Trying to nail down the concept for a satisfying game was a bit of a personal challenge for me. I wanted to pursue an original design for my first project, but I struggled to navigate the plethora of options available to me. It was difficult to understand the limits of my own abilities from within the vacuum of inexperience. Each of my previous ideas failed to balance ambition with accessibility.
I began to gravitate towards a 2D project as a good springboard into the larger world of games. Something simple to serve as a prototype for my next design. But I still wanted an original idea… I asked around among some friends, not really expecting any results. Imagine my surprise when my friend Milo pulls the rough draft design document for Standoff seemingly out of a hat. It felt like I had been waiting for a moment like this - to allow me to skip the indecision and dive right into the implementation.
So as I set out to write Standoff, my main goal was to try and get a handle on my own capacities for self-driven game development. In addition, the design of Standoff allowed me to build off of tried-and-true design structures in order to synthesize something new.