Are Game Ideas a Dime a Dozen?

Around 6 years ago or so, 2004 or something, I started looking around for advice directed at budding game developers. At the time I was mostly looking around to see where and how I should start in on my big game idea that I had rolling around in my head for enough time that I decided to try my hand at making it.

It wasn’t long until I found the famous Sloperama post on ideas. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think a lot of new developers do either. But it is true. Sort of…

While Tom has good reason to write something like this intended for game dev tenderfoots, I think this nugget of advice can have a decent negative effect on what more experienced developers decide to work on, or even prototype.

So my post is directed towards developers with a few polished games under their belt. To stay with the Boy Scout ranking system, these developers would be First Class or Star. Not necessarily Eagle Scouts [Miyamoto?], but know how to tie a square-knot no problem. They’re comfortable with the execution of the game idea, working on usability, play-testing and have a general understanding of good and bad design. I’m not saying there’s some sort of ceiling on any of these, but I think there’s a point you reach where you feel like you’re “in your cockpit” [Stolen from Mike] when you’re making whatever it is that you’re making.

I think the reason Tom Sloper wrote that article, and so many other veterans follow with the same advice for designers starting out, is due to the fact that many a first timer looking to promote their game solely based on the idea of it is often touting an idea that doesn’t excite people experienced in game development. That’s not all that surprising, though if you’ve made a few games. Or even one.

I’m not excited by my Big Ideas that started me off on this path in the first place. In fact, a friend asked about “my first love” just last night and he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t excited anymore by the idea, like I had lost something along the way. But I’d argue the opposite, I’ve actually gained something and that’s the ability to understand my limits [temporary] as a developer at this point in time and what that means for the games I want to make.

In the beginning I would let ideas run wild with features, story and content. They were sprawling epics of games that would take decades to create with even a medium sized team, but I didn’t care. I was a teenager in love. Now though, an idea of that scope can’t even get me off the couch because it’s too big to understand really quickly. Not that a large idea can’t be great, but it certainly is much harder to test against and I have less experience with that. That’s just me, though.

As I grow as a developer I temper my taste for the game ideas that we come up with and I think more developers should take notice and give ourselves a little more credit as designers. Our latest game, due out in a week or so, is a product of really hashing out ideas based on an abstract concept and trusting our gut for that Eureka moment. I’m not saying it will be typical but the first time we tried doing the brainstorm-room thing, as more experienced developers, it worked. Though it seemed that throughout the process, the important thing was not to settle on good-enough. We had plenty of decent ideas that could have been decent games, but we weren’t excited about those.

For this session we settled on a word or phrase [parallax scrolling] and used it as a starting point to drive the brainstorm. Just about all of our games are centered around one mechanic that seeds teh rest of the game. If we hold true to that mechanic we feel like the mechanic itself will form into something cool and interesting. Anyway, “parallax” went to “speed”, into a discussion about speed and the feeling of going fast and how awesome that is, into talking about propulsion types and eventually into the final solution which was the Eureka moment. It was incredibly obvious to us both simultaneously that we realized it had to be prototyped immediately. I went into my room and created a mockup while Mike made a control-scheme prototype. And we had it.

A lot of my views on ideas now are driven by the experience, and while it may never happen again and I could be totally wrong, I feel like we need to trust ourselves as developers more often and put a little more faith into our ideas, even if they have burned us in the past with those terribly overblown growing-pain game projects that we all embarked on when wide eyed and green. Find a project that excites you in all areas that need exciting! Scope. Style. Gameplay. Innovation? You can have ‘em all, just hold out for the right one and bounce ideas off each other. It’s not like we have a checklist of things that make for a good or bad game project, it’s just what our tastes have become so we don’t need to check them against some sort of rote list or anything, we just kind of know.

I feel like that’s also one really important facet of settling in on an idea [as opposed to rapid prototyping multiple ideas]. Most often, those early game projects that I spent years translating into worthless design documents were solely from my brain, and that’s a problem! Our brains like to give themselves credit when they come up with something “new” so that colors the idea in a favorable light. If you have another brain around that can’t help but give you “big ups” for an idea it didn’t completely have, then you probably know you’re onto something.

Anyway, just wanted to ramble on that for a bit, something I’ve been thinking about while on some downtime. Also, you should know that there are many ways to generate ideas and prototypes. This is just what worked for us last time and we’ll probably try it again for the next game. I’m all for people coming up with personal ideas as a means of expression [I do that also] or shotgun prototypes or picking random ideas off a dartboard. Whatever works!

