2024 Sep 23
A cassowary.me manifesto
In the distant past of 2017, I was laboring over some large video game project or other, and it struck me that at the rate I was going and with the scope of game I had planned, I was probably never going to finish making it.
It then struck me that I could very easily resolve this issue just by making something really small. If I made a game very quickly, I could release it immediately and show it to my friends. The process of making the game would be over almost before it began — it wouldn't ever have a chance to turn into an interminable slog.
The result of this plan was the creation of the first cassowary.me game, Snake But You Can Only Turn Left, which was a very simple idea that I figured I could easily make in a day or so, and maybe I could even use it as an opportunity to learn how to make a game that ran in the browser without using Flash (which had been my previous method of making games as a child.) But, I thought, the idea of "snake but you can only turn left" seemed so obvious — surely someone must have already done it. So, I searched for it, and was surprised to see that no one had ever created such a game before.
It then occurred to me that, even though there's lots of video games that already exist and lots of people making video games, there's tons of possible types of video game that no one has ever made or even thought of before. I think this is mostly because the field of possibilities in video games is extremely wide, yet the majority of people making video games mostly play and are inspired by the same set of preexisting games, and tend to make video games that resemble the games that they like to play.
There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but it means that it's actually quite easy to conceive of ideas for video game mechanics that no one has ever come up with before. Of course, I'm not even going to claim that my video game ideas are particularly original — most of them are just box-pushing puzzle variants or weird versions of Snake, to be honest — but I would like to challenge any aspiring video game makers reading this to try to broaden your horizons a bit with regards to the actual base mechanics of the game you're building.
Are you thinking about making a rogue-like game, or a game where you draw cards randomly from a deck? Are you thinking about making a backtracking platformer where you gain power-ups that allow you to reach new areas, or a game where a bunch of enemies chase you around inside a 2D box while you shoot at them? In these cases, maybe, instead of just thinking about what kinds of elements you want to layer on top of a game system you already like, try to think about how you can challenge some of the basic assumptions that your idea is built on top of. I think doing this will result in something that is much more interesting and unique than what you might otherwise have come up with.
And, yes, doing this means that you might make something that is actually bad. I'm certainly not trying to say that everything I've made for this website is a shining beacon of great game design. Most of my games would seriously benefit from some additional 'time in the oven,' as it were. But, in this case, consider making really small games! That way, if your idea is bad, it's fine — you just release the game and move on to the next idea. If you don't hang your hat on any one idea being a golden ticket, you will be less impacted if one of your ideas turns out to be bad.
Plus, making a bunch of small things means that you will gain skill much more quickly. Honestly, while it's definitely possible to learn things based on principles or lessons, the best way to learn something like game design is just by trying it over and over until you gain an intuition for what works and what doesn't. I think in this day and age there's a lot of incentives pushing people towards making games that are large in scope and similar to things that already exist. I would like to see more people finish their projects, and for those projects to be more unique and interesting, so maybe try to push against those incentives. You'll probably make something more interesting and you might be surprised at how easy it becomes once you've done it enough.
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