Writing Games Part 2: Ideas
Probably one of the most common questions encountered in the game industry is "I have this a great idea for a game, how do I sell it?" It's a reasonable question, but the answer is often much harsher than aspiriting designers like.
In the vast majority of cases, ideas are meaningless. That original killer idea you have has probably been brought up countless times by other players or within teams at game companies.
Original ideas aren't as original as you'd like to think. Some of the most common original ideas, for example, are "genre combinations". It's like that old commercial, "You put chocolate in my peanut butter!" "YOU put peanut butter on my chocolate!"
Pretty much every permutation of Genre X + Genre Y into Genre Z has been either done or at least gone over enough that it's been carefully determined to suck. Back in 1997-1998, the hot idea was "first person stategy!". BattleZone, Golgotha, maybe a couple others.
Then it was "role playing + first person shooter!" a la Deus Ex or System Shock 2. And now "massively multiplayer + anything!". For a while there, I had multiple friends come up with the idea of "Like DDR/PaRappa, but a fighting game!".
The problem with genre combinations is that, more often than not, you attract an intersection of the genre player bases, not a union. If you combine role playing and first person shooting, there's a very good chance you'll attract only those players that like BOTH, not players that like EITHER.
Deus Ex was a classic example of this. I'm fairly alone in my assessment of it -- I hated it. Absolutely, completely thought it was crap. The RPG elements only served to dampen any natural FPS skills, and the FPS elements dampened any gains from the RPG skills. So unless you were good at both, it was a very difficult game to play. RPG players that weren't very good at FPS games hated it, and FPS players that didn't like having their natural skills modulated by artificial skill ratings also hated it. That said, it sold enough copies that obviously SOMEONE liked it but, hell, so did Deer Hunter.
Right after genre combinations, the most common "original" ideas are "like X but with Y" ideas. "Like Quake, but with stats!" or "Like Civilization, but with more units!" or "Like Diablo, but 3D!" or "Like Everquest, but without camping!".
Unfortunately a lot of people think an idea is original simply because they've managed to mutate a single allele on a game's DNA sequence. It's not that simple -- minor riffs on pre-existing themes rarely end up doing as well as the pre-existing theme. In fact, many of the improvements get away with part of the fun unknowingly. In Diablo, one of the fun parts of the game was playing inventory Tetris, and when that was removed in subsequent games, it took a bit of satisfaction and playing away from the players. Same with camping in EQ (I mean, you remove camping, you've removed THE GAME), etc.
Killer ideas just aren't as killer as you'd think. That said, occasionally you DO run into someone with a truly unique or interesting idea. Those occasions are SO rare that they almost don't count.
Another area where people have lots of ideas is "adding realism" to a game. Realism sucks. Realism is only important when it makes a game fun and interesting. The vast majority of realism is boring and tedious. If every fantasy game forced you to manually have your party stop and eat, sleep, oil armor, sharpen and oil weapons, and answer nature's call, it would get boring, fast. Most strategy players don't want to deal with communication failures, morale and logistical problems, even though that's 90% of what war is. Most FPS players don't want to deal with real physics.
Real physics is something I have direct experience with. In the various Quake games, you fall at something like 4x the speed of gravity. In addition, you have near instantaneous acceleration and a top running speed of about 30mph (depends on the game...in DOOM it was closer to 60-70mph I think). Oh, and gravity and inertia didn't affect projectiles. And falling damage didn't kick in until you jumped about 3 stories.
So, just for hoots, one day we tried various permutations on making the game "real" (on the insistence of some of us, who didn't believe it when Carmack said "trust me, this sucks").
Run speed @ 20mph feels like you're walking. Falling at 9.8 m/s/s feels like you're floating. Standard acceleration feels like you're trying to run through viscous liquid. Rockets that have trajectory and are affected by player's momentum and gravity -- impossible to use. Oh, and of course, getting hit by anything has a 25% chance of instantly killing you. And falling off more than 10' inflicts damage (10' is barely above your head in Q2).
Ideas aren't the problem. As much as people like to point to the industry at lacking good ideas, you have to believe me, ideas are NOT the problem. It's getting those ideas accepted and then made into games that's a problem.
Radical new ideas are massive risks. Most game companies have folders and folders of ideas for games. My game company, which is two people, has a queue of over a dozen game ideas. But in the real world, for every Populous or Lemmings or The Sims there's going to be a dozen Majestics. Which is why Activision continually cranks out a half-dozen first person shooters which are "original" because, hey, that one has WW2 zombies, but THIS one is the real world of mercenaries! Whatever.
How do you separate the awesome idea from "sounds good on paper" idea? It's really tough to say, because something that sounds great on paper often isn't revealed to suck until you've committed enough resources to making it playable. That's when subtle issues come up and you have to rethink you're overall strategy. But most ideas never reach that stage or, even worse, they're green lit to completion without a proper evaluation of playability before hand.
Coming up with the idea just isn't nearly as big a problem as making a game. It's that whole 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration bit. Ideas tend to be epiphanies, and epiphanies are cheap and free. Sitting down and grinding out a game that you may not have 100% confidence in -- THAT'S hard f'in work.
Ironically enough, my company's problem right now is that we've got development down to such a refined process (4-6 weeks to crank out a puzzle game) that ideas ARE our biggest problem right now, because most of our original ideas are for games with longer development schedules than we can allocate reasonably (i.e. 6-12 months).
Writing Games Part 3: Getting a Job
