Game Ideas

Game Play & Game Design
#21

The theme and the time limit help with creativity, they don’t hurt it. “Freedom is the opposite of creativity” and all that.

Tell a person “go make some art” and they’ll have no idea what to do. Give a person a piece of paper and a box of crayons and tell them they have 15 minutes, and they’ll come up with something great.

I am saying that the “ideas” put forth in this thread are not restrictive enough to be useful for creativity.

The idea is that you should try out a bunch of small ideas: do game jams, make prototypes. That prototype (more accurately, what people think of that prototype) will tell you whether a larger game around your idea is worthwhile or not.

#22

I think you are missing my point. One good idea a year is enough to keep me busy every night. More than enough as I have a backlog of ideas to work on. I get plenty of random ideas, but I’m very critical of them and only select a few.

#23

I understand your point. I just disagree that ideas are rare and precious. Maybe they’re rare (once a year) for you, and maybe that’s okay with your preferred workflow, so you’ve got nothing to improve upon.

But since this thread was supposed to be a resource for programmers who think they don’t have enough ideas, my advice to them is to practice with much smaller projects until they’re better at coming up with ideas of their own. If you’re happy with one idea a year, then I was talking to them about game jams, not really you.

I don’t think that a general list of “make a platformer game with an armadillo” ideas is very helpful to a programmer trying to think of an idea. I think practice, or at least more specific requirements, is much more helpful.

The reason Pong is useful is because it has a set of obvious requirements. Everybody knows how it should look and behave, so you have a tangible goal to shoot for. That makes it useful for practicing. I think any ideas we list here should be as tangible as Pong is. Otherwise this isn’t really a resource for programmers, it’s just us shooting random ideas back and forth. And that’s okay too. But it doesn’t sound like the original goal of the thread.

#24

I took this thread as a way to dump ideas in an attempt to help others start the process of figuring out how to create great ideas. I’ll be honest, music is the only real creative thing I do, other than that I am horrible at creativity. Game ideas do not come to me out of the blue all the time, even after 4 years of game development and watching other developers build their own games.

I completely understand your point, but I don’t think the argument needs to really be here. I like the idea of this thread just because it gets me thinking about game ideas, and how I could change this idea etc… There are different ways for people to reach the point that you are trying to make, this could definitely be helpful.

As an example; Say you isolate a person from music their entire lives. They have never heard a single song, never played a single note. Then you one day give them a guitar, show them the basics and tell them to write music. Well, how do they start? They have no idea because they have no base to work off of. The only reason music is easy for me is because I’ve listened to it all my life. I have my preferences, my tastes. I listen to it when I’m not practicing to see what other drummers are doing and see if I can replicate their fills and beats and incorporate them into my own style. Through trial and error for years, I have finally started to develop my own style.

Obviously that was a pretty extreme example, most people are exposed to games before they start game development, but my point still stands (I think). Giving people a base to work off of, letting them choose between ideas and building something helps to create their own style and then figure out what kind of games they like to make. I see this thread as a way for some younger developers who have not developed their own style to get that base. Everyone needs to start somewhere!

Plus, it’s just fun to see what you all come up with, I like reading about different ideas and imagining them :slight_smile:

#25

Not my intention to get into this sort of “meta” back and forth on this thread. But some thoughts occur to me.

I don’t think that getting more specific, by laying out a mechanic, is necessary or even a good thing. To me, a story is what is going to drive a good game, and a big part of making that story work is trying to figure out how to design or program a mechanic that will support that story. Solving that for a programmer seems almost like writing homework assignments for someone.

I suggested penguins, not armadillos, because of some very compelling footage that can be seen in Attenborough’s “Frozen Planet” video. The poor penguin chick fleeing for its very life from dozens of wanna-be mothers that almost
crush and trample it in the pursuit–that struck me as a story/scenario with some juice in it, both comic and violent in a weird way (comedy and violence sure worked on “Angry Birds”). Maybe it resonates, as well, due to sometimes finding myself “running away” from relationships that start to impose onerous time requirements. Whatever. Figuring out a mechanic to program this will require some creativity, but isn’t that what programming is about? And when talking about the important of limitations: it seems this story imposes some definite bounds as to what might work or not.

