From Concept to Reality

Week summary January 30, 2009

The goal for this week was to reach my 100 ideas/concepts which I did yesterday. I used a total of seven techniques during the week to reach my result and they were;

• Open minded
• Lists
• Randomize
• Stream of Consciousness
• Idea cards
• Darkness
• Game mix up

The technique I liked the least was the List technique because you got a very focused result depending on what words you using as topics on the lists. I felt it being a technique that would work better if you knew what you were looking for, e.g. scenarios for real time strategy games, then this technique would be great. But when you are looking for new concepts it doesn’t feel like the best one.

The techique I probably would prefer to use the next time I am in need of a lot of game ideas is the idea cards. It spawned a lot of ideas for me on a short amount of time. It takes some time to prepare but you can prepare words wherever you are, if you’re out walking you can record short messages on words that could be to good use, if your watching television you can write down notes on stuff you see. Play a game and you might find something you think is smart or just like a cool thing. Then you write them all down on a piece of paper and cut it into pieces with one word on each piece. Mix them up and draw a couple of them, one idea already. Draw another one and you have two new ideas.

The rest of the techniques worked really good to, some more extreme then others maybe but sometimes you have to use extreme methods to get somewhere. The randomizeing technique is really random, sometimes you get a couple of good words, sometimes you get less fortunate words but I used all the words I collected and a bit imagination really helps on this project.

In Stream of Consciousness you really have to open your mind, taking in everything you see and think. I wrote down totally diferent stuff with the technique, I first thought of some countries in Asia like China and India, then I floated over on budism and hinduism and further along the path we find statues and temples and even monks and then all of a sudden I think of a polecat(iller in swedish), and then we have a whole bunch of animals on the list. It is really about letting your mind go away on its own typing what you think and feel.

Yesterday I used two techniques I hadn’t planed to use, the darkness and games mixup. The darkness method don’t have to be in the darkness, it should probably be called the try new things method or exposure method since that it what it’s all about. Do something you don’t usually do, I sat in the darkness on my toilet since I was to lazy going out of the appartment and lucky me, it worked. The Games mix up method is probably not the best method since you only use stuff that have been in other games pretty much but you can twist and turn their stuff and use it in your own way.

But the absolute easiest method to use is the open minded technique, it’s all about using your head on your way to school or to town, see opportunities in the environment around you.

So the end result from all the different techiques is:

• List – 10 concepts
• Idea cards – 25 concepts
• Randomize – 26 concepts
• Stream of Consciousness – 13 concepts
• Darkness – 10 concepts
• games mix up – 3 concepts
• open minded – 13 concepts

There is one technique I didn’t use even thou I put it on my list last week and that is the Shout it out technique but I prefer going over stuff in my head then talking to myself which resulted in that I didn’t use that one.

Anything I would do different next time I am on a concept spree? Probably do more each day, I could have done a lot more some days but when the words or idea cards where all used, I stopped. If I would have created more idea cards I would have gotten more ideas for sure.

But it was an interesting week and I’m surprised I could get that many ideas out of me, but I guess if you put your mind to it there won’t be any problems.

The future looks like this, I will try to have sorted out my 20 best ideas by Monday and I will also keep working on my Project plan which I thought would only be a time plan, talk about shock when I saw it all. But I hope on having most if that done to Tuesday so I can ask questions on the things I don’t understand on the meeting then and then finish it up to next Friday. Next week I will also dig deeper into my 20 ideas and build them up with some more information.

That’s all for this post, thanks for reading if you made it this far.

With the darkness around me January 29, 2009

I now got my 100 ideas, I solved my earlier problem by going into a dark room and just sit there for a while, writing whatever crossed my mind. That resulted in 10 new ideas just by sitting in the darkness doing nothing. Then when I came out I sat down at the computer and wrote them down in my document and later I started too use the method where I tried to mix different games before.

