it seems like smaller-to-medium-sized game development often starts from recognising some feasibler-than-it-seems, high-bang-for-buck gimmick or tech thing, with which you can reliably wow people, and then imagining an otherwise small-scope game around that
which i think there are many examples of but i don’t want to list any
and how that used to seem smart to me (build your game around a pretty-cool-no-matter-what core element, so you can’t go too far wrong) but now seems more like hedging, something done when you know you need to make something but don’t feel strongly about what or why
the opposite thing seems better to me when i see it: something built around a core risk, which a team has agreed to take, and not to mitigate, because they do feel strongly about it
but if ever i’m pitching something for investment i usually feel like i have to do the first thing
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
I want to make game I already love, but better. I wish big companies made those games, but they don’t!
if you’ll forgive the marketing terms this duality seems very much like the product of the 2010s “blue ocean rapidly turning into a red ocean” dynamic – the cool gimmick that GIFs well on twitter is about getting noticed, taking up space, reserving your spot, getting the metrics that the platform holders demand you have to consider you legitimate. whereas i think “this creative question / area of risk is interesting to me and i’ll bet there are cool things waiting to be excavated from it” is a pure creative impulse. and it gets lost in the current capitalist-realist market thinking but i think people following pure creative impulses like that is actually a vital step in the large-scale ecological cycle that a medium needs to keep from collapsing into stagnation in the long term. because even the most seemingly infinite money printing machine has a finite number of turns left on its crank.
Leave a Reply