Developing - What genre should my game be?

Psst - this *IS* the Kickstarter, Manuel ;)

Game Maker's Toolkit

I'm not sure platformer and puzzle-platformer are so incompatible? Even Celeste has some levels that are slower and inching in a puzzle-y direction, Portal is definitely puzzley and has plenty of opportunities for high-speed inertial acrobatics, and even looking at your example fast-platformer level, it looks like it absolutely *could* be done at a cautious pace. Only a couple of the actions described in 9:45-10:02 appear to need to be done with any sort of even slightly tight timing, and there's convenient places to land and pause between them, and try again if you mess them up without needing to go back to the start. It's difficult to do fast but entirely possible to do slowly and carefully, and to me that sounds like an *excellent* thing for a speedrunnable puzzle-platformer, in the same way as Portal.

Qwertystop

This is becoming more and more engaging. At this moment in the series I'm just waiting for you to launch the Kickstarter campaign for the game. Please don't do it yourself, hire someone, but do it nonetheless. It will be immediately supported on my side (and I would think that a lot of people would also support it). Beside the game, there a lots of things that you can put on it also: design docs, renders...

Manuel Alcoba

[without watching the video] DDR clone

Tukaro

I would like to share some of my own insight acquired along my game design career that I believe could be useful. The first is the MDA framework, where M stands for Mechanics – the game’s underlying systems –, D stands for Dynamics – How the mechanics interact. Effectively the gameplay -, and A stands for Aesthetics – essentially the player intended experience provided by the dynamics, i.e. the “fun”. I bring this up because it feels like you’re focusing too much on the mechanics side and ignoring the aesthetics side, meaning that you have some cool mechanics but no goal on how you want to use them. In effect you have game mechanics but no game. Don’t worry, this a very easy trap to fall into, particularly for starting designers (I was very much the same) since it feels like cool mechanics should lead to cool games, but from my experience cool mechanics lead to cool prototypes, while cool aesthetics lead to cool games. So sometimes it’s better to step back and think to yourself “why should a player want to play my game. What’s the emotional response I want them to have”, “what is the gameplay that can enable that”, “and what are the mechanics required to achieve that”. Think Aesthetics -> Dynamics -> Mechanics instead of coming up with the mechanics first and then trying to find the game. The second is pretty much the same as Oliver’s: Focus on a MVP. Once you have that you can look at where you stand and figure out what else you can add to improve the game. I hope that proves useful :)