A thread with lots of ideas in it can also maybe show that almost any scenario can be looked at as a game, can be considered for its game potential. Game making and design is to a large extent a way of looking at the world.

@Opiop

[quote]Plus, it’s just fun to see what you all come up with, I like reading about different ideas and imagining them :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Yay!

#26

Now we just need to apply gamification to game design and we can have a game about arguing about game ideas. Now there’s an idea!

:emo: :persecutioncomplex:

#27

Thats what i wanted to say. This competitions allready do a lot of work for you, but getting a good idea outside this limits is hard.
The timelimit might not limit the creativity, but it limits the possible “size” of the idea. If you want to create a big game, a competition like this won’t be a big help.
The ideas here might not be restrictive enough for some people, but they might point anotherone to a great idea.

#28

[quote=“Opiop,post:24,topic:55387”]
I like your music metaphor. But what I’m saying is that we’ve got a music forum here, and we’re compiling a list of “song ideas” that are very generic: make a song with drums in it, or make a song about the sky. I just don’t think that’s useful for somebody trying to learn how to write their own songs- what that person really needs is some example chords or drum things (I am not a music person) that might be used along with that idea.

[quote=“Opiop,post:24,topic:55387”]
My issue is that these general ideas don’t actually establish a base. They’re too general to be any more useful than just pointing to a random object and saying “make a game about that”. I’m not sure how helpful that is to somebody trying to figure out their own style. Maybe we’re trying to beat the “what did you do today?” thread for the largest number of posts?

[quote=“Opiop,post:24,topic:55387”]
If that’s all we’re here for, then that’s fine. But that’s different than saying it’ll be useful for people who are trying to think of their own ideas.

I didn’t mean to hijack your thread. I hope you start a new thread, and I’ll keep the meta out of it. I originally intended to leave it at my $0.02, with the hope that people would start posting more specific ideas. If that’s not interesting to people, that’s okay too.

[quote=“philfrei,post:25,topic:55387”]
I guess we’re picturing two different types of people reading this thread. I’m picturing somebody who doesn’t quite know how to take apart an idea and make a game out of it. I’m not sure how pointing to random ideas and telling them to pick one helps with that, any more than saying “make a game” does.

Or it’s like if somebody eventually wants to be able to build their own vehicle, but doesn’t know anything about how vehicles work. The most helpful thing would be to say “if I was going to build a van, here is how I’d start, here are the pieces I would use” or “if I was going to build a truck, this is how it’s different from a car”. Saying “make a red one” just isn’t helpful.

I thought this thread was meant to be a type of educational resource. If all we’re doing is trading pictures of cars we like back and forth, that’s fun too, it’s just not useful to the type of person I’m picturing. I seriously hope you start a new thread.

[quote=“philfrei,post:25,topic:55387”]
But armadillos can roll into a bulletproof ball!

Oh, and I made a dumb little penguin game a while ago: http://staticvoidgames.com/games/AvalancheRider

[quote=“philfrei,post:25,topic:55387”]
I agree with you, I just don’t know how useful the general “make a game about X” is. I would think it would be way more interesting to post “here is how I got the idea, here is how I’d start the idea, here are some specifics of what I’d do with that idea” instead.

But again, if that’s not your intent, let’s start a new thread without all this meta back and forth.

Oh, and I meant to say this earlier: but I hope your wife feels better soon.

#29

@wessles http://www.magneticbynature.com/

#30

You can’t force yourself to come up with a great idea. Trust me, don’t try to think of an amazing idea just by forcing your mind to work tirelessly to come up with something creative. You can’t summon ideas, they can only come to you of their own accord.