STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR GAMES AS GIMMICK FIRST! GAMES ARE SYSTEMS, NOT PARTY TRICKS. THEY HAVE TO WORK WITH CONCERTED FORCE.
I'm so utterly exhausted with these indie teams thinking they've skirted the curve by coming up with a non-direct approach to game design because of their one tiny inversion to their genre's formula. Like, yes, it is better to put thought into your game's intellectual play, committing its expression to something expressively unique and utterable only within games - but if you design from an academic's abstract perspective first, as though your mechanics are the rosetta stone for dissecting why people gravitate towards any individual game, then you're sacrificing your art to the altar of skinner box games just the same as all the devs who sell out to work on live service trash. Games are play forward; the interaction is what translates the design to us, not the other way around. It is in transforming the play through nuance that the nuance sings - in Tunic, the combat being poorly implemented and simplistic does not shockingly transform when it becomes poorly implemented and complicated. The same with economy, the same with traversal, the same with puzzle design.
If you wouldn't want to to do it without the gimmick, then it isn't worth doing.
I'm so utterly exhausted with these indie teams thinking they've skirted the curve by coming up with a non-direct approach to game design because of their one tiny inversion to their genre's formula. Like, yes, it is better to put thought into your game's intellectual play, committing its expression to something expressively unique and utterable only within games - but if you design from an academic's abstract perspective first, as though your mechanics are the rosetta stone for dissecting why people gravitate towards any individual game, then you're sacrificing your art to the altar of skinner box games just the same as all the devs who sell out to work on live service trash. Games are play forward; the interaction is what translates the design to us, not the other way around. It is in transforming the play through nuance that the nuance sings - in Tunic, the combat being poorly implemented and simplistic does not shockingly transform when it becomes poorly implemented and complicated. The same with economy, the same with traversal, the same with puzzle design.
If you wouldn't want to to do it without the gimmick, then it isn't worth doing.
LeonardoMF93
1 year ago