development of this idea. my design document is over 6000 words so far. which like, i’m writing a god damn design document! i’ve never formally made one of these for any of my game ideas yet, but because this one was already so close to being a fully‐formed concept from the get‐go, i felt compelled to start making a concrete plan to get it the rest of the way there. this has been incredibly useful; putting all the design rationale into words has really helped with filling in all the rest of the pieces, or the pieces which my brain had auto‐populated with generic‐but‐unsuitable “default” designs. not to mention how it’s just kept track of all of those pieces in the first place.
in doing this, i’m appreciating my own habit of documenting the “why”. i think this is critical with game design! if you don’t understand the reason a system is being designed in a particular way, you can end up implementing it wrong, or wasting time experimenting with other ideas that were already shot down earlier. i do the same thing with programming: even if the // WHY: is just “these assumptions are being made ’cuz i’m too lazy to account for other potential cases right now” or “i think there’s a better method for doing this but i’m not familiar enough with it to try implementing it”, that’s super helpful to have written confirmation of later! and despite how small the design space is here, i’ve still found it supremely useful to have all these references for why something was considered a good or bad idea, because having so many intersecting systems in game design makes you constantly re‐evaluate past decisions while fitting them together.
it also helps that the scope of the project is not nearly as grand as any of my other ideas (save for one which was a fair bit smaller but suffered a gameplay premise which i could not figure out how to actually make it fun). it’s still bigger than it perhaps ought to be, but one nice thing about how its structure is compartmentalized is that the vast majority of the feature set can be completely lobbed off while still having a perfectly playable game left standing. of course i wish i could realize everything that i’m writing down, but i acknowledge that some stuff is going to be more work than i’m anticipating, and being able to take the stuff off my plate that proves to be the most arduous will probably be how this game gets made at all.
all the work that i need to do for this game is also gonna be highly focused on developing the sorts of skills that i want more experience with anyway, including level design, workflow development, system programming, FX polish, cross‐platform support, UI design, and even some script writing. like, not only is it just a good idea for a game in general, but it’s also very well‐targeted to me as a solo developer, and to where exactly i am at the moment.
the biggest drawback is that the game has to be totally non‐commercial. there are definite upsides which necessitate this drawback, but it remains a drawback for my purposes. to compensate, i’ll most likely release 1 or 2 small music albums before releasing the game so i have some other works that people can give me money for if they really want to (which has the added benefit of focusing on one skill this game won’t really be making me work on: music composition). please look forward to my future creative projects!