I suppose I will add more question than answers

Chris Crawford, he made a good point about advantages of "grand leap creativity" (as opposed to "incremental creativity"), also his whip act was quite convincing, it all made sense

But, later he did his "Dragon Speech", which simply put, he said he quits making games Also, did he made any good games? Except Balance of Power (which was extremely famous, yet not very playable) and maybe Eastern Front, not really...

So, would I want to be like him? I'm not sure...

Notch with his Minecraft. Was it original or just an innovation of Infiminer? I guess both. He took an existing mechanic (building blocks and team fighting in destructible terrain) and then REMOVED everything that was not about building anything you desire with these blocks. So, his innovation was not adding anything, but removing, that was the key to the huge success of the game. Was it a grand leap creativity? Or just the lame incremental creativity?

Marketing for indies, well, the popular rumour says its pointless to make good games. Because you won't be able to market them (as opposed to AAA titles where you have marketing budget and you can make standard games). You need to make viral games. Which means either excellent or pathetic, but never, ever good or mediocre ones

My expereince as a dev. When I compare my successful games with unsuccessful ones, I see the ones more into the direction of a clone being simply better than those that were very unique. Althrough, I'm not sure if that's the deciding factor, the successful ones also had other interesting characteristics (like a very strict and short deadline, me liking them as a player, strong core activity).

Daniel Cook (of Spry Fox) suggests in his article "plagiarism as a moral choice" that remaining a plagiarist rather than evolving new innovations is "to waste your very limited time on this planet", and that to do so results in ending up as a "wage slave". I'd suggest a read of the full article, but the relevant advice summed up at the end is:

What's the alternative? Why not start up a small prototyping project? Knock a genre down to its most basic element. Give yourself constraints so you intentionally do not replicate games of the past. Rebuild your game from that simple foundation, borrowing elements from the entire breadth of game history. Finish a game that has a half dozen influences from widely disparate games that in the end create a player experience that is uniquely yours. This is how you stop being a plagiarist and start becoming a master game designer. There is still time to create something amazing and new.

He also linked to a post at the bottom titled "Inspiration vs. Immitation", but unfortunately his link is broken -- I've linked to the up-to-date version though.

In short, don't just imitate, but absolutely be inspired! :)

Your whole game doesn't need to be new. Even if it's only one part of your game which is new. For exemple, you have Limbo, it's just a basic platformer (you run, jump, resolve enigma, etc...) but the graphic tone, and atmoshpere are really unique.

I would associate innovative with Indie game dev, and old/refined with big production. But, there is the case of "Candy Crush", a game on mobile platform which is (oldyl) a very big success. But the concept is a very old and used one. (I even have the same type of game on my old phone which is something like 10 years old!)

But ot answer your question, I will say ; "both". Take some proven concept from there and there, mix, bring your own inspiration, mix again, and pray that this will become something cool ^^'

In short, don't just imitate, but absolutely be inspired!

Hi,

Innovation should be guided by market research, such as end-user surveys, reading, and beta testing, in my opinion. This is not only my view but that of many of the leaders in game development organizations.

All successful game developers have at least one person in their organization who wants much more innovation. Looking at proven methods is part of the market research which is healthy to mitigate the passions for innovation which can potentially result in disaster for a company. Just because there is a great innovation does not mean that it translates to better gameplay and fun for the end-user. Market research helps greatly to find that balance.

In larger game development corporations, game designers represent only one category among others. There may be several project managers each assigned to the development of a particular game, each game development having at least one game designer, lead programmers, lead artists, and lead testers. Designers tend to have a more artistic mind and want to push the boundaries of innovation from a gameplay perspective while programmers must deal with the realities of time and budget constraints over them.

