How to come up with ideas

Since I started my “one game per week” challenge on lessmilk.com , I noticed that the most common question I received in my email was “how do you come up with new interesting ideas every week?”. Therefore, I decided to try to answer this question here.



This post tells about the process of finding ideas for my games by me, but I think that this can also be applied to almost any creative work.

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Use restrictions

When you know that you want to create something, the next step is to decide what to specifically create. However, there are so many possibilities and so many choices to make it that it is difficult to find a specific idea. Because of this, many people change their decisions over and over and end up with nothing at all.



One of the powerful tools for circumventing this trap is the use of restrictions. With restrictions, you artificially get rid of many ideas and having fewer opportunities means that choosing an idea is easier. Therefore, instead of focusing on your idea, try to find restrictions that you find interesting.



Here are the limitations that I still used to make 12 games:

• Each game should be done in approximately 7 days.
• Each game uses retro graphics that I create myself
• Each game will follow a theme that I define in advance (for example: a platform game)

People might think that having these restrictions makes my job harder, but in fact the opposite is true.

Get Started Now

At this point, you should have a vague idea of ​​what you want to do, but nothing concrete. Should you start brainstorming this way in order to find an excellent idea? Well, there is one problem: you may never find the perfect idea.



Instead of brainstorming, start realizing your bare idea right now. Make something really simple or be inspired by something similar. In any case, since you do not know exactly what you are creating, it will probably end up with something unimportant. And that's fine, you'll worry about making your idea interesting later.



For my platform game, I quickly began coding the most basic elements of the game:

• Download and display the map on the screen
• Having a character moving around the map
• Ability to die and complete a level

No original ideas were involved. The game was pretty bad, but I had something to play with.

Iterate

Now that you have a finished bare prototype, it's time to improve it. This part may be the most difficult and long in the creation process, but it is also the most interesting.



Here's how it works: there is a small idea, implement it, test it, improve it and repeat it again. Some ideas will turn out to be bad, some will need a lot of tweaks, and others will turn out great. Just continue to perform iterations with new ideas until you have something you like.



I will try to show you this process on one of my ideas that I had for my platform game:

• Adding coins to games adds interest, so I coded the coins.
• It looked nice, but it was wrong, because the coins were not used anywhere
• To fix this I changed the rules of the game: to complete the level you must collect all the coins
• It got much better, but now I had to redo some of the levels to accommodate this change.

Just a small idea, like “adding coins,” ended with a complete change in my entire game. If you want, you can play my platformer here .

Conclusion

Summary: use constraints, start right now and iterate.



With such a system, finding ideas is actually not that difficult. To do this, you still need to work and apply fantasy, but in the end you will have ideas and, more importantly, you will have something that you like.