That technique works on the following way; write down a lot of games and their unique sellingpoint or the thing that you think is good and like about them. Then -and this is the new part which made it easier for me -you write what you play for type of character. For me on my games I wrote e.g. orphanage boy on the Darkness, Man/Robot on Halo and boy on a mission on Shadow of the Colossus. With these words you then pick a character and pick different stuff from the other words you just wrote down about there u.s. or the things you like with them. This way I was able to come up with the last three concepts for my project.

Now the hard parts come when I shall throw 80 of the concepts away and focus my attention on 20 but well, I can still use the rest of the ideas later on in my carrer. In an hour and 20 minutes we will have our second Skype meeting but I probably won’t report anything from it since all who reads these posts are probably there too.

Idea cards January 28, 2009

I did do my homework for last evening and came up with a couple of words to use for todays work. I came up with 75 words yesterday, cutted them up into smaller cards early in the morning and since 10 this morning I’ve been taken three idea cards and used the words on the cards to come up with any idea that may spring up into my head. Two hours later I had 25 new ideas, so I’m up at a total of 87 now and I only have 13 left now. I’m soon done with this part of the project and will then continue on with the next step.

Idea cards in my hat

The words I used came from different sources, some came from the book Game Design Workshop by T. Fullerton, C.Swain and S. Hoffman. Others came from the gaming magazines Level 33 and 34, I picked words from texts, pictures and so on. I also used some of the words Isak put in a comment on an earlier post. Thanks for those Isak!

How does the idea card technique work if I should get a bit more formal. You take a piece of paper and write down a lot of words, then you cut them into cards with one word on each which you put into a bowl. Then you draw cards without peeking on them and you could draw two or three cards, even four if you would prefer that. With the cards you should make up a game idea and I usually goes for the first that springs in my mind. If I don’t I usually get stuck and can’t come up with anything else. I put the cards that I used in another bowl after I’ve used them so I don’t get the same word twice.

The technique works fairly well I think, I got 25 ideas without any problems and in a quite short time. The words reflects what games you will get but if you have a lot of words with a bit of variation it won’t be a problem. You can get very intresting word combinations with this techique, I got e.g. firefly, fly and fish for one idea and smile, ant, secret societe on another. But I came up with ideas to those words too, you just have to use your imagination. For the 13 last ideas I have to come up with a new technique but I’ll see what I can find. I might go with the one that Andreas used the other day with movies and pausing but we’ll see.

The rest of the day I will spend working on my timeplan I think.

Thank you for reading

Randomize technique January 26, 2009

I have spent my day using the Randomization techique and then wrote down the ideas to the words that I picked. I have two word combinations left to write but else than that, I have 26 new game concepts which is pretty nice. I am up at a total of 49 and pretty much half way.

I used the techique on four different sources; Game manuals, Discworld and Lord of the Ring books and the swedish gaming magazine Level. It ended up with eleven ideas from Game manuals, six from Discworld, five from LotR and four from Level.

I thought it was an easy method to use and the results where good. With the manuals,I took a random from 17 different manuals,  browsed through it and stoped at a random page, then just pointed at a word. The problem is that many words can be useless words like; he, over, said and very common words. But I pointed at a word and if it was a simple word I watched the vicinity of the word and usually found a good word. Many game manuals are in four or five different languages too but if I ended up on the finnish section I checked what word I pointed at in the swedish section and still used it or pointed at one on that page.

I used five discworld books, five LotR books and only two Level’s since those were the only ones up at my appartment and then as I mentioned recently, 17 game manuals from three different systems over a wide range of genres.

I took out two words for each idea and I used different sources for both words. After I’ve collected a bunch I returned to my computer and started to develope the ideas in a OneNote book. I tried to use both words in the idea but at some points; only one word was used.

Another nice thing with this techique is that you will get an wide arrange of ideas, spread over a lot of genres, themes and such if you like that, I know I got that atleast.

A nice or funny thing is that I can see many ideas infront of, visualized, which is nice when your trying to describe them. I also learing how to name games now, since I’m giving all my ideas names that reflects the gameplay.

Thats it, I got one of the two that where missing in the beginning of this blog so only one left now for today. But I think
I will go and play some games now, going to download the Resident Evil 5 demo and try that out but I’ll report in tomorrow again with another techinque report. Still have no plans on which one to use but we’ll see tomorrow.

