My game ideas are too ambitious and complicated. Whether I'm thinking about designing a video game or a board game, I always start with a 50,000-foot-high view of a complex experience that would take many interrelated mechanics working in unison to create.
This makes it difficult to give myself opportunities to grow step-by-step as a game designer. I'm a great software developer, so if I came up with simpler ideas like "Tetris but with X", I could implement them without too much trouble and learn from that experience. But instead, my ideas all sound like "Civilization but in space with procedurally generated storylines and custom tech trees and, and, and, and..."
I know that one thing I can do is pare down those complex ideas until I have an "MVP". But I feel like I'm missing out on a whole universe of possibilities. I see simple, elegant games like Carcassone, Limbo, Braid, or Thomas Was Alone, and they're clearly novel ideas that don't come from thought processes like my derivative one described in the above paragraph.
Has anyone else struggled with this? How can I give myself a zen-strike-on-the-nose to shake off some of the derivative patterns of thinking I've grown into over the years?
I think most designers struggle with this at first, The hard part about game design is not to come up with ideas, it is to strip them down and make them feasible to implement with the skills and resources you have available without losing the fun.
I'd recommend starting not with an idea for game but with an idea for a single gameplay mechanic, If you got a fun solid core for your game it becomes alot easier to control the scale of things, (You can then add features incrementally rather than stripping things down)
[size="1"]I don't suffer from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!
I think the largest challenge is boredom. It'snot that one can't come up with simpler, more realistic ideas; it's that the simpler, more realistic ideas are just so boring and uninspiring. Tetris but with X definitely sounds like a good project to learn from, but that one good thing about it is also the worst thing about it: Who wants to work on something that they know is just for practice? What's really exciting is working on something that you'll want to show your friends, or family when they ask you what the hell you're doing on the computer all day. That's the kind of stuff I try to work on, because I know that as soon as I find something boring (either because it's too easy or too hard) I'll procrastinate and never get to it or finish it, if I've already started.
That's what I'd like to add on top of what everyone said. Take big ideas, pare them down, impose restrictions, but make sure the project you're making is something you honestly, truly believe you'll want to show to friends, families, strangers, possible employers. I know that makes it even harder, but when you do find something worthwhile, you'll be absolutely stunned at how devoted you are to it.
One more thing: Get some friends who design. Maybe at your school, but most likely online at a place like gamedev.net. Find people you can compare ideas with. Sometimes the mere act of witnessing someone else do something can make you ten times better at it. This applies to anything from sports to programming, and of course game design.
When we teach at game development workshops for high school classes we always teach them not to make a game. One of our most used (and useful) guidelines is to make a toy not a game. In other words think of a single game mechanic you like, test it, and if it is fun make a game out of it. That way you ensure to always start with something fun, and then you can add story line and other elements afterwards. Preferably as an iterative process.
Yeah, I followed this for designing a simple game myself. Now I have a pretty good working game mechanic but have to figure out how to make the next step to turn this simple "toy" into a full fledged game. Piece at a time I guess, real game development quickly becomes a job
You could also limit the game to exclude certain themes or genres, stick to certain mechanics, only use a limited number of inputs, etc.
I find this is a very effective way to reduce complexity. Imposing harsh restrictions such as 'game can only use one button', or 'gameplay occurs along a single axis', or even 'game can only use 2 colours', really makes you distill your ideas into their most basic form.
