Passing Me By
Game Design
Core Design
This game is a meditation on impermanence. It challenges the player's instinct for accumulation by building a world where everything—skills, companions, locations, and equipment—is temporary. The only lasting progression is the player's own adaptability and the lasting personal memories they form, which are truly earned and unforgettable because of the fleeting nature of all else. They search through the change for the repeating event that continues to cause it.
This game focuses on the impermanence of things.
It goes against the inherent taught game dynamic of accumulating things, relationships, locations, and abilties.
Skills come and go.
Characters come and go.
Locations come and go.
Equipment comes and goes.
Something that sticks around in this game becomes truly memorable. The self and adaptability.
What sticks around?
Instead of a traditional power curve, the player's progression is more about their identity. They aren't getting stronger in a traditional sense, but they are becoming a more defined and influential person within the changing world.
While a character's skills, equipment, and companions come and go, their personality remains. This personality would be a kind of meta-progression system, a stat that you "build" over time with your actions and choices. This gives the player a tangible, persistent sense of self in a world of constant change.
Charisma and reputation become central to this game.
Exploring loss, and the inability to invest.
This game is rooted in losing something that you experience, learn, and come to rely on. This repeats as well, so the player must appreciate things while they have them, and will miss them when they are gone. They become used to having and losing, creating a strange feeling of impermanence.
To really drive this feeling home and create the contrast before the ending validation of the experience, this path must be long and winding.
I think players will truly feel the ending contrast after a long, varied road travelled.
Small tokens along the way call back to previous events, but they are only tokens that touch on the players memories helping them remember the losses.
Validating a path of loss.
The path of constant loss sets up for a grand return to all things in the end, with a granting of all that is lost returning to the player in a big climax.
The return of all things wouldn't just be a happy ending; it would validate the player's entire experience. Every fleeting skill, every lost companion, and every forgotten location would have served a purpose, leading to this final, permanent state. It would retroactively make all the moments of loss and frustration meaningful.
The ending wouldn't just be about "winning" a final boss fight. It would be about a final, creative act of restoration. The player's last major action would be to bring back the world they've been missing.
