This week's topic was repetition. I went down a rabbit hole of exploring the concept of repetition in video games. I wanted to build a little prototype this week as well, so I could start iterating, little by little, on the game I want to make.
Initially, I thought the concept of repetition in video games was limited to "grinding". Grinding is essentially a game mechanic, through which players do something repetitive (like killing a monster over and over) in order to achieve something (get money, gain experience, find an item, etc). Grinding is often attributed to poor design, since it's something that nobody enjoys doing - some crafty players have even scripted bots to automate these actions for them.
The more I read and thought about this concept, it dawned on me that in general, video games are repetitive systems in their entirety. In games, our choices are constrained to the interface we use - keyboard, mouse, controller. The choices we have on the actions we can do are limited, and as such, we find ourselves doing the same things over and over: shooting, climbing, clicking, jumping, pressing, moving. Everything we do in a game involves a series of repetitive events.
My little prototype was built with the CreateJS Javascript library, and inspired by bubble wrap: aesthetically a repeating pattern, which encourages a repetitive action - to pop the bubbles. I hoped to replicate this feeling of satisfaction, and hopefully make it a part of my final game in one way or another (not the bubble wrap, but the mechanic). You can see the code on Github.