Guest Post: Design Your Game — Ideas

Ever wanted to design your own game? Most people who are interested in game design have had an idea for their own game, but where do we get these ideas? How can we make them better? This chapter in the Design Your Game series will concern ideas and where to look.
Ideas come from everywhere. They can come from other video games, other forms of entertainment, or just life. Shigeru Miyamoto once had the idea for the game Pikmin when he was weeding his yard!

If you are looking for a game idea, just live your life, and whenever you do something, ask, “Could that be a game?” This is part of the game designer mentality. Game designers are always looking for new sources of fun in the world around them. Mowing the lawn might not be a very fun game, but what about the things you are mowing? The bugs might be fleeing for their life beneath your very nose. What would it be like to be a bug in the suburbs? And that is how the process goes.

Many games are thought of by playing other games, but you have to be very careful, because if your idea and soon-to-be game is too much like the preexisting game, it may get lost in the shuffle and be seen as a knock-off.

You need to be constantly examining the living and nonliving things around you, things on the news, daily activities, and using your imagination, much like Shigeru Miyamoto did, to create a solid game idea.

Now, once you have a game idea, don’t stop. At this point, you should write NOTHING down, but keep it all in your head. Think of new possibilities within your game idea. What if the weeds I pulled were creatures? Maybe there were different kinds. Some might like water? Some could be fast? Strong? Maybe you have to collect them and use them to complete challenges. Or what if they followed you around and you could use them in large quantities? But what about a story… Why are you doing this… Maybe you want to get back home, because there was an earthquake while you were out of town? Or maybe you’re on a new planet as an astronaut! Maybe you have to explore the planet… or, better yet, you have to find the pieces to your broken spaceship!!!
See how a simple idea of weed creatures can mutate into an entire game! This process, of course, took place over longer periods of time, but until you think you have a solid concept which includes basic gameplay (mechanics and challenge types) and a basic story, do not right anything down – nothing is permanent, and once you write it down, you will hesitate to change it — TRUST ME. Mull it over in your head.

Take some time to do that, and write down everything you thought of when your concept has met the requirements I gave. If you want to submit your concept for my feedback (I will not steal it – I promise), please do so below. You can even choose to have it have a chance to be published in this series as an example (you can choose not to though). Also, unless you are very lucky, it is going to take a long time for you to get to the point to write it down, so don’t rush. People who already have ideas: try to evolve them if you can, make sure you have no gaps, and make sure it isn’t already a game. If you want a really good chance of getting it published (but do so anyways if you can, as it will help me criticize it), enter how your idea evolved and where you got it from in the coments-submission section of the site.

Good Luck!

Dylan Woodbury lives with his family in Southern California. He runs http://dtwgames.com, a game design website that posts intriguing new articles every week, both beginner’s tutorials and theoretical ideas. He also has an interest in writing, and is planning his first novel. His primary goal is to change the world through video games.