"Don't reinvent the wheel!"
Old-school game programmers who are fond of hard-coding everything from scratch probably have heard of this axiom a lot. In today's world where there is a plethora of game engines and third-party plugins, it sure is a valuable piece of wisdom to keep in mind. What's the point of inventing yet another graphics library, if one could simply use an already existing one such as OpenGL?
It seems pretty obvious that generic building blocks of a system, such as a graphics engine, physics engine, and so forth, should be borrowed from the end results of their specific fields of expertise, rather than being reformulated every time a new system is being built (unless one feels an urge to hyper-customize them for some reason).
So many contemporary game developers nowadays possess a tendency of "keeping everything as simple as possible", especially within areas in which engineering is heavily involved. They claim that any technical aspect of the game must utilize pre-made toolsets as much as possible, and avoid building features from ground up wherever it is affordable to do so.
This is indeed an efficient way to develop a videogame. After all, it is the "fun" part of the game that matters, not how the game was being made exactly. And if there is an easy way to implement a gameplay feature as opposed to a hard way, developers should probably go for the easy way and spend the rest of their time fine-tuning user interactions, adding more contents, and applying a spectrum of interdisciplinary design elements. This, for sure, is a great way of enriching the overall user experience.
However, I am afraid that this is somehow not enough for making a successful videogame.
Back in the old-school era of the game industry (1980s and early 1990s), there were not that many games in the market to compete against. A simple arcade game with a handful of clever mechanics would've been decent enough to attract a sufficient number of customers. Every new experimental genre or mechanic was an instant key to originality, and originality was oftentimes followed by profit in this brave new niche of innovation where any creative mind could contribute something fresh and unforeseen. And the audience was curious enough to be willing to pay for it.
Nowadays? Not so much. Decades of game development from all over the world has now drained this industry of almost every conceivable source of originality. It initially started off as: "There is no new genre I can think of!". Nowadays, it goes as far as: "There is no more weird, trippy in-game mechanic I can possibly think of!".
You have a bunch of creative ideas for your new indie game? Forget about it. Other developers probably have already tried every single one of them. Sure, you can still rearrange already existing gameplay ideas in different ways, thereby producing unique permutations of them, but even such degree of uniqueness quickly turns out to be blend and meaningless (like uniform white noise) as people get exposed to more and more of them. Of course, there still are ways of making best-selling games. Large AAA game companies, armed with hundreds of coders, artists, and writers, still have the ability to preserve their own market share by grinding in as much of their talent pool as possible to yield the world's highest-quality graphics, physics, and narrative details.
For an independent developer who would rather be a snake's head than a dragon's tail, however, this slit of opportunity does not help at all. No matter how hard a small group of indie developers try, there is no way for them to surpass the objective quality of a corporate-produced AAA game in terms of graphics, physics, and other quantitatively measurable dimensions, whose greatness is further magnified by an insurmountable scale of marketing.
To summarize, there are two common options for making a successful game in today's world, and both of them do not work out well for their own reasons:
(1) Develop a AAA game that is equipped with hyper-realistic graphics, hyper-realistic physics, a stunningly countless number of in-game elements, as well as storytelling that is so rich in context that it requires an enormous group of writers to build. (Only huge companies are eligible to this approach.)
(2) Develop an extremely creative game, which has gameplay features that are clearly original. (Too many indie developers are doing this, so one would say that "being creative" is no longer a powerful selling point.)
So, what should an indie developer do, in order to survive this red ocean of countless videogames and stand out as a competitive one? If neither talent-grinding nor "being creative" is a promising option for coming up with a game that sells well, is it even economically feasible to try to make a living out of indie games these days?
In my opinion, there is still a way. And the reason why I have not lost hope is that "creativity" itself is a broad concept which can be subdivided into two different types. If one type of creativity is deemed useless, we can utilize the other one.
(Type 1 - Soft Creativity)
Remember those younger days, when you were in high school and there was at least one kid in each classroom who was famous for being the "creative" one? He would always dress up in a quirky costume, play the guitar in the hallway, excel in art classes, and hate studying math and science because those subjects are supposed to be a set of authoritarian rules devised to annihilate one's imaginative power.
To him, creativity is all about being irrational. Anything that deviates from the norm is considered "creative", and therefore anything he writes, draws, speaks, and presents is a product of pure fantasy. He never fails to start off the engine of his own imaginative powerhouse by blowing bubbles of what-ifs. To him, an ideal process of designing a videogame begins with a sequence of unconventional suppositions like this:
"What if each in-game object that the player happens to touch instantly turns into a ragdoll, and then back again to its original rigid-body state as soon as the player touches it again? We might as well develop a puzzle game which takes place inside a museum in Rome, where there is a myriad of old marble sculptures each of which can be utilized as a temporary ragdoll for puzzle-solving purposes."
"What if, inside our game world, the moon really is made out of cheese and there is a federation of moon-mining corporates which are hiring out-of-job cows as unpaid interns to maximize their profit? Different regions of the moon are also made out of different types of cheese, so there must be also a huge number of moon experts who occupy most of their time analyzing the real estate price and estimated annual tax of each moon region, due to fluctuations in market demand."
"What if..."
And the list goes on.
This, of course, is an indescribably wondrous way of discovering unforeseen treasure islands of opportunity. Human imagination can sometimes be a key to hidden successes, and I do highly value the endeavors of creative individuals to leverage it as much as possible. However, are these "creative" pieces of imagination really creative enough? To me, the ones above I just came up with only demonstrate "soft creativity", as opposed to "hard creativity". A product of soft creativity is purely imaginative and thereby sparkles upon the throne of its own vibe, yet it is easily conceivable, easily replicable, and oftentimes isolates itself within its own context, mainly because it is a concoction of thoughts that were sluggishly brewed out of a loose web of irrationally resembling ideas. It is by no means cleverly articulated.
