Yes, a design document that is "20 to 60 pages of vague notes" does mean nothing. A design document that represents a complete, playable game removes the risk that exists with the type of "vague idea" design documents you are thinking of. That's a point I gave up trying to make 15 years ago.

Indie games are not the hobbbyist game industry, and have nothing at all to do with it. In fact, indie games pretty much the exact opposite of the hobbyist game industry who made by far the largest, most detailed, and complex games ever made. My blog can teach you a little about the forgotten hobbyist game industry... http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarcMichalik/787769/

Every person in the world does not have a good game idea. Good game ideas are very rare. I see the games that the computer game industry makes, they have yet to come anywhere near approaching the hobbyist game industry's knowledge of game design. If they were going to make a strategy game that could rival my Cold War game, or Armageddon, I would think they would have done so at least once in the last 25 years... they have not. Why would I expect that, all of a sudden, now they are and I just don't know it yet? It more than unlikely, since it would require a quantum leap on their part from where they are now.

I didn't make a company before I made a game. I had entire trilogy of games before I made a company. A "Big Three" designers game design document IS a PLAYABLE game. People in the modern game industry have never been able to comprehend that fact. Our design documents are PLAYABLE GAMES. Finished. Done. Playable.

Tom Clancy is dead. He did not make that game. It is an Ubisoft game, not a Tom Clancy games. Clancy was an author, he wrote books. He didn't make games. Only Sid Meier can make a Sid Meier game, only Steve Cole can make a Steve Cole game. More obviously true words have never been spoken.

I already know all of your responses, these are all the same incorrect beliefs I have been listening too for over 20 years now. I know you believe these things deeply, but many of them are simply incorrect. The modern game industry has a lot of things wrong, the belief that a design document that covers all aspect of a game is "impossible", for example. How did our games ever even exist if that is true? Have any of you ever thought about that? If it's "impossible" how do ASL and SFB even exists, then?

Obviously, I need to find a way to make Lost Art Studios real. That has always been the only way, the modern game industry doesn't hire game designers, they hire level designers... or assistant designers at best, by our industry's definition of it. So the only way for a game designer to make computer games is to start their own company, which I KNOW I can't do. There has to be some way of doing this without trying to make a lesser B-game version of the Cold War game. I really don't want to do that to the CivKiller, and wouldn't have the money to try any time in the foreseeable future anyway.

So far, nothing seems to have changed and even revolutionizing how games are made with Rube does nothing to help. I would think this situation would be viewed as a "problem" by a game industry that took itself as seriously as yours claims too.

and even revolutionizing how games are made with Rube does nothing to help.

by rube do you meant the box2d editor?

not to burst your bubble, but some of us have been doing hand rolled 2d and 3d game physics in our sleep for 20+ years now. "don't need no stinkin' editor".

Haha. I don't want to get into Rube, that didn't go well. But Rube is actually a physical construct used to describe a very complex "tool of game design" that results in games based on the ASL/SFB style of "real time" game design that are a "next generation" of that form of game design.

I have been avoiding revealing this, but at this point it seems like something I really should point out. I began "designing games" when I was 7 years old. My parents got me a children's game called "Payday". But I didn't have anyone to play it with, my brother was only 2. But that wasn't a problem, because Payday could play itself. So I would just play Payday against it's built-in "AI". At 7, that's how I saw it. I kept doing this throughout my childhood with many different children's games like Payday. Then when I was 13, I think, maybe 14, Axis & Allies came out. Once I had played that a few times, I applied my "board game AI" to Axis & Allies. This was very, very challenging. It was simple with children's games, but making Axis & Allies play itself was an entirely different matter. It took months. Russia is easy, they were playing themselves almost immediately. America was hard. England was even more difficult... and Japan. Japan took a very long time to work out. In the end, I could either pick a nation and play Axis & Allies against my own "board game AI", or I could not even play at all, and just watch my "board game AI" control all five nations. This "Axis & Allies" version of my "Board Game AI" is a fundamental component of "Rube", and how I make games. It is nothing at all like how anyone else makes games, not even Steve Cole.

I am a "savant game designer". People often translate "savant" as "genius", that is not what I am saying. I mean it in the true, clinical, "socially incapacitating" way. I have an unhealthy obsession with game and simulation design. I "see AI" in all games, even board games. As far as I know I am the only savant game designer there has ever been. I'm sure there have been plenty of people with a similar... "condition"... over the years, but they haven't made games. There games would be obvious to me, they would stand out... "jump of the page". It is possible that SVC is also a savant game designer, with his obsession being the core mechanics of how simulations function and mine being "magic and illusion, trickery... all fake compared to what SVC does"... but it is also possible that he is just that good on raw ability alone. I've never been able to tell which it is.

Anyway. This is the source of both Rube, and my unique style of designing games that even Steve Cole does not do. I am not a normal everyday person who wants to make games. I am a savant game designer who already has a very impressive history as a game designer. In a way, as a member of the SFB Staff, I am practically a "founding father of modern game design" simply by having been a member of the SFB Staff. So I am not the "totally inexperienced guy who thinks he has a good idea". I am the exact opposite of that, actually. That's another one of my problems, your industry has forgotten us and therefore has no respect at all for who we actually were to you and your own history. We were literally your "founding fathers". The SFU articles of my blog will explain that in more detail if you don't understand what I mean by that.

