Author Archives: David Mullich
Where Do Game Designers Get Their Ideas From?
Although I wrote last week that there is no “idea guy” position in the game industry, game designers do frequently need to come up with ideas as part of their other responsibilities. After all, every game starts out as an idea. However, while many gamers believe that a game designer comes up with and then develops a game exactly as he or she originally envisioned it, game design is a much more complicated process. Some games come from one powerful idea, but most are formed by combining many ideas to create a unique whole. It’s very possible that initial ideas will be (or should be) abandoned, and lots of new ideas will be considered during the process.
Novice game designers tend to mash together existing genres, mechanics, and themes. They envision new games as collages of existing game component, or put a slight twist on an existing game: “Street Fighter…. with politicians!”. As a result, they focus on the mechanics and theme rather than creating unique player experiences.
A more experienced game designers will shift their focus so that instead of having visions of a specific game, they will be interested in exploring broad or incomplete ideas. The ideas can be about theme, they can be about mechanics, they can be about player experiences… really, they can be about anything.
Now these ideas don’t come out of thin air. Game designers are influenced by personal interests and hobbies. For example, for the first game I made professional, Space II, I took concepts I learned about shamanism in an anthropology class, and turned it into a space colonization game in which the player’s goal was to acquire converts to a new religion. In my second game, Windfall: An Oil Crisis Simulation, I applied queuing theory and supply & demand economics to the 1979 oil crisis. For my third game, Network, I combined principles from a mass communication class with the movie Network and created a satirical network programming simulation.
When coming up with new concepts, I looked for my inspiration in everywhere but other games. This is why I recommend to my game design students that they spend a significant part of every day doing something other than playing games so that they have well-rounded experiences upon which to draw:
- Read a book
- See a play
- Listen to music
- Draw a landscape
- Go hiking
- Do volunteer work
- Take an online course in something that has nothing to do with making games.
Ideas can strike you at any time. I get my best ideas while driving; other might get theirs while taking a shower or having a dream. So, another thing I recommend to my students is that they keep a game design journal with them at all times for jotting down their ideas when they strike. The journal should be small and convenient enough that you can place it on their nightstand or take it with you everyone you go.
Ideas rarely come out as fully formed. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the classic stages of creativity:
- Preparation: Becoming interested in a topic
- Incubation: Period where ideas “churn around” in your subconscious
- Insight: The “aha!” moment, where an idea comes together
- Evaluation: Deciding whether the insight is worth pursuing
- Elaboration: Fleshing out the idea
This is the typical birth process for an idea, but it’s possible to skip or jump around stages. Perhaps you’ll have an “aha!” moment without even realizing you were interested in the topic. Or maybe you’ll decide that an idea is worth pursuing, but instead of fleshing it out, you’ll spend more time letting it churn around in your head.
Fleshing out an idea is where a designer’s real work comes in, and in doing that work, they need to keep a healthy emotional distance. Obviously, they are excited by their ideas, but they know many ideas never work out, so it’s dangerous to become attached to an untested one. They also know that the initial conception is very rarely the best implementation, so keeping an open mind and keeping nothing sacred will tend to result in better final games.
Be advised that professional game designers don’t just work on their own ideas; often they are called upon to develop ideas that they are given to work on. So, besides coming up with their own brilliant inspirations, they may be called upon to flesh out concepts coming from sources such as these:
- Licensing Hook: Your business development manager has just acquired the licensing rights to make a game based upon the hit TV show The Hooker and the Priest, and now you must somehow turn that into a game.
- Technology Hook: Your engine programmer came up with a method of rendering rainbows that look so cool, you are tasked with creating a game based on rainbows.
- Filling A Gap: Your marketing director says that even though your company has made a very popular real-time strategy game and first-person shooter game, it also needs to make a platformer to cover the entire customer base, and you are charged with designing one.
- Following Coattails: Your vice president of sales reports that your competitors new werewolf survival game is selling through the rough, and now all of the retailers are clamoring for more werewolf survival games.
- Sequels: Your company has done very well with their Boswell Badger endless runner game franchise, but the game’s leader designer is burned out on badgers, and you’ve been called in to design Boswell Badger VIII.
