Chasing Perfection

September is here and the #1GAM theme is “perfection”. Which sounds pretty ambitious to me.

As I began to brainstorm, the abstract ideas about perfection came first. Such as:

• Chasing perfection means looking for something you can get closer to but never really achieve. So the game would need to encourage players to try levels over and over again to do a little bit better.
• This could be done through different play styles, or scores. Using  multiple scoring metrics that heavily analyze every little thing the player does would be good. There might need to be some sort of reward for those who aren’t natural score-chasers.

I had a few “game” ideas:

• Some kind of sports simulation (snowboarding was what really stood out to me)
• A stealth-action assassin game
• A point-and-click game where the protagonist sees visions of the future and then needs to set a scene exactly as he/she had seen it to progress (I’ve been watching Lost with my wife, so it would be similar to Desmond in season 3).

How to design a game that gets a person to replay a moment over and over again intrigued me. I decided I wanted to put the player in the shoes of an assassin (or thief) who needs to carefully craft a plan of attack, and then execute. Essential to this gameplay would be the ability to quickly go back, change the plan, and then start again, iterating on the plan until… perfection. Or until the player feels satisfied and moves on. That’s the thing, perfection really is unobtainable. You can never get there, but each person will determine for his or herself at what point the diminishing returns stop being worth pursuing.

I’m still hashing out the idea. One difficulty of being new at this means its really hard for me to gauge what I can and can’t do and how long it will really take. So getting my hands dirty gives me a better idea of what I can get done than planning, unfortunately.

But I will say that I’m prototyping a top down, stealth-action gameplay style with a Transistor-esque plan-and-attack system. Other influences include Hotline Miami, Gunpoint, Ronin, and X-COM.