One must conclude that a system of checks and balances is healthy for a company to have in order to manage innovation compared to proven methods. Market research helps leaders of the company settle the issues, after all, and what the end-users like must be balanced with resources available. Mostly reusing the same libraries with some customization, which is very efficient from a business viewpoint, must be balanced with the costs and risks of innovation. Market research resolves many things like this.

is it better to favor an old mechanic or feature that has already been done frequently

Daniel Cook (of Spry Fox) suggests in his article "plagiarism as a moral choice" that remaining a plagiarist rather than evolving new innovations is "to waste your very limited time on this planet", and that to do so results in ending up as a "wage slave". I'd suggest a read of the full article, but the relevant advice summed up at the end is:

Do you have examples of these superb innovative games? Were these successful (I don't even ask for financial success, it could be by nother criterias). Would *I* (not some critics that write reviews) find such game FUN?

When I chek my list of favourite games, I don't see there so much ground breaking revolution... I like Civilization 4 (clone of Civ3, Civ2, Civ1, Empire), MasterOfOrion2 (pretty standard 4x genre), when I was younger I played tons of RPGs (all of them pretty much the same mechanic wise, even almost identical character stats and skills and spell names :D), recently I really enyoed Deponia (a 100% traditional, absolute traditional, point & click).

The only exception I can think of right now is Crepper World (althrough it's based on tower defence genre so I'm not sure if people would count it as that innovative).

As I see it, I enjoy MUCH more games that are traditional and polished and executed well, than super creative yet not so fun ones. And I hate it, I wanted to be the one who rewards creativity :D

Innovation should be guided by market research, such as end-user surveys, reading, and beta testing, in my opinion. This is not only my view but that of many of the leaders in game development organizations.

And as for those "leaders in game development organizations", I wonder how many of those got bankrupt by now :)

Do you have examples of these superb innovative games?

Triple Town is a pretty popular and reasonably (though not brilliantly) successful indie game. It's a well polished match-3 game, with the key innovation that you combine items to create better ones rather than eliminating them, with the objective of building the best possible town. It was also originally released on a platform (one of the early Kindles) that was widely thought to be a poor choice of gaming platform thanks to a monochrome display and very slow update rate.

Spelunky is a well polished and very popular "rogue-like inspired platformer", most of which is the simple but very well polished combination of elements already found in previous games. Simply combining these elements in this way is impressive by itself and may even be considered a small form of innovation, but the game also includes a very popular daily challenge feature that I haven't seen done on such a scale (rather than for small puzzles) before.

Realm of The Mad God is a free-to-play browser-based co-op bullet-hell fantasy MMO featuring real-time combat and perma-death. It uses procedurally generated maps and player-created enemies and items to continuously generate new content at extremely minimal (or no) cost to the developers. Again this are all elements we've seen before to at least some extent, but never in this particular combination or on the same scale.

I'm sure there are loads more examples -- and probably even ones that are a lot more innovative than these -- but I'll leave it there to note that I actually agree with you! In the overwhelming majority of cases a well polished game will be more successful than one that is merely innovative. I would also agree with Daniel Cook's idea that we should continue to strive for better rather than settling for a successful clone of an existing game.

I also feel like this is an appropriate time to mention the concept of "iterative design" as explained in the article "evolutionary design: a practical process for creating great game designs". By iterating over rapid prototypes of ideas you can quickly "find the fun", or stop yourself from wasting too much time if an idea turns out to be boring or uninteresting.

3Ddreamer, on 05 Nov 2013 - 10:21 AM, said:


Innovation should be guided by market research, such as end-user surveys, reading, and beta testing, in my opinion. This is not only my view but that of many of the leaders in game development organizations.

I disagree. Strongly. It's a suicide. I was doing it in the past and I almost got bankrupt. "Thou shall not make a game the way market research says, do it the way YOU feel is right instead". I don't know if this is an universal truth but surely it's my personal truth and I would first eat my keyboard before I make another game based on market research

I feel that you misunderstood. In my post there with the other comments I talked about checks and balances and just plain balance in general. For a fact many a game development company went bankrupt because they did not pay attention to the likes and dislikes of the end-users, which is a risk that market research is supposed to help prevent as far as end-user issues if done right. Problem is that many game devs either are incompetent with market research or they tend to ignore the realities which it reveals. Any resource which informs the developer is a good thing if handled right and not bad.