I made a game by myself and it’s called “Hundreds”.

Play it right now for free!

I felt a great sense of accomplishment making this game on my own, though I know there is an oceans worth of improvement to be had still, it’s a big milestone for me so I thought I’d share the journey with you all in this post.

My whole career as a game developer has been spent on the visual side of things, which can sometimes be frustrating for me. In my formative years as a developer I often struggled with programmers on any number of levels. Getting something as basic as prototyping the first draft of player movement in the game was an extremely laborious task [we were using a game-maker like tool as well!].

Though, I’m not totally oblivious to coding. I code all my own websites [intuition, Mikengreg, this site...] but that’s more script than anything and when it comes to games I rarely touched more than a config file in plain text or XML scripts.

So a few years ago, during the days of Dinowaurs, I ventured out to try and learn a bit about coding games. At first I started using ActionScript 2.0 with the help of a book or two and I made some solid progress, but I never felt like I “got it”. I think I made some particle systems and a few other toys, but no games.

After awhile I bought a few books on ActionScript 3.0 and dove into the terrifying world of Object Oriented Programming [OOP]. It was a completely new way to set things up compared to 2.0 though it felt more organized. Like there was a more strict set of rules that I’d need to follow that might allow me to uncover the underlying structure of this “magical coding stuff” better.

For the next couple years, and up until just recently, I would find a free night or weekend and try certain things out. Most of the time it was a simple project to learn how input works with the keyboard. Other times it was a grandiose plan to overhaul my portfolio or create a “platforming garden” where I would be able to test and tweak platforming characters. These would always fail miserably because I was in way over my head, but they were wholly necessary to the learning process. After I failed or came up against a brick wall I would often stop studying/coding for months at a time. The frustration was immense and I didn’t really have a community to advise me during. That was fine though. I certainly had plenty to do with my other projects and the break was nice since I would get a little obsessive about figuring out a certain problem.

So this sort of on/off parabola continued until about a month or two ago. I was in a programming phase and I took to going back to the early chapters of the Moock book. I realized I didn’t truly understand the core concepts of many different devices in OOP and I needed to get back to basics. It was here that I learned how powerful functions actually can be and what arrays actually do. I continued to read and re-read these same chapters until I completely understood the building blocks of AS3.0 and it was then that I decided I could pull of an actual game.

Using only circles and frictionless physics I was able to make a full game that I’m pretty happy with. It’s not a game that is supposed to say anything in particular nor is it a game that I think is incredibly gripping or fun for me, but I feel like the concept is sound and the execution decent for my first game. There are many things I would like to alter if I had the powers of an expert coder [motion blur] but those simply won’t be happening for this game.

I hope some of you get a kick out of it and I’m considering posting the awful source here since it might be a good opportunity for some more experienced developers to give me some tips on how to better code something and so on. Though that could get overwhelming as the whole thing is a 100% mess; I’m sure. It’s all in one file! o_O

Oh! And post your highest level in the comments if you want. I don’t have high-scores or anything so this’ll have to do.

TIGJam Midwest 2010

TIGJam Midwest is next weekend, June 4th-6th, 2010, at Foundry Coworking. If you’re interested, RSVP here at Eventbrite: http://tigjammidwest.eventbrite.com

Here’s the official info:

TIGJam Midwest is an indie game jam where creatives – programmers, hackers, designers, artists, or musicians – get together and make videogames in a weekend. For those who aren’t familiar with game jams, they’re similar to events like the 48 Hour Film Project or Startup Weekend. It’s called TIGJam because our group is part of the TIGSource community, which is a developer community for indie games.

Our game jams usually have a theme, and TIGJam Midwest’s theme this year is “proverbs,” proposed by Mark Doeden of 8monkey Labs.  Participants will form teams, choose a specific proverb from a culture of their choice, and develop a game based on it. There could be games based on Chinese Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Christian proverbs, or more obscure cultures or religions.

The local community is encouraged to attend the show & tell at Impromptu Studio at 3pm-8pm on Sunday, where they will experience the games and meet local game developers. These won’t be your usual space marine shooters; expect raw and barely-finished games that explore satirical, brand new, or meaningful territory.

