game ideas and commitment

[Doctory]

hi everyone
ive been wondering how everyone makes these games.
i could never come up with an idea, and when i do come up with an idea, i cant commit to it.
so, how do you come up with ideas for a game and commit to it?

[ivan]

One approach is to make a lot of small prototypes.
Make something small, centered around a particular game mechanic.
Your goal should be to make something playable ASAP.
This way you can improvise to see where the game mechanic takes you.
If it's not fun, drop it and make another prototype.

In my experience it's much harder to come up with an idea and to go through with it.
Sometimes, it takes years to make a game from the top down and the process is much less creative/exciting.

[nfey]

The idea part is the easy one There's a lot of people with ideas, but very few can properly word them into an actual game concept and even fewer can execute. If you're struggling here, start reading books on game design, game designer/dev blogs, play a lot of games in an analytical fashion (as in, try to understand what makes them fun, or engaging). It might be a bit overwhelming at first, but you'll find bits and pieces that you can put together and twist to come up with a new game mechanic or even a full game.
Commitment is a bit harder, but if you have the right execution skills and mindset, you can commit to a single project. Resist the urge to endlessly refactor code or to wipe everything and start from scratch.
Actually having time to work and make steady progress is what I find the hardest. "guy who dreams of being a game dev / designer and is working on his pet project that he's certain will be a hit on the market" isn't exactly an actual profession that gets you paid, so I've still got a full-time job.

[zorg]

Of course, there's always this... for ideas.
As for commitment, a clean mind and/or workplace does indeed do wonders, although for me, a gigantic whiteboard is what keeps me on track when making games.

[Roland_Yonaba]

I second Ivan's piece of advice. Small prototypes. It's a very wise one indeed.

[Doctory]

thanks everyone on your opinion on this topic
its appreciated

[Muris]

I think I kinda understand what the topic poster means. For me I might have hard time getting ideas, and when I do get one, the idea is so out of reach for the scale of one man project that it would instantly get scratched. Although sometimes its fun to play with completely random ideas. And sometimes just doing stuff, you can accidentally create something interesting. For example one simple project I was learning javascript and I was interested on how to draw faces, so I looked up some guides and made some very simple bezier curves to draw shapes of a face. Then I added some sliders to change the shape of the curve and the end result can produce some really bizarre faces, without shading though. With some settings it always produced thief looking faces so in the end result I named it a thief generator.

I guess I am like many others one of those, "I wanna make an rpg" kind of a guy, but the amount of work and things to do is just too much. For now I have probably again bitten something more than I can chew, and making strategy rpg, which is pretty much in game play wise something like fire emblem and fftactics etc. I have to say that in a way I feel that the project, despite I dont have much, is probably still more succesful than other ones I have tried to do. The thing is that I am actually enjoying of playing my own creation, which I find quite hard to acchieve. Maybe I just like Strategy RPGs, but once I got the game up to atleast to the point where it has some mechanics on it, this really has pushed me forward on actually finishing it.

I am not sure if its going to be fun/enjoyable game for others to play if I ever finish it, but at least I do like my own creation, despite it is like a clone and most likely there are billions of other games like mine.

So what I am trying to say, that I think doing something that you actually like doing is likely to produce some interesting ideas by experiementing with the concept you like or something. Like for example you would think about making a side scroller even though you do not like them that much, I think getting good ideas will be a lot harder than for something that is in your interest to begin with.

[Doctory]

-snip-

thanks for your opinion muris, it exactly describes how i feel
now i actually know what to make

[T-Bone]

Commiting to a game seriously is hard, and keeping that commitment throughout the time (possibly years!) it takes to finish a large project is much much harder.

Hat Cat was made in three years. I can't point to a specific thing that made it work, but a few reasons I've thought about:

1. We were a team of two people. That made it possible for us to yell at each other to work more.
2. We were both convinced the gameplay idea was good enough for it to deserve to be finished.
3. Working on it was almost always fun from beginning to end.

Some things you can think about.

[zorg]

1. We were a team of two people. That made it possible for us to yell at each other to work more.

That would certainly raise my productivity, though sadly i don't know many people who would be interested... on the other hand i haven't exactly asked anyone about it yet either; procrastination :v