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"Well, really I'm more of an idea guy."
Its a turn of phrase that makes me wince when I see it in class, or hear it drop from the lips of a new and untested game developer. When I see it as an instructor it usually heralds trouble. It's almost a form of foreshadowing warning me that this person is missing a skillset somewhere and they're hoping having a great idea will make up for that.
There are a lot of ideas out there. Many original, many rehashes of the same thing we saw last year except with bigger guns, or shinier puzzle pieces and the occasional piece of transcendental brilliance.
I'm not bagging on people with great ideas in general, but when it comes to games, having a great idea is simply not enough to get that game made. You need to have something else, another skillset beyond just coming up with "great ideas". Ideas, I hate to say, are a dime a dozen, especially in an industry as creative as our inherently tends to be.
So what's your "in"? What's your route to production going to be? You have to step up to the plate and be a salesman. You're going to have to stand in front of people and *ABOVE ALL* communicate.
You're going to have to show someone or a group of someones exactly how cool your game is. You're going to have to paint a picture up inside their heads that is so compelling that they have no choice to buy-in.
This goes beyond just selling your idea to a producer, in order to get anything created, whether it be concept art or programming tech, you are going to have to convince people to help you out, to produce spec work on YOUR idea, versus the five ideas of their own that they already have cached and ready to go.
In all cases (code, art or sales) you're going to need a design document. It's like the pass or go question from a producer, "do you have a design document." There are a rare few instances where something scribbled on a cocktail napkin over lunch is going to suffice, but I would advise against betting on that situation when you're first starting out. As an "idea guy" this is where you have your chance to shine.
A design document involves a lot a writing, a lot of thinking, a lot of what if's and why thats. It's the first hurdle, because if you cannot put one together, then the game's over before it starts. They are time consuming, tedious things, and noone's going to handle that bag of snakes for you.
But if you don't have artistic skills, and you don't have programming skills, then this document is where you have to make your stand. The prose needs to sing, the gameplay descriptions leap from the page and burrow hungrily into the mind of the reader like something out of a Steven King opus.
The spelling needs to be right (and shame on you if you rely on spell check to save you) the grammar makes sense, the descriptions thorough, the characters well developed and consistent.
If you can't code, and you can't draw, then you're going to have to write and write well because after the meeting or the phone call, this is what's going to be left behind to speak on your behalf. You want it to never shut up.
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In a panel at PAX, this very subject came up, and the unanimous answer from the long time industry veterans was that documents alone just don't cut it. You need a prototype of at least one aspect of your game, even it if is only a board game, to really have a reasonable shot.
Besides the document issue, the other problem with what seems to be a great idea is that it often has critical holes in it that won't show up until there has been some attempt to implement it. I hesitate to call anything a great idea until I see some implementation.
On the other hand, if you're independently wealthy, I'm sure you can find plenty of skilled personnel willing to create your idea for you as long as you supply paychecks.
Heh, I faintly remember saying "I'm more of an ideas guy" myself in a dark, dark past... Now I hear other freshmen say it.
But I do agree wholeheartedly with Joshua; Design Documents are -not- a good way to communicate your coolness. It's not 'sparkable' enough, it might not convey that spark of enthousiasm, motivation, awesomeness. At least not when it comes to communicating inhouse, with art and code, in my experience.
An embarrassingly simple flash demo, or a live pitch, or a simple storyboard can do so much more! My personal favorite is making a lot of moodboards =)
First there's the pitch document, which comes before the design document, and is replete with marketing-speak, target demographics, and historical data as a basis to predict if the game will be a success. To write this, you need to have good industry knowledge and keep it updated on a daily basis - you have to know what has sold in the past, what people want today, and what the various markets are behaving like to predict the trends of the immediate future. Even if you're not going to a publisher with it, you need to justify creating the game at least to yourself, if you hope it to be a commercial success and not just a personal piece of art.
Then there's the design document, which there are entire books and lectures about how to write one clearly and effectively. Most are terrible, and writing a good one is an art onto itself. These documents are often woefully under-detailed. Saying "the game will have sound effects for all major events" is not good enough for the design document -- you haven't designed anything by saying that. Which game events will have audio effects, what will those effects sound like, what mood you are going for, and WHY you want a particular mood are all further things you must describe. A glaring omission in most design documents is WHY -- WHY you have designed the characters the way you have, WHY the art style is the one it is, WHY the level design should be a certain way, and so forth. As you say, this takes a lot of consideration, and is more than simply coming up with ideas.
Then there's the technical design document, which gets into the nitty-gritty of power-up values, pseudo-code, and other programming-like details.