A couple other exciting things are in the works.  Alec Holowka of Aquaria fame will be giving a keynote Friday at 7pm.  Venom is providing free energy drinks, there could be a visit from Senator Jack Hatch to express his support of creative endeavors like this, and there are rumors of drink specials next door at the Des Moines Social Club.  Finally, barring some catastrophy, there should be free catered food the whole weekend.  Expect one or two other exciting things to get finalized closer to the event.

All this free stuff is thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Technology Association of Iowa.  It’s exciting to think that these organizations are supporting a culture of game development here in Iowa!

Laserback and Quadruped Co-op Mode

Hey Intuition blog :) The Dinowaurs days was the last time I made a post, so this announcement is very fitting. Lately, I’ve been working on my own game about a laser monster called Laserback which is a one-button arcade style game that I submitted to Gamma IV.

Well, I made a hefty update today: 4 Player QUADRUPED CO-OP MODE!!!:

Click the image to see it a little larger.

More Laserback info to come down the road.

Brand yourself, even if it’s lazy.

Ok, this will be quick. I have a half dozen other posts I want to make but I’m in the middle of working on FOUR GAMES!!! Ahhhhh!

So I played an awesome game today, it’s called Specter Spelunker Shrinks. But when I got to the site I thought…
me

“Whoa, this is the same dude [NMcCoy] who did Wavespark?! Awesome!

I continued to believe that NMcCoy made this game and my idea of him as a developer was bolstered. I already loved Wavespark. So while that helped out my opinion of NMcCoy, I completely missed the fact that it was done by a different developer, Ken Grafals of Fall Damage Games. It’s quite easy, but the only difference is in the masthead [image at the top of a page]. See for yourself:

Did you catch the difference? ;)

But seriously, this is becoming more of an issue now that we have plenty of free, well designed solutions for putting out what we make. I actually recommend using a theme of some sort if you’re not of the visual persuasion, and even if you are since it’s a great starting place. All of the typography is pretty much going to be nice, clean and legible so you don’t need to fret over that, and the overall user experience is polished on most popular Wordpress [insert your CMS here] themes.

However, this kind of thing happens a lot [i see this theme everywhere], where we all use the same theme and then the confusion starts in. So if you’re dropping in a theme of your own, I would advise one change. It can take as little as one minute if you want. Change the colors! It’s a very simple fix. Head over to the style.css and search for the hex of whatever colors you’re using [use firebug as well]. Do a Find and Replace on the colors, swap them consistently like that, and there you go. You’re a completely different “company” that’s most likely not going to be confused with anyone else. It’s all you need, and it goes a long way.

Now that doesn’t mean picking colors is easy, in fact it can go horribly wrong. But be modest, stick with a strict palette and ask for some honest opinions and after an hour or so you’ll be on your way. In fact, in just one line, I did it with Fall Damage Games. By taking out the background image, and just leaving the background black, the whole site took on its own identity.

Just tweak the CSS a tad, you’ll be glad you did. It’s important.

EON

Oh, hey. It’s, uh, it’s been a while…

EON is finished and out on Newgrounds! We ended up adding a level editor, and those crazy NG kids are cooking up some weird and fun stuff, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s very satisfying building a fun game, but it’s a whole new experience creating a tool and watching people use it in surprising ways, I may have to do more in that direction…

Anyway, go play it! And please rate highly :)

How I just got over a huge creative block.

I started work on the Mikengreg logo around 3 months ago, it had gone pretty well for the most part but I stopped working on it regularly about a month ago. For that month I’ve felt a block swelling. I just got over that an hour ago. I’m fresh and excited and everything is in place now, but it was extremely tough getting to this point. Not in the way a difficult challenge is tough, like beating Sexy Hiking, but in the way you feel when you’re sick or hurt as a kid and you ask that big fatalistic question:
you

“Mom. Am I going to die?!”

It’s this sort of mindset that gets me paralyzed in a creative block. I’m staring at sketches, ideas and everything else I can think of but a feeling of deterministic dread drapes every new thought. It’s not the blank-page problem, or at least not usually with me. I’m creating new stuff, exploring new areas but none of it is working. It all sucks. It’s never going to work! AHHHHH!!! In this most recent case it was my work on the Mikengreg identity. After a long hiatus from the badge, I decided I hated it. This is nothing new, I was never 100% happy with it, but now the pressure is on and I was questioning the entire direction because I was no longer in the groove of working on Mikengreg stuff.

While I know the big idea of Mikengreg is “handmade games crafted with love and high-fives” I lost the scent on how that would actually be applied to the identity a long time ago. What does our website look like? What surface are we making these games on? Where’s the system?

