>>723912694
True, but I don't think anyone making a good game has a fully realized day one design document, though. Maybe that's just me being ignorant, but I think all games evolve through iteration and ideas come into focus over time.

I've had certain loose ideas for how something would work for a long time, based on a desire for a specific kind of mechanical interaction or feel, or a specific aesthetic choice. But there's still something magical when those ideas come into perfectly clear focus around a very specific, very actionable single idea.

What inspired that post was me mulling about the loose idea that your rival character would be easier to hate if I could sell the idea that he was a cheater or the game was stacked in his favor. And the loose idea that certain kinds of enemy attacks should require the player to move out of the way entirely, rather than relying on defensive maneuvers and iframes, but wondering how to do that without it feeling arbitrary and confusing. And the loose idea that I needed a way to add some diversity to boss move sets, but I didn't want to do a bunch of extra animation work and also I like the rival boss having a "mirror match" feel where he fundamentally shares your move set.
The concrete, highly actionable idea was that the boss can summon and move level hazards around the fight space in various patterns as a kind of "attack" while he's fighting. Doesn't require much actual animation work, allows the attack to feel like sort of thing you have to avoid rather than just parry, and also feels like the boss is rigging the game against you since the level itself bends to his whim

Cowboy hat on a gorilla.