I've been wracking my brains trying to come up with the perfect idea for my next game while working away at my game engine and things where looking pretty grim.

I mean I really didn't want to get started on a new product until I had the right idea, after finishing one game you realise just how much work goes into making them, no point wasting all that...

Then wham!

I get one idea that seems just that next step above all the other (been done before) type ideas.

But for some reason I thought of three more last night, how can I spend 2 years thinking about games and not come up with anything good then get 3 in one night?

Maybe there is some sort of zen state brought about by not having any human contact and surplus coffee...

:confused:

How often do you come up with the good ones?

Jai

I come up with good ideas all the time. My problem is not having enough time and/or resources to put it into practice. I realize people will say read alot of books for ideas, but I say watch tons of movies. Maybe lots of reading will help, i don't know, since I don't do alot of reading. But I do watch lots and lots of movies... and then an idea incubates based on that. Sometimes based on songs, i'll see the music video for the song in my head and then i'll get some ideas for games from that. And as always ideas from games from playing games :-) I know in the past i've said I don't play them I make them, but I do get some ideas from some games I play. I just don't play alot, I play sporadically.

Keith

Here, have more ideas!

http://hamumu.com/idea.php

any comments? I haven't linked this up to my site yet, so it's semi-hidden, but it should work. It's a pretty abnormal web page feature, I think. Please feel free to rate and/or comment on any of them!

Hi Hamumu,

That is an awesome idea!

Maybe you could expand it into a game idea vault and let other people post their ideas there as well.

I have heaps of ideas that I know I'll never develop into real games but it might be nice to have them somewhere as a public resource then maybe one day some of my ideas will be made into someone else's game.

Keep the rating and comments section to so you can sort by the best ideas...

Hmm that is a good idea, I will write it down and maybe develop it latter if you don't :)

cheers,

Originally posted by Hamumu
Here, have more ideas!

http://hamumu.com/idea.php

any comments? I haven't linked this up to my site yet, so it's semi-hidden, but it should work. It's a pretty abnormal web page feature, I think. Please feel free to rate and/or comment on any of them!

LOL! That's funny. A couple of years ago I started design work of a game very similar to 'The Glob' (but my 'glob' was similar to the sentient gooey terrain found in Starcraft).

It turned out to be one of my projects that really didn't go anywhere. I have more game ideas than I have time to implement (which isn't to say *all* my game ideas are good).

Great idea Hamumu some of those ideas are pretty cool!

I have found that getting the right _idea_ is extremely hard. Ideas are _not_ a dime a dozen.

- an idea should include a cool title - that noone thought of before and is therefore googlable. Also easy to remember. And has to tell something about the game by itself.

- a good idea requires little resources to create - the lesser resources the better the idea - this alone makes brilliant ideas immensely difficult.

- a good idea requires a rapid prototype - so the project can be thrown away without looking back if it turns out not to be fun

- a good idea needs to sound good to anyone - so when they read the idea of the game on some download site they like the game too

- a good idea needs to be unique enough that not too many people have already thought of it

- a good idea needs to take into account _my_ strengths and use them accordingly (good ideas are not good for everybody - the ideal idea is one only I can create because I'm special :))

- a good game idea must offer plenty of replayable fun

- the demo-cut is extremely important - need to think of that too

- plenty more I forget about

Great points Diodor

These are pretty much my thoughts as well, I do have a lot of dime a dozen ideas that might be fun to post and discuss but the really good ones are like at the next level of goodness.

These are the ones that will work, that people love when they hear them, that are simple enough for me to complete and original enought that they may get me noticed in the big world of games out there.

Of these ideas I only have three, but I think that is pretty good. I think there may be one higher level of good idea which is the revolutionary idea that no one has thought about and is increadibly fun and somehow works.

A few more things that make an idea truely great:

As well as things Diodor mentioned, something that you want to make (for whatever reason).

Also an idea that becomes more concrete the more you work on it not less concrete I find some ideas start of being excellent but as you examine them they sort of fall appart in the implementation.

Attraction without extensive playing! In other words an idea that people can just pick up straight away without having to involve higher level brain functions.

That's cool Hamumu!

You won't mind if I do something similar with my site? :D

The only thing I would worry about is if someone tried to sue you if you used one of their ideas. That's why a lot of game companies throw away unsolicited game ideas to avoid any possible lawsuits down the line.

However, I guess you could put a disclaimer when someone posts their idea. It would basically say they're making their idea public property by submitting it to a public forum and therefore forfeit any rights to the game design.

I'm not sure if that stands up legally or not.

I have found that getting the right _idea_ is extremely hard. Ideas are _not_ a dime a dozen.

I think it's different for everyone. I think I'm an "idea's man". I come up with ideas all the time. If I like the idea I start planning it out on paper and try to break it down. It's at this stage I'll really know if the idea is good/bad/ugly.

I currently have 6 killer ideas that I've designed and have done the main design work upon. All that remains is to do the refinement design work, then win the lottery so I can afford the development team it would need to complete them :)

I only have two good designs that I can realistically develop by myself. The others need a much larger development team to make the games anywhere near what the designs require :(

Don't be too sure they're all killer ideas - you really never know until you actually get a prototype up and running, and that's the truth.

By Killer I didn't mean a guaranteed financial success, just that I know the designs I have, have the potential to be converted into excellent games. Alas you can't really design a financial success, you just have to take what you know, put it to good use and then pray.

About my idea site: thanks people, I guess I will link it up for use!