Playstation 3/2 manuals to the left, Wii manuals on the top, Xbox 360 manuals down and to the right

Randomize intro January 26, 2009

New week and more game concepts to come up with. Today I will try out the Randomize technique which starts with you taking a dictonary, paper, magazine or anything with text in it, then you pick a random side and a random word on that side. You could close your eyes and point anywhere on the page and you then use that word, then write something out of  that word.

It could probably be done with two words, which would be picked from two different sources so that the mix would be greater, if I would only pick one word and work with that it feels that I could have come up with it myself so I am probably gonna use more than 1 word.

My plan is to use all my game manuals and also the backsides of the game covers, there is a lot of game related texts in them and I’m sure to end up with something useful. I’m probably going to try using a couple of game magazines as well to try different sources. I could try using my Discworld novels too. I’ll report in later on what I’ve used and what it all resulted in. My plan is to reach around 40 ideas today, as a total amount of ideas that is, not 40 new ones but that would be great too.

Have a nice day everybody!

List creation and an unmentioned technique January 24, 2009

So I tried the List creation techinque yesterday and ended up with 10 new ideas for my project. I simply chose a topic and wrote down everything I could come up with in that specific topic under a couple of minutes and then I changed topic and made the same again. It ended up with four different lists; bad things, war reasons, snow and fruits.

After I filled them all out I looked at them and formed game ideas from the different words in the lists. Many wacky ideas came out but I let them pass and if they don’t work later on I dismiss them then but I need as many ideas as possible so everything works at the moment.

I think this techique would work better if you know what you want to do for type of game, like if you want to do a new type of sports game, you can list all different sports, then all different types of balls or the things you use to play with and then just mix them up all togheter.

I also tried another idea techique yesterday, one that I havn’t mentioned yet but that works great and that is the one where you use your surroundings to come up with new ideas. I took a walk yesterday before lunch to pick up my new modem and if you think about game ideas, you’ll see a lot of them out there. I saw a tree and thought about a game where you play the tree and decides how it should grow, two girls cycled past me and ahh, what about a mountainbike game where you controll your balance with the sixaxis controller for the PS3.

So I’m up at 23 ideas at the moment, and I need 77 more ideas but they will come within time. One week have soon past and I still have like seven weeks to go so I don’t think I have to rush it but I’m gonna try to have the ideas ready for the end of next week, hopefully earlier.  But that will still beat my old plan which was to take 10 ideas each day which would, including holidays, would drag it out over two weeks.

About the ideas, I’ll post them when all of them are done unless I get a mentor who forbids me to do so due to legal reasons. But hopefully you will get to read them the upcoming week.

Thanks Isak for the words, the rest of you readers, feel free to come up with more words.

Smell you all later.

Conceptualization Techniques January 23, 2009

Morning people, I’ve just read half of chapter 6 in the book Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping and Playtesting  by Fullerton, Swain and Hoffman (ISBN: 1578202221) and it was about conceptualization. I’ve the book on my list of literature that I will use during this project and I read this chapter to find different ways on how to come up with ideas or concepts.

The techniques they’re recomending are:

• List Creation
• Idea Cards
• Shout it out
• Stram of consciousness
• Randomize it

So for this project I will try this techniques out and I will start today. I will also comment on how good they worked for me and what I think about them. So how does this techinques works?

In short; List Creation is about making lists on certain topics, one list for each topic.
With Idea Cards you write down a lot of different words on papers pieces and then put them in a bowl and then you draw 2 or more and create ideas on what the papers says.
Shout it out is what it sounds like, get a mic or voice recorder and just talk crazy, all that you can come up with.
Steam of Consciousness is like Shout it out but you write down anything that springs in your mind on a piece of paper or in a word document on the computer
In Randomize it you just pick a random word in a magazine or dictonary and work your way from there.

Sounds quite interesting I think and it will be fun trying them out.

So if people want to help out you can post words for the idea cards in the comments and I might use them depending on the seriousity of them.