[Create Game Sunday] and why your game ideas aren't worthless.
How it works is lets pick a day in the week like say Saturday and a topic to create a game around and you have until the next Saturday to develop it and post it then for discussion.
Now I am sure about now the "Game ideas are worthless without implementation!" cockroaches will crawl out.
Here is the thing implementation and ideas are both part of the skill of game design. They are the same thing. Game design is a knowledge bound skill that utilizes concepts like the different rules,systems,mechanics,patterns and in what context they work.
What implementation gives you is that it test your concepts in that context. But the trade-off is time. I am talking about 3-5 years to test if your project is commercially viable. Even game jams are limited because of their simplicity and most are not even commercially viable. Steam is already flooded and indies studios pop all the time.
What your best tool as a game designer is analysis, with analysis you have both the concepts in the game and the context in that its already tested and you know if they work or not as the game is already released.
The second best tool is to practice in making game ideas. What it gives is flexibility and creativity in mixing the different concepts in your head. This will help you in solving problems in your implementation phase so it is good fucking practice! Your ideas do not have to be commercially viable thus they don't need to take 3-5 years and you don't have to wonder if they work or not, I am going to spoil things for you, they won't work, but it doesn't matter, it's just practice, all that matters is exercising your brain utilizing your knowledge. You can go as wild and speculative with infinite budgets creating anything and everything.
What creating game ideas gives is a frame of reference not matter how wild they are. This is absolutely important because having a direction you work towards in game development helps you tremendously. Many projects failed through getting lost in development because of lack of direction. A frame of reference make you able to compare and contrast between the current design and the reference and gives you a better idea on what you can or can't do.
As a conclusion creating game ideas help in game development, you can work smart and exercise and have fun in coming up with ideas. OR you can go through grueling,torturous and endless Trial and Error.
Of course that does not mean you will escape from the feedback and testing required in implementation. It is about the amount of work you can save yourself.
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####You all are game designers. You all should have projects you are working on and your own perspective and knowledge. I will recommend taking the challenge because it will help your projects.
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Now lets see what day it is? Oh its Saturday! What a coincidence! The game is on!
The game you need to create for next week:
Open World RTS.
I am sure you are familiar with open world games, go anywhere do anything and the RTS genre has not gotten any love recently so its time to shake things up a bit. So come up with a RTS that works in a really big map fighting other enemy factions.
Would it work? Would it not? Who knows! Go wild and find out!
Some inspiration to get you started. Factorio, Tower Defense Games and the 4X Genre.
The big issue you have to solve is how to handle player attention when he can't be anywhere at once and organize things so that he doesn't get overwhelmed by the big map.
Now this is all guidelines and you can have your own idea on what Open World RTS can be.
You can be as concise or as in depth as you want. You can make GDD with something like Google Docs, and I believe Trello is popular here? My recommendation is Workflowy(ref link here) since its easy to add your thoughts fast, detail and rearrange later and you can keep it open in a tab on hand.
Now since its the first challenge I will like to call upon you to come up with topics for the next set of challenges and what kind of direction you would like going forward.
EDIT: Wrong title. It should be Saturday, since you would have 2 days of discussion instead of one when people are more free on weekend.
Posted Jun 10, 2017, 6:30 AM UTC · edited