I wish I knew. My father is in over 20 different volumes of Who's Who. He was one of the greatest businessmen/negotiators of the 20th century. He was responsible for things like the early 1970's renovation of NORAD, the stadium that the Buffalo Bill's play in, and Saudi Arabia's entire water desalinization system to name just a few. I, clearly, did not get any of his abilities in those areas. I am worse than bad at those things. I just design games and simulations. I really don't do anything else particularly well. But when it comes to business... the more "ideas" I have the worse my situation becomes. There are no words to describe how incompetent I am at that.

Any way of making my games would work for me, haha. That's all I really care about, literally. It's a life-long obsession. Funding would, of course, do it. But I can never get that, I actually tried that, comically, for years. I hit my head up against that wall enough times to know that I am not capable of doing that. My fathers "help" always consisted of ideas way beyond what normal people would ever even consider. His way of thinking led him to advice like... "The CEO or President is the key, don't waste your time talking to anyone else" which, well, I don't think I need to explain why that wasn't actually helpful for me. "An audience with the King" is how he did it, it's not a meeting that I can even arrange... of course.

The question you are asking me, is the question I am asking in this thread because I don't know. The best idea that seems to be emerging for me here was Tom Sloper's suggestion that I find a partner who can handle the business side. That could actually work... if only I knew someone like that. Normally that happens between people who know each other already, and I don't know anyone like that. What I should even try to do this time around is exactly what I am trying to figure out, because I was out of ideas and had tried every thing I could think of ten years ago.

And I guess I should give an example of what I mean when I say that "only I can make my games". There is a series of 3 starship simulator/adventure games in the PDU. These are, by far, the most sophisticated and advanced game designs I have ever conceived. I just barely understand enough to make them function. These games are based on the more advanced version of Rube that I call "Holodeck Rube" and a level of SFB tactical knowledge that fewer than 20 people on the planet possess. Here is a brief, intentionally vague description...

I can put you in the captain's chair, and Rube will do his "maintain a constant illusion of activity around the player" thing that "Holodeck Rube" does. The bridge of the ship you are on is essentially a Holodeck, and nothing you are seeing is real. None of it is actually happening. You will command the ship exactly as you see Captain Kirk do it on Star Trek. Sitting in the captain's chair on a 3D bridge. And it will be just like you are in an episode of Star Trek. The combat, unlike the disastrous and completely broken "Bridge Commander" that you may be thinking of, this combat will play out in a way that feels completely realistic to you. And the only way that can happen, is that it is not actually happening. Outside of the "holodeck show" taking place on the bridge Rube is also both "planning the future", and using a trick to "place the AI in the future". They "AI" is acting from the future, it knows what will happen in the future, and therefore this fight can be "choreographed" into something that seem totally realistic too the player. I am not talking about any kind of time travel here, this is a "trick" Rube can do akin to the 12 second delay a radio station uses to mute any bad language that a guest might speak.

Now... even if I gave you a complete design document... do you think you could make this? If you do, why haven't you yet? Because you can't, even forgetting Rube... there are less than 20 people on the planet with the tactical space combat knowledge to make this happen. This is the kind of thing I am talking about when I say that only I can make my games. Just as only Sid Meier can make his games, or only SVC can make his.

If you watch the video you will see that no combat is taking place, because they cannot possibly do that. They destroy a moving ship with a long range missile. Anyone can do that, there is nothing difficult about that. Then the "close combat" is motionless, because they cannot have it moving, because that is far beyond their abilities to do. This is a "faking" of a starship simulator where no actual combat ever occurs because they cannot make that work. Anyone can fire a long range missile at a moving target at long range, or set motionless ships on the screen to trade shots back and forth. None of that takes any advanced knowledge, ANYONE can do these brain dead simple things. What I am talking about... you won't notice a difference from what you think is a real "Star Trek-like" fight. There is a reason the "game" in this video was never released as a game, and if they do release it as a game... as you can see from the video, the combat will be non-existant. Motionless. No different than Faster Than Light. Moving the ships within range for "tactical combat" is the part they can't do, and won't ever be able to. The very beginning of that, which doesn't help much because there is so much more they would need to know, are three specific positions that the PDU calls the "Extended Option Point", "Tactical Option Point", and "Close Option Point". Anyone can make Faster Than Light, where the ships don't move. That's easy. Lets see them try to make the ships move... I already know the result of the method they would attempt to use. Their hostiles will just endlessly wiggle in confusion, constantly changing AI Profiles based on the constantly changing situation. You guy's have attempted this many times before, it always results in the same "confusing wiggling until I die" enemy "combat tactics"... if you can call "wiggling in confusion" a combat tactic:-)

What is it you think computers aren't advanced enough to do yet? I am kind of confused by that. "Crippled Rube", that is the one I have actually been using for many years, is actually surprisingly simple. I am not saying that what I can do with a starship simulator is any kind of magic thing, I have to work around severe limitations to make my ship simulators work. The biggest limitation being that it can only do 1v1 fights. There can never be more than your ship, and the one you are fighting in any given scenario. Stationary objects and defenses, like bases and minefields, can exist. But there can never be more than a single moving target to fight... because it isn't actually happening. Of course... a group of 3 frigates, for example, can ACTUALLY be a single ship:-)