Hi Chris! Thinking back on Anodyne 2/Sephonie/Game 5, I feel like we tend to do this 'dance' between different poles of focus - core gameplay (e.g... platforming in sephonie), 'secondary gameplay' (e.g., level design philosophy, how many levels, vibes, world design in sephonie), and the story. Often getting excited and brainstorming widely on one of these poles will lead to the 'practical concern' of one of the other poles. Depending on the time we might shift focus, or let time pass, and in the process, we'll forget a bit about one of the poles we had worked on. Over time, the more interesting ideas remain while the others tend to drift away.
Eventually though we do have to stop thinking widely and we try to solidify some aspect. So far this has always been the story or the gameplay-core - the systems tend to require a bit more concrete in story or gameplay-core in order to actually become tangible.
I would say that we kind of do this (often we try to brainstorm rough plots and characters when it comes to story) a few times (or maybe just infinitely, but in smaller magnitudes, until the game is done.
Brainstorming the secondary gameplay too much, I think, tends to lead to the most time wasted, but we also get a lot of wild/interesting ideas. It's kind of like the difference between designing "The Jump" of a game vs. "Where The Jump Happens"... any platformer inevitably needs a Jump, but you sort of need to think wildly about 'where the jump happens' to make anything interesting in the end outside of a tech demo. But if you only ever dream about "Where The Jump Happens" then nothing will ever take form.
I think the balance (which is hard to find as every project is different!) is to not get too invested in any one 'secondary gameplay idea'... since world design and like, progression systems or whatever, can change really quickly according to the demands of other things.
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If I had any reflections now, as we're edging more into production of Game 5, I think we tend to waste too much energy with the really really early brainstorming? E.g. Late 2020 and early 2021. That's not to say it's a complete waste, but I do think I, at least, need some period of consistent time where I'm able to make progress on something concrete (a story plot or a gameplay prototype), while also being able to jump around to the wide brainstorming. Rather than focusing on one of these things, forgetting about the project for a month, etc. A lot of the extremely early ideas for Game 5 didn't amount to much, except maybe some thematic concerns, and maybe the visual style being 3D somehow.
I haven't talked about it yet, but we had a weird turn of events with the story in this game. Usually the story undergoes one major revision, after the gameplay has gotten its feet and we can figure things out better - but Game 5 went through one and is going through a relatively minor (though important) one. It's related to the setting which veered into the overly-realistic-historical, before we realized that it was causing issues with how widely we could think about writing and gameplay. So we've steered it back towards the more fantastical while trying to preserve the historical research/themes we're interested in.
When it comes to that, I guess it's a matter of philosophy... I think that when it comes to games, if a story or writing style is restricting the gameplay (e.g. "Wait, wouldn't this enemy acting like this seem too strange?") - if the gameplay is 'begging' to go in a direction, but it doesn't 'fit' the setting or something... then something in the story has got to go or change, and that's what we're doing with Game 5.