Recently I was thinking with myself "if I made a game using only my personal preferences, what would the game feel like? what if I tried to make a perfect game?", and I got some topics I want to discuss with other game devs (alright yeah my definition of a perfect game is probably different from yours but game design principles still apply):
1 - The perfect game needs to have strong community support
I have a couple points for this one. Firstly, if your game has a strong community, then newcomers will have a reason to play your game - to engage in the community too. Also, if you have a community who also makes content (e.g., fan-made levels, videos, etc), then you won't need to feel like "if I stop this game, the game is dead". Of course a few updates and stuff like that will keep the community, but they will also be making content by their own.
Btw, fanmades and stuff are good for other reasons too. If your game have a good fanmades support, people will start making fan made stuff, like their own levels, their own content, etc. This will give players another reason to play your game - so that other people consume their content too (like to play their levels or fanmade games). And in order for more people to get to know their content, they may start making videos of their levels, which means more content and promotion for your game
2 - The perfect game needs to have some pro playing field
This will get much easier if you have a community - but not every person in the world is a casual player. Some people (like me) might prefer to do some intense stuff in your game. Maybe they beat a new hardest level, maybe they did a crazy achievement, maybe they did something that deep down inside, you know that even you as the developer of the game would struggle to do so too. Also, if you have a not so small player base, then a pro player might start to make more serious content, as the community will watch them plying and go "oh, dude's good". More serious content can mean live streams, not so small channels, more engagement even for people who don't play your game still...
Also, if your game has a good pro plying field, then becoming a good player will take longer, meaning more playtime. Then you just need to make the learning curve less steep, maybe you can make a "hardest levels list", maybe an introduction on how top playing works in your game, etc. And if becoming a pro player in your game doesn't feel impossible, then some players will have another reason to play your game - they will want to be top players too, to glaze their skill in the community, and to make their content too
3 - The perfect game may be a rhythm game
This is the moment where my personal preferences might start biasing the perfect game, but I still have points. Firstly, music will help making the levels of your game to feel more alive, and more satisfying to watch and play. Also, people will be able to use your game to promote small artists, or even to self promote. But it will be shared promotion: you get more people in your game and more content, the level creator also gets engagement, and the artist will have it's song being shown to more people. Including people who may actually like the song and the artist... (I found the song Crim3s - Lost with a popular red level in a game, never cared that much with the level but the song was one of my favorites for some time)
Just please, don't make another vsrg (vertical scrolling rhythm game). You know those games where you have notes falling on a line, and you need to be a pianist and be getting perfects... the world doesn't need more games like these, these games are too technically hard to make, and you need to be lucky to make your game stand out. Also, games of this kind usually requires lots of music anyways, and I don't assume first-time rhythm game makers have that many songs valiable to use
4 - The perfect game may have a lot of levels
You don't need to scope creep your game (planning more features than what you can add), but you should focus on an easy, fast and good level design system. The more levels = the more content. And having a good amount of levels will help people having more stuff to do in your game. For instance, level grinders (people who strive to beat the most levels, maybe to get the most stats, or to have more videos in their channel) will need to play your game for more time. And level showcasers (people who get very good levels, usually fanmades, and record these levels to other people to watch and find new levels) will have more content to choose from
If you know you cannot make too many levels without scope creep, then that's another reason to support fanmades. You cannot make too many levels, but your community can.
5 - The perfect game... doesn't really exist (yet)
There are some games that got pretty close to this definition of a perfect game. Two games that really impacted the way I see games as a whole were rolling sky and geometry dash, the first was pretty much my introduction to games with strong communities, and the other impacted a lot the game design of my games. But they're not perfect. Rolling sky kinda forces you to have a discord, install weird apps and to have a really good mobile, what's not my case. And geometry dash is *too* hard, taking pretty much hours (if not days) to beat levels that I know that are still far from the top playing field (and demons).
So I started searching games on itch.io, it would be cool to find a really good game on itch made by some indie, and helping the developer of the game to grow - and to pretty much start a community in a game (which in turn, the community of the game would know me lol). The closest I got was with my own game Paradox Space (no, I'm not self promoting no time to play), and I also found a cool platformer called RED CLAW by Cookie-Crumb. Other than that, I really didn't found that many games that satisfied me, even though there are millions of games in itch
This is my point of view in the "perfect game". I know such definition doesn't exist, and you probably disagree with a lot of stuff I said, so let me know your thoughts on your visions of perfect games!













I found a glitch that due to some screen resolution glitch or the way the levels work, the red eye boss is impossible, as several crates required to beat it fall through the screen, in a place the camera can't go and my claw/hand can't grab