After all this your job doesn't end - you don't feed the documents into one end of the game-making team and have a finished game, exactly how you imagined it, come out the other. There's the back-and-forth iterations for approving concept art; constant communication with the game artists and programmers to actually produce the game; stopping constantly to make sure the game is following its vision; do technical, art, playtest QA; resolve emergent technical, art, and gameplay issues; if there's a client or publisher you communicate to them the game progress and deal with any contract or milestone issues. And at the end of the day, if the game sucks, it's YOUR fault, and YOUR job to analyze and quantify how it sucks, why it sucks, and how to fix it.
I've definitely made a game career without being a programmer or artist, but as you say in your blog, you have to have SOME skills that are outstanding on offer. In my case it's communication (verbal and written), organization (of ideas and people), industry knowledge (both historical and current), technical and art knowledge, and lastly, "great ideas." But the great ideas part doesn't stand alone and is worthless to a client, developer, or publisher without its accompanying complimentary skills.
There've been a spate of articles and essays and blog/wiki posts of late on this subject. Most of them say the same thing: having some supposedly great idea isn't enough. Selling a game requires at least a solid design doc, and much more often needs a playable prototype... and even that's only good for about a 5% successful sell rate (if that) for someone without a track record.
Those points aren't wrong on their specifics. But I think they unfairly minimize some other important points related to ideas and game design (and designers):
1. Having "an" idea doesn't make you a good game designer. Being able to have lots of ideas is more important.
Someone whose mind is both fertile and adaptable is likely to make a better designer of games than someone who's wedded to one single idea and who is determined to make that specific idea a reality as a game. The latter kind of person is valuable; they deliver concrete products. But the former kind of person is valuable, too; they make good games better.
2. Ideas may be a dime a dozen, but GOOD ideas are considerably more valuable.
A person who's capable of consistently generating good ideas -- where "good" means "appropriate for this game, reasonably cost-efficient to implement, and fun for the target market" -- should not be dismissed as merely an "ideas guy" as though anyone can do that. Anyone can't.
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As advice to people trying to sell one cherished idea for a game, there's nothing wrong with "write a strong design doc" and "build a working prototype."
How about some advice for people looking to make a career out of designing many games of various types?
Is being known as an "ideas guy" really such a bad thing for these folks?
1. Pitch Doc
2. Design Doc (or Flash Demo, or Storyboard)
3. Tech Design Doc
Having *an* idea doesn't make you a great game designer, but having *lots* of ideas doesn't help either unless you know how to use them to build a game. It's that second part that is so often lacking, knowing what is needed to make a game out of that idea, that is the difference between being being an "idea guy" and being a "Game Designer". Hence my suggestion about building design documents. The process of putting together a design doc, even without the demo element, will make you think through these ideas and learn (by main force occasionally) how to take the idea and make it into a an actual game.
If you are looking to get into the industry in Game Design, you've got two basic routes (anyone feel free to correct me if there's a way around either of these). Get in wherever you have applicable skills (code, art, QA, writing, IT, management, wherever) and learn the industry, learn the process, develop contacts and design documents of your own. Companies are often quicker to listen to ideas from within (and its easier to get a face-to-face discussion with someone who can sign-off on the idea).
If you don't have "applicable skills", then you may need to tread the well-worn path of option #2. Make the game yourself. Take that design document and find artists and programmers who think it is as worthwhile as you do. Get them to buy-in. Bringing a product to market from concept stage to actual publication is a big deal, it takes a *lot* of work (especially with no money) and if you can pull it off (even if it never makes much money) you have just gone a long way towards establishing your credibility as a game designer.
There *are* people out there in the industry who are predominantly "idea guys", but they are usually proven quantities. They have a string of games under their belt and they know what has to happen to bring one of these ideas to final form. Unless you are talking about some of the old-skool ladies and gentlemen, who started their careers back when COBOL was still a viable programming language, they probably didn't start out as Game Designers. They started somewhere else and worked their way up or in.
On content-driven games, people dedicated to level design and scripting are also commonplace.
It's a really, really good thing for the designer to be able to wear as many hats as possible, even if they aren't practicing the role, as that will let them "see through the ideas" of the rest of the team and anticipate concerns.
I wish anyone with any access to students wanting to get into game development would carefully and lovingly brand across their foreheads the phrase NO ONE WANTS TO BUY MY IDEAS. Backwards, so they can read it in the mirror every morning. Game development is about execution. If a person provides ideas (in any form -- blogs, documents, internet forum commentary) that aren't backed up by ANY execution in their career, the alarm bells should be ringing. Call me a cynic.
James (lovely surname by the way), I think I want to add "walking encyclopedia" to my business card now.
That's awlays one of they key questions, isn't it? The "How do I keep them from stealing my idea?" one. It's out there in every artistic form, whether it be game design, writing, you even run across it in fine art. Every time I discuss a concept I've presented, I get that back from someone I know "How do you know they won't *steal* it?"
Of course, that's what NDAs are for, but in my experience there are *so many* good ideas out there that the "Dark and Mysterious THEY" don't really *need* to steal them (nor would they have the time to cherry pick only the best even if they were so inclined).