“Ideas represent one tiny percentage of your game. It’s not the core. It’s only a spark—a source of motivation to make you sit down and work in front of your computer.” -Lach, Co-Founder of Berzerk Studio
Your game idea is terrible. However, everyone’s game ideas are terrible, so that’s perfectly okay. Stop wasting your time needlessly hoarding your game ideas, or waste hours of your life writing 100 pages of design documents. Just sit down, start working on your game, and learn from the process.
A game is simply just not playable until it is put into action, and thus is inherently worthless in it’s design document form. No matter how carefully crafted your documentation may be, there are a myriad of reasons why your brilliant idea can fail when it comes to execution. Some of these possible reasons could be lack of technical skill, not enough budget, time constraints, lack of personal motivation, poorly thought out or balanced game mechanics, or a host of other issues that you will undoubtedly run into when you start the process of getting to work on a game.
A game developer’s goal is to design a satisfying game experience, and even assuming the most basic mechanics possible, the execution of this design can be derailed at many points in the development cycle. The design must translate his idea through the minds of everyone else who has touched the project, and who will have many different ideas regarding what’s feasible within the given scope of the project. A design document does not hold a candle to the months and years of hard work required to complete a game, no matter how intricately designed the document.
If a game is successfully shipped, it’s thanks to the effort of the entire development team as a whole.
This involves navigating through the ungodly amount of programming and debugging work, insane hours of refining art, writing, quality assurance, music production, voice acting, trailer production, dealing with countless man-hours of marketing, figuring out the logistics of running a synchronized skeleton crew. The game idea? Sure it can be used as a catalyst to get the work done, but the actual development process will more often than not shred apart the initial idea, as the logistics behind creating and releasing a game that is fun and polished will interfere with the design documentation that was written before the actual development process.
The notion that a game idea is valuable and must be cherished before the prototype stage is amazingly out of touch with the oftentimes grueling development process. Many fledgling game designers have a similar notion of: “I have this amazing idea. It’s absolutely brilliant and will sell hundreds of thousands of copies and make me rich. I want to onboard a team to make this game for me with a revenue share model. I’m scared that people may steal my game idea and get rich off of it.”
The honest truth? No one will ever steal your game idea. You don’t need to worry about your precious game idea ever being stolen because even if someone did take it, they’d still have to spend countless hours building it, fine tuning it’s gameplay, figure out a path to market it, then spend countless more hours polishing it to the point where it’s suitable for release. By the time this happens, it would most likely be dramatically different than the initial idea, as it is inherently impossible to design a complete and perfect game on paper without putting in the hours and getting into the meat and potatoes of development.
Don’t get me wrong, without game ideas there wouldn’t be any games. However, the game idea itself is a microscopic part of the entire game development process, and should be treated as such.
Still not convinced that ideas are a dime a dozen? Here’s 300 of ’em, free of charge: http://www.squidi.net/three/
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There is no such thing as bad idea (when stripped to a bare core), only bad executions.
Drowning a bunch of nurses sure seems like a bad idea. Drinking bleach is also a bad idea. There are tons of bad ideas.
Funny thing is I am saying something similar to developers around me for
years. 😀 Nobody listens. It is probably because of the fear that goes like:
“Well, these ideas are bad, but my idea is so good that everyone will
create a game based on that and since they have more time (they are making it
fulltime, which I don´t) they will get paid for my idea before me!”
For me there surely are ideas that are worth the attention more than others, but what matters at the end is the execution, since ordinary ideas can be tremendously fun and exceptional ideas can be ultimately badly executed and therefore not fun and not interesting at all.
I’ve always liked derek sivers’ approach – ideas are just multipliers. an awesome idea with no implementation = 20 x 0. all your ideas are worthless unless you implement them https://sivers.org/multiply
that being said, it does suck when people who are more motivated than me independently implement an idea that i had and show me how lazy i am 😛
While all games need an idea or concept to spark them into existence, experienced game designers understand that the truly golden ideas come forth during the evolution of its implementation; many times entirely by accident.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Then you probably have not shipped a video game before.
It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re worried that a large company like EA or Activision will swipe up your idea and run with it, remember that those companies aren’t as willing to take risks as small indies on ideas or genres with unproven track records. It’s only *after* you come away with success that they will try to clone it.