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/ideaguy/ - For Idea Guys by Idea Guys

Discuss your game ideas, mechanics, stories, and characters. Give and receive feedback. Improve.

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 No.47

>tfw too many ideas
>tfw you'll never have enough time or patience to turn them all into reality
>tfw every time you try to take it easy, you get excited and it turns into something very complicated and big
How can you even control yourself?

I wanted to make a simple rpg game, but now I want to add space exploration and space-ship building and minecraft redstone-like "programming" mechanic and different planets that have levels equally complicated and large to the first one, and complex NPCs that you can order to do tasks, I also want to add musical instruments that you can play as a minigame, and have a survival system with hunger and thirst and temperature etc etc

It all makes sense the way it's laid out in my head, but there's no way I can type that out without seeming like the most huge weeb ideaguy on earth.

 No.48

Everything will always sound amazing and make sense in your head because the ideas are vague and not fully fleshed out. Once you have to actually sit down and write them out and figure out exactly what you mean and how it'll work, You start to see get a sense of scale and whats reasonable and what works.

Write down each part of your idea in a doc,just the general idea of each part, then see if you can expand on it,you'll find that some parts don't click or work anymore or that you never had a concrete idea for it in the first place

 No.50

Also start by writing down the CORE features you want your game to have, the things that have to be in it no exceptions, then you can write down optional features that if they didn't make it into the game, it could stand on its own.

 No.51

>work with others
>don't allow the feature bloat, complete goals in stages
>hire coders to do the AI or buy middleware (shitty choices I know)
>install Evernote, or Bitnami's Redmine package, etc. and you can write all the ideas but put them away somewhere else for now
>learn to code well (it takes years) by implementing real software apps in c++ and c# for example
it's not impossible OP.

 No.52

>>48
It was supposed to be a sort of sandbox exploration/tinkering game with no straightforward goal, so I feel having all that shit isn't necessarily 100% unreasonable. (a bit like how skyrim does it, you can follow the "main" questline if you want, but you can get essentially the same gameplay without it)

But then again, the whole concept (or lack thereof) was probably flawed from the beginning. Or at the very least way out of scale for what a single person is capable of doing.

>>50
That's where the problem is. When I finish fleshing out what the game is centrally about, I get this "great" little addition that would work really well together with it. That's not necessarily bad yet, but then I get this great concept for the surrounding context of the game and the world and story. And then more things start connecting to the new things and new lore ideas come out and I get more ideas of what would be awesome within the new whole. And somewhere in the midst of that I lost sight of what the game was supposed to be.

And all that shit looks so important in my mind that the game "wouldn't be the same" without it.

>>51
Maybe I just need someone to tell me to fucking stop.

I feel I could easily finish my games if I didn't try to turn it into something bigger than I'm capable of shortly after starting. I actually had a project that's whole point was to be small and simple, but I got so excited for it that I started writing a story for it, and it ended up becoming so important to me that I was afraid to do it wrong.

 No.53

>>52
sounds like you need some constraints,something to keep you within scope,This comes from either other people or self placed constraints.

When I say core features, I mean gameplay, not story or characters or lore.

Pick 5 gameplay mechanics/ideas that make up your game
Ex: sandbox focused on exploration, no set goals, point and click,party of 3, no quest failure

Now sit down and explain how you plan to implement that,what it looks like, how it works, and how it connects with the players options.

If you come up with some new "idea", ask yourself, "does it fit within any of these current features?" If so write down just the first line of the idea that you had, Ex: "timed quests would be cool", then go back to fleshing out and finishing the core features.

Once your 5 core features are done,then look at your list of other NON-CORE features you thought up along the way, pick 5 and repeat

if any idea doesn't work or you have to fundamentally alter your other main features, It just might not fit and you need to discard,dont go out of your way to cram something cool in.

Story,characters, and lore are all areas that you want your mind to go wild on. Not everything is going to be good, but you first want quantity over quality,then you go back and refine those ideas.

Its up to you to start with game play or world building first, game play is what you need to take it from an rp to an actual product and will be harder to design but is more critical if you want an actual game and not a novel

World building is where you add your flavor and will most likely come easier and in a rush, but its not necessarily going to get you any closer to having an actual game

world building needs game play, game play doesn't need world building.

 No.54

>>52
Creativity isn't bad. There are lots of people who can't be creative. It's just a matter of learning to use your creativity better to suit a real project. The only way you learn that is through real experience.

>>53
Good post, much better than mine.

OP, what you need to do is focus on getting a concrete game design concept together that is A) practical and B) doesn't have separate conflicting themes or features, it needs to be "harmonious", not confused. Balance. Create basic features THEN add ideas. Having ideas is not bad though, just learn to restrain yourself until you get high quality ideas.

I would recommend this book
https://www.google.com/search?q=game+design+a+book+of+lenses+pdf

 No.55

>>54
Thanks mang

Link to the book on kickass: http://goo.gl/o2pD3f
second edition



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