- Orders From Above: Your studio manager had a dream about spiral staircases last night, and was so exited about the idea, he orders you to build a game about spiral staircases.
Professional game designers are probably more often called upon to develop game ideas that came from someone else than they are to work on their own. Admittedly, it can be difficult to get enthusiastic about someone else’s idea, but that’s what you need to do if you’re a professional. However, sometimes it’s necessary — desirable even — to call in for help, and so next week, I will write about how to brainstorm ideas with other team members.
Sorry, There Is No “Idea Guy” Position In The Game Industry
Whenever I meet a new group of game production students at The Los Angeles Film School, I ask them what role they want to have in the game industry. Every so often, I get one who says, “I’m really good at ideas. That’s what I want to do in the game industry: be the guy who comes up with the ideas for games, stories and characters.”
Well then, stand in line behind the game designer, the programmer, the artist, the sound engineer, the quality insurance tester, and the project manager, all of whom bring valuable skills to the development team, because they all have ideas too.
Everyone has ideas. Good ones. Lots of good ones. As an exercise for my introductory game design class, I divide my students into groups of three and ask them to come up with 100 game design ideas in an hour. No one has failed the assignment yet.
Now, there is a game designer position whose responsibilities is to come up with game ideas; however, in practice a game designer is often given an idea to develop, either because the game was the idea of the boss or someone else on the team, an adaptation of a movie or another type of intellectual property, or a sequel to an existing game.
Even when the designer is tasked with coming up with an original game concept, the entire development team might be involved; after all, they are the ones who will be required to develop it, and they have probably have lots of good ideas too from the many games they have collectively played. When I worked as a producer at Jet Morgan Games, we would call the entire company into the conference room — producers, programmers, artists — to brainstorm ideas for projects we were pitching to our various clients.
But let’s say that you and only you are responsible for coming up with the game ideas at a game studio. What do you think you will be doing while the rest of the development team is actually creating the game? Coming up with new ideas to choose from when the team is finished eighteen months from now?
Ideas are, as they say, a dime a dozen, and no one is going to pay you to come up with one. What employers and clients pay for is the ability to execute ideas; that is, turning an idea into a finished product, preferably one that is popular enough that it will earn more revenue than it cost to develop.
If you want to get a job developing games, you need to have the skills necessary to do one of these positions:
- Game Designers define the way the game is played and the player experience. They develop the rules of the game, the setting, story and characters, objects such as weapons and vehicles, different ways the game may be played. This is more than just coming up with the game’s “idea”; it is coming up with all the details about how the game works. Even after the game is fully designed, the game tester is busy running playtest sessions with other players and refining the game based upon the session results.
- Level Designers are a sub-specialty of game designers who uses a level editor tool to not only create levels (environments) for a game, but may also program scripted events for player interaction with game objects.
- Game Writers write character profiles, backstories, main stories, mission and item descriptions, dialog, instructions and all other text appearing in a game.
- Game Programmers, or Developers, use programming languages such as C++ to develop code for implementing the design and displaying graphics and audio for video games. They also develop related software, such as game development tools like level editors and game engines.
- Game Artists create the visual elements of a game, such as characters, scenery, objects, vehicles, surface textures, clothing, props, and even user interface components. They also create concept art and storyboards which help communicate the proposed visual elements during the pre-production phase.
- Sound Designers are responsible for a game’s music, sound effects, and dialog. They may use audio libraries for finding music and sound effects, or they may compose music or record sounds themselves.
- Testers, or Quality Assurance personnel, verify that all of the game’s planned features and assets have been implemented and work properly.
- Project Managers, or Producers, oversees the entire project and ensures that the team is delivery quality within the time and budget constraints. They run meetings, write reports, and manage budgets, work schedules and project timelines.
Any one of these people can come up with an idea for a game. But if that’s all you can do, then you need to develop additional skills if you want to work in the game industry. Game development teams are very collaborative, and if you can’t contribute to a game’s execution, you’re not yet ready to contribute to its conception.
David Mullich 