Can I Pet That Dog??
The great de-shrimpening.
I would like to make a video game. However, because I already have a full time job as a project manager for Maxwell Sloane LLC , and I also sometimes attempt to monetize my dice making (shop here if you wanna look at some shiny click-clacks), and I homeschool one kiddo while the other goes to public school and brings home every germ under the sun, and sometimes I pretend to manage my household too, I do not have the physical capacity to do so. Mostly I barely have the energy to flop onto the couch and watch TV for an hour before bed, it would be a time-bending sort of miracle to add game development into all of that.
And yet, like anybody with a little bit of creativity, the ideas will not leave me alone. I have so many journals so I can try and capture them in ink and paper and get them out of my head so they stop haunting me, but I reserve that for ideas I actually have the means to accomplish. What do I do with the wandering ideas I physically cannot execute but that still keep bonking around my brain meats like an annoying fairy that just wants me to listen?
Oh ho ho, this is a journal too, and one without particular purpose other than to give me an outlet to practice writing again, so let’s make this the first in a new series,
“Half-Baked Brain Batter”
….we’ll workshop that name later.
Today this idea banged around in my head demanding attention like a distraught toddler, a game about petting every dog. In my mind it’s a puzzle platformer, with your ability to command whichever dog is currently with you to help you solve the puzzles. The more time you spend with a dog, the higher its bond is, and the more you repeat commands the better it will be able to follow them. So yes, the dogs will have stats. Each dog knows a different unique trick to solve the puzzles and help you acquire more dogs. You can swap out dogs you have collected on command, so it must involve some kind of dog teleporter from whatever kennel they would be kept in. I imagined the game in the art style of Fez (spectacular game, do recommend).
As I write this out I worry I’m just re-inventing pokemon, but with dogs. Like, I could just go play pokemon and only choose doglike ones and then save myself the trouble of designing my own game. The only trouble is….
I find pokemon to be excruciatingly boring. It could then be argued that the central conceit of my game would be “What if pokemon, but actually fun to play” which seems like a good way to piss off a lot of people so maybe we won’t use that as the elevator pitch.
The other barriers are, besides not having dabbled in game development since I was writing for a MUD in high school, a mortifying thing perhaps to admit, is a lack of foundational skills in producing music, pixel art, and the ability to design interesting puzzles. Those first two are skills I’m confident I could learn, however: fifteen years of running Dungeons and Dragons has severely atrophied my puzzle development abilities. Partly because puzzle development hinges very much on guessing what the person who designed the puzzle wanted, which is a very un-fun game, but also because it’s 1v5 in terms of D&D, so even when I do put out a puzzle, those five brains get together and solve it pretty effortlessly usually by some means I never considered, making it no challenge at all. For Dungeons and Dragons, then, I lean a lot on open ended puzzles with no set solution, which is pretty antithetical to how video games operate.
At the risk of wandering even further into the weeds (for example, Scribblenauts has open-ended puzzles, but that actually makes it less fun when I can just solve all my problems with a dragon and call it a day), I’m going to leave the idea there. I just wanna pet every dog, and it sounds like a fun idea to try and gamify, but I’ve at least pinned it here like a malformed butterfly, so if I need to revisit it I can, and maybe now it will leave me alone.
For a little while, at least.
xoxoxoxo,
J.