That’s how I work, in systems. If I don’t have a system that I can turn to then I’m 100% lost. More on systems in the future. I’ll post about that when I do my big Mikengreg identity process post. Point being, I was lost.

Don’t let it stagnate

So the first contributing factor was that this was looming over my head during a couple of big projects. In my head I am thinking: “Mikengreg isn’t perfect, in fact every time I look at it, it sucks a little more.” With each day that I didn’t work toward making it work I saw more and more mistakes. This may seem like a good thing on the surface, but in reality it added to my crippling creative paralysis. In the same way putting off talking about a serious problem with a significant other only makes the fight worse, putting off facing up to the issues with the logo made it that much harder to address.

Do your best not to cut off projects midway through their development. If you have to split time between them, do at least a little work everyday on one or the other to avoid it stagnating.

Stick with the spark

Of course, the “don’t let it happen” variants are merely precautionary and aren’t too useful when you’re in the throes of a major creative block. On Monday I basically just planned and sketched all day. It wasn’t a bad thing, and certainly could have been worse [stare at a screen all day] but I was convinced that I had got it all wrong in the first place. The original line of thinking was to make a beer/food label/badge/seal logo for us that would communicate our personality. Last time I left off I was planning on hand-painting everything [website etc.] and toying with the idea of doing it in woodcut. I did some website concepts and all of them felt aimless and trite. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with modern stuff, corporate looking stuff, experimental type and etc. Some of it was ok, but it was all just as aimless as the website concepts. It wasn’t until I realized where I’d left off with the woodcuts that I just needed to iterate on that. I was letting my growing distaste for what I’d done tempt me to scrap it all, including the big idea.

That’s really the nugget of all of this. The Big Idea. Don’t lose sight of it. It’s what Mikengreg was founded on; it gets us excited and we believe in it. By investigating other avenues I wasn’t expanding the process, rather I was abandoning the only shred of a system that we had in the first place. It’s healthy to think outside the box but if you’re letting the block itself frustrate and control your creative decisions you may make some serious mistakes. Always keep an eye on the original idea when moving forward. That is your guide and it will never waiver [unless of course it was a bad idea in the first place].

Don’t move horizontally, drill down vertically

Part of the solution to dredging myself out of the block was to stop thinking in terms of iterating horizontally on a design problem. What I mean was that I was looking for solutions in alternate styles of typography, completely new identity systems [see above] rather than constraining the vision and thinking vertically about what wasn’t working with the original concept. I had this aimless website design, a few aimless pieces of art that I was arranging and various typefaces I was switching in and out. One image was hand-painted, the other a sketch, and then the logo badge you see on mikengreg.com. These disparate elements weren’t working and I wasn’t willing to think about why because I was so frustrated.

The real problem was that I had a website that was more graphical than the content it would be displaying. After immersing myself in a healthy amount of top-quality website designs from around the internet, it was clear that I was more concerned with the identity itself than the games we would make and showcase through the identity. The identity is the pasta [handmade and cooked to perfection] and the games are the sauce. Of course I don’t actually want to have the identity overshadow the games; I love our games, and I think they’re fucking awesome. So, I took a step back and reconsidered all my choices and decided that all this hand-painted stuff had to go. Also, the badge needs a good amount of simplification as well some woodcut treatments.

Now I had my system. Woodcuts and wood. It made total sense the whole time. Wooden surfaces chiseled by hand into works of art. All the elements were now in place with the system. Handmade = 1 color woodcut. Games = showcased in full color. Crafted with Love & High-Fives = Mikengreg [the humans]. Now surely there is a lot more to the system, but we’re good now. I’ve got the badge looking much better. Everything in its right place.

Though, none of this would have happened as quickly if I hand’t stuck with it. Fight through the pain as much as you don’t want to. It’s a much stranger problem when facing creative problems, but hopefully some of these things I went through will help you find your way through it.

I tell people this a lot but my Mom gave me a great piece of sinister logic when I was younger trying to learn simple division. I was on the bed cross-legged pounding my fists into the comforter because I couldn’t understand the problem. My mom, being the award-winning teacher she is, waited until I calmed enough to tell me:
Mom

Now Greg, you want to know something? That frustration you’re feeling… Well that’s how you know you’re just about to learn something new!

About 5 minutes later I figured it out and I’ve been doing long-division ever since!