But it doesn't accept outside submissions, and I decided early on not to, for a few reasons. The legal one could be an issue, but not much - if you're posting your idea into something you KNOW is a public forum... well, you pretty much just gave up all suing rights there! The main reason is quality control. How can I turn down peoples' ideas in a fair and friendly way without coming off rude? Yet I don't want the thing flooded with ideas, and I happen to know that it would end up absolutely overloaded to the gills with ideas that were more about story (and not even a good story!) than gameplay. People wouldn't really view it as a resource after the first few days of additions, more like as something to laugh at. Sadly, I know the #1 biggest comment will be "How can I submit my ideas?".

Not that it's really a resource now... just more of some sort of insight into what goes on at Hamumu! I made it for three reasons: 1> to add more content to page using something I had an infinite supply of, and 2> so maybe the hundreds of ideas I come up with have a chance to go somewhere instead of just becoming dust on my hard drive, and 3> so I have a public dated record I can refer to when I say "NO! They stole my idea!!", which I say very often.

Topically speaking: I have about a new idea a day. Most are throwaway, but when one sticks in my craw for a couple of days, I write it down in some fashion. ANYTHING makes a good game idea, and it can be really fun to just sit down and try to make up a game around some basic idea. Try it: Garbagemen. There's a world of arcade fun in that.

Try it: Garbagemen. There's a world of arcade fun in that.

It's been done. Trashman and Trashman2. Very old games. I used to love them back in the day.

By Killer I didn't mean a guaranteed financial success, just that I know the designs I have, have the potential to be converted into excellent games.

Ah, you misunderstand. What I mean is, until you get a prototype running, you won't even know if your killer idea is even fun to play or not. Or if it has some fundamental gameplay flaw that ruins the whole thing. I suspect your confidence may stem from a lack of experience here.

One obvious and inexhaustable font of ideas is taking an existing game and changing something about it. For me, the most frequent case of this is playing a game and thinking "Oh, if only they had done X..." Or, unfortunately, sometimes "if only they hadn't done X..."

Yes, this tack will probably never yield a truly original gameplay idea. But how often do those come along? 95% of the games on the market are just a variant of an existing game. And, as my dad says, the pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs. It's harder to sell wildly different and unfamiliar games; you have to educate your users. New takes on old genres, for better or for worse, is a lot safer.

I imagine all of us here could have long enjoyable careers making games purely by taking existing game ideas and tweaking them to fit our preferences of the time. That's certainly going to be my approach for quite some time yet.

I'm still in the "ideas are a dime a dozen" category. Of course, you are gonna have to go through a couple hundred bucks' worth to get at the good ones. And I'm a very strong believer that a great game is not about a single idea... it's a NUMBER of great ideas, seamlessly combined, executed exceptionally well.

But getting that basic "seed" idea CAN be a challenge. I've found that like any other skill or talent, this comes with practice.

When I first started getting serious about doing the indie thing, I had about three "solid" ideas, plus some general concepts of games I thought I'd like to do sometimes. But it was all pretty weak. What I started doing was carrying a notebook around with me, and every time I had some kind of wild, hairy idea for a game, I'd write it down.

Well, it was slow and forced at first. But the longer I kept at it, the easier the ideas came. It's like you are training your brain to recognize possibilities it used to discard.

It looks to me people mean different things when they talk about "ideas". Are we talking about the concept -- "Vice City meets Barbie Fashion Designer" -- or are we talking about a design that has proven itself to work in a prototype? There is a big difference between the two. Concepts are easiest to come up with but generally hard to turn into a working design. (And you don't know whether a design works until you have a prototype.) As a result, concepts are worth a dime a dozen but proven designs are priceless :)

Or if it has some fundamental gameplay flaw that ruins the whole thing. I suspect your confidence may stem from a lack of experience here.

Actually I was looking at it from the other way round - I think my feeling of their potential stems from experience, not lack of it. I've been designing games (albeit exceptionally basic ones) since I was 8 and I'm now 26. I used to be at the stage where I would design stuff and think it would be great only for it to turn out crap when I attempted to develop it. I've spent many years realising what design should be about. Too many people get hung up on aspects like visual themes, location settings, or ideas like "wouldn't it be great if you could blow up this...".

These days when I'm working on designs I work on a pure gameplay level. I have a very vivid and accurate imagination and have a pretty good ability to imagine a game not only in the fun parts, but the parts in-between. It's these in-between parts that are generally the meat of any game and have to be at least interesting. I find myself designing controls, responses, AI, the whole kit'n'kaboodle. I've probably discarded about 20 game designs since New Year having spent time designing them into detail only to realise that they wouldn't play as well as I originally thought. But these killer designs I talk of I have been working on for months, over a year in one case, and I feel confident that they have real potential.

Only time (and a large development budget :) ) will tell which of us is right.

I tend to take each idea and let it sit in my head a long time, weeks or months even. Eventually, the flaws will reveal themselves, and usually they're just too vague or lacking for real content, and it'll be on to the next idea. Or I find one that works but realize that I can't do that one anyway for technical reasons(time/ability mostly).

All in all, it's much easier to find flaws by drawing from existing games, because you have a complete experience to evaluate rather than a jumble of ideas or a half-done prototype.

Did anyone here do the GameVersity.com Design Treatments seminar. While it didn;t help idntify the fun game vs the rest it certainly helped in calrifying thoughts around a game idea and also the presentation and delivery of a game idea.

Not sure when they will do the seminar again but their Game Design and Documentation course starts in March.