In today's lecture, we're going to talk about Ideation or the formation of ideas. We spoke a bit about this when we talked about the game design process earlier in the course. But in this lecture, we'll dive deeply into the topic. Ideation is one of the challenges of the game designer. That is, how do you produce the idea for a game? You can think of an idea as the soul or essence of your game. What makes your game, your game? Rather than think of an idea is one thing, I often found it useful to think of it as a collection of things. This collection of ideas you can think of as the pillars of the game. The pillars form the foundation that the rest of the game is built upon. Finding the soul or pillars of your game is often the first step when coming up with a game idea. But sometimes the soul and pillars emerge, evolve, and grow as the game takes form. Ideation certainly happens at the beginning of a game project, but it does not stop there, idea generation continues across the life of the project. Beyond the overarching game idea, you must also flesh out all the details of the game. We've discussed storytelling, game play, and user experience in previous lectures, many of the ideas that you come up with surround these elements of the game. But how do you come up with a game ideas, where do you begin? A great place to start is with a curious mind, be observant, think about things and ask questions. With a curious mind go out and have life experiences, travel, explore and experience the world, enjoy it, but also take the time to reflect on your life experiences. There could just be some great inspiration there. As you have these experiences, think of how they could be described as a system. Is there a way you can break what you're seeing into multiple mechanics that functioning together over time creates the dynamics of the system? This is the same process you would go through in creating a game. If you get good at this, it will help you and taking your ideas and translating them into game systems. Of course, getting a good education will help you greatly in the ability to think systematically. Education will also unlock a world of ideas and thoughts to you. I'm often asked by primary age students what to focus their studies on to get into games. I always tell them that it's best to get a broad, diverse foundation to their education, but orient their work toward games. That is, if they're taking a science class, a math class, or a history class, think about what you can apply that you're learning toward games and understand the human condition. What motivates people? Why do they like certain things and dislike other things? You can learn a lot about the human condition through listening to stories from in-person stories told by family and friends, to stories told to the masses through movies, television shows, theater, and performance art. There is so much inspiration and ideas you can get from these stories. Don't forget books, books are a foundational form of storytelling. How many games have been inspired by The Lord of the Rings series or even the more recent Harry Potter series. I would urge you to read not only fiction, but also non fiction, such as biographies and the stories of history. Even books that explore the human condition, such as self-help books. Of course, you need to play games, play a lot of games, play console games, PC games, mobile games, and even non-digital games, such as board games and card games, play a variety of game genres, not just your favorites. Also, play games, a variety production levels, from AAA games to indie games, to hobbyists, web-based games, and even simple game jam games. You never know where you're going to get good ideas from. Of course, there are thousands and thousands of games out there, sometimes it's hard to find the diamond in the rough. Fortunately, you can discover games via, not only word of mouth, but also several great internet resources. Metacritic is a great place to find average review scores of video games. A Metacritic score above 90 is considered great, and one above 80 is good. Many AAA games live or die by their Metacritic score from an industry point of view, scoring a high Metacritic score often equates to success. Other places to find games are on digital distribution channels like Steam for PC games, Nintendo e-shop, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network for console games. The Apple App Store and Google Play for mobile games. You can usually search for games by genre and then sort them by top sellers, best reviews, or release date. There is also often curated collections of games to discover. Another good place to discover games and trends in gaming is by looking at game news sites such as Polygon, Destructoid, The Verge, Touch arcade, and the Game-Informer. You can also look at game sales data on sites such as NPD to get an idea what is popular and what is selling. Some games are great but not yet popular, you can check out Reddit to find heavily debated curated list of games. You can also watch social media influencers on YouTube to see what is hot and what is on the rise. You may just find a diamond in the rough. Of course, when you're mining games for ideas, you should not be trying to just copy or clone an other game, there's enough of that already going on in the industry. Rather, you should be looking for inspiration. Are there emerging techniques for interactive storytelling? Is there something innovative in terms of game play? Is this new standard emerging in terms of user experience? If you do want to make a similar game to one that you've seen or played, you do not want to copy, but model and improve. That is, the elements of a game can inspire elements of your game, but you should be improving on these elements push the medium forward. Many popular games are mash-ups of other games. That is, the developers pulled together different elements from several games, mash them together, add their own secret sauce and hopefully poured altogether into a cohesive whole. Extreme example of this is the game Kingdom Hearts, which mixes action, role playing, hack-and-slash, and rhythm genres, while also mixing characters from Disney, Square Enix and Pixar. You should realize across this discussion that idea generation is an active, not a passive process. Great ideas are out there, but you must work at finding and generating them. I highly encourage you to keep a journal, notebook, or digital archive of your ideas. The human mind is fickle, and ideas are fleeting you will forget them unless you record them in some fashion. When you're looking for a great idea for your next game, go back through your old notes and you may just find you already thought of it. One of the best ways to get good at coming up with game ideas is to just do it. Game jams are a great place to practice this. Game jams, such as the Global Game Jam are typically events where a bunch of people get together, form into small teams and work on a game project over a concentrated period of time, such as 48 hours. I highly encourage you to participate in as many game jams as you can. Once again, one of the best ways to learn about making games is to do it.