And since nearly anyone who spent their early childhood in a privileged upper middle class household of a first-world educational system, being granted the luxury of high-standard living without having to endure a soul-crushing prison of toxic competition that is founded upon an unbearably shallow standard of brute-force memorization and dexterity, is naturally equipped with the ability to conceive random irrational ideas and embellish them with their own independent collection of fantasies, "being creative" in the aforementioned (soft-creative) sense does not really mean anything other than: "You were given a chance to think randomly with less hesitation than, say, people in the third world".
(Type 2 - Hard Creativity)
Hard creativity is something different. It is hard to conceive, hard to replicate, and fitting it into an external context of meaning requires careful planning. It might comprise a hint of curious irrationality, yet the foundation of it is laid upon a ground of rational worldview - something which establishes consistent relations with pre-existing ideas.
When a professional architect designs a house, one would almost invariably say that the result of his/her design contains a lot more depth to it than a random house drawing scribbled by an amateur. This "depth" is the thing which distinguishes hard creativity from soft creativity.
In the videogame industry, hard creativity often comes in the form of technological innovations. To be honest, it would be careless to say that every innovation grants the developer a power of being sufficiently original to be able to stand out among the pool of kindred competitors. After all, making a VR/AR game might help increase the game's sale a bit because only a fraction of developers are venturing to make one at this time of writing, but probably not so much because there are still a truckload of innovators from all over the world who are eager to experiment with the hidden potentials of the VR/AR platform. It is a rat race where there are fewer rats and perhaps more cheese to eat, but nevertheless a rat race.
Selling a game is not as financially promising as selling consumable daily products (such as toilet papers, foods, etc), where being "unique" is not as strictly necessary as in the case of selling intellectual properties. In order to seriously make money off of a game, one needs to ensure that it is either marketed extremely well (which is not a feasible option for indie developers), or is built upon a unique playground of hard creativity which cannot be imitated by most people. Some of the examples of this "unique playground" are:
(1) A rare simulation game in which the user can experiment with unique culinary scenarios, such as making a cup of tea based upon a custom fluid motion simulator, as well as selling it to customers to improve the player's in-game reputations based on a psychological feedback loop of a typical tea-drinker.
(2) A procedural animal generator that the player can run to create all sorts of random animals (each of which possesses its own bone structure, muscular structure, behavioral pattern, metabolic pattern, and any customizable biological trait), and force them to undergo multiple stages of player-designed challenge sessions for the purpose of selecting competent ones via natural selection (e.g. Fighters' arena, race track, etc). Those who survive these challenge sessions will then be part of the player's inventory, and henceforth be used to defend the player's territory from enemies.
(3) A Turing-Complete ecological simulator, in which every constituent specie of the ecosystem can function as a computing unit of a hypothetical computer, which thereby lets the player effectively design a virtual computer inside his/her own computer by utilizing statistical cross-species interactions as means of computation (e.g. The total population of preys within the n-th voxel represents the value of the n-th indexed variable X[n], and the total population of predators within the n-th voxel is proportional to "-d(X[n])/dt" which represents the rate at which X[n] decrements at each point in time, and etc).
And the list goes on.
As you probably have realized, these seemingly complex ideas distinguish themselves from mere imaginations based upon a premise that they are far more difficult to implement. They may be just slightly harder to conceive, yet formulation of their details is significantly more challenging because it requires deep understanding of hard academic subjects. And I do admit that such rare breeds of serious game mechanics won't be able to attract a wide range of audiences, yet will not hesitate to assure that targeting a niche market is probably a better strategy than trying to appeal to everyone at once during this era of gaming where countless hyper-casual games have already won the heart of the mainstream. A friend to all is a friend to none.
"Oh, you are just overthinking it!", one might say. "Just keep it simple. Simple is best. Our goal is to make a game that is fun to play, not some kind of convoluted academic research."
Sure, sure, that is indeed the common sense of the public when it comes to game development. But the so-called common sense is not an everlasting gem of truth, and the good old days back in which we could leverage such a bite-sized train of reasoning to produce a game that sells well is now gone. Are you going to make yet another casual game which has a bunch of cute-looking characters running around, doing silly things, and opening up loot boxes? Cool! Now good luck competing with a million other casual games in Google Play and App Store that are similar to yours but already way more popular.
We are seeing a phenomenon in the game industry that is reminiscent of what happened to TV shows, movies, and other types of entertainment. The mainstream audience has already been dominated by large mega corporations, and most of the so-called "creative" indie game developers, who would proudly label themselves as a group of brave cavaliers on their road to fight against the mainstream culture, have hardly done anything more advanced than simply repeating their age-long rhetoric of "starving underground artists".
In order to survive as a professional game developer in this post-infantile epoch of videogames, one must be creative in a hard way - "creative" because it is one of the few weapons that an indie developer can utilize rather more efficiently (compared to corporate executives whose internal guidelines and mannerism preclude them from experimenting with wild ideas), as well as "in a hard way" because soft creativity is way too commonplace and easily replicable.
And if the practice of hard creativity requires the developer to "reinvent the wheel", the developer must be willing to reinvent the wheel in order to truly distinguish his/her game from others and stand out in a niche market. We are living in a world that is saturated with hordes of professional wheel decorators. The only way to remain as a competent indie game developer is to be able to come up with a new wheel.