I notice often that when people try to reinvent a genre or provide a “new and exciting twist”, they just take an existing genre or genre expectation, and add something on top of it. You can see this in pretty much every genre; every new title takes the existing mechanics and just keeps adding more and more, never looking back, until the new games are an ungodly mess of mechanics and expectations.

It’s a lot easier to notice something that’s missing rather than something that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, I reckon, so as a genre goes on the games become absolutely inpenetrable to newcomers. That is, until one game comes along and says “hey what if we just go back to the basics for a change?” Everyone cheers, the game sells like hotcakes, and absolutely no one learns their lesson as they proceed to copy that game and just add more shit on top of it. (See: the Roguelike genre and Balatro.)

But I think it’s a fascinating thought experiment to try and take the “bare essentials” of a genre and see how much you can strip away before it doesn’t look like itself anymore.

Consider the fighting game genre. Multiple characters, 2d stage, a punch/block/grab trifecta, special moves. How much can you whittle away and still have a “fighting game”?

Turns out, more than you think!

• Remove the 2d, and you get games like Tekken or Virtua Fighter. Still fighting games, and popular to this day (maybe not Virtua Fighter).
• Remove the special moves and the multiple characters, and you get simplified fighting games like Footsies: Rollback Edition. A lot of fun to pull out and play a few rounds, and truly digs into the essence of a fighting game.
• How about time? Most fighting games operate on a real-time system, what if we made it turn-based? That would fundamentally make it not a fighter, right? Well, no! YOMI Hustle is a turn-based fighting game and it’s a lot of fun.
• What about the punching? Most of these games assume the fight occurs mostly with your fists, but can we remove that? Yes we can - Lethal League is a fighting game where you fight eachother with a baseball, and it’s an absolute riot.

The more you sit down and think, the more these possibilities expand for you, and the more design opportunities sprout.

• Do I have to have grabs in my game? They’re fundamentally just a short-range invincible attack. What role do they play in the dynamics?
• How about the blocking state? Most of these games have you either hold back or hold a button to activate block, but why is “block” a state at all? Isn’t blocking just objectively better than a neutral state? Why would I ever not block if I’m idle?
• What if instead there isn’t any blocking at all? What happens then?

You don’t have to go down each of these holes, but considering these angles makes you better understand and appreciate things you might have taken for granted. Maybe you’ll start thinking about an accepted part of the genre and come up with a more interesting way of achieving the same macro goal.

If you wanna make something new, don’t just blindly follow what everyone else is doing. Following what everyone else is going is not a bad thing in the slightest, crowds tend to have some collective wisdom, but you should understand why it’s being done. If you do, you might be able to understand that you don’t want that particular mechanic’s goal achieved, or maybe you can do it in other ways.