Idea Guy: The Myths and Realities of Game Inception

Ages ago, my industry friends and I had a running joke about young designers who viewed themselves as the “idea guy.” 

The framing stems from an uninformed view of how games are made – the concept that there’s a lonely genius on a team somewhere, possibly with a fancy title like Creative Director, who comes up with a game’s original idea, which everyone else perfectly executes.

Novice game designers used to join the industry with that type of lofty role as their aspiration. They didn’t want to do the hard and often tedious work of shipping a game, but they sure as heck wanted to sit around coming up with cool ideas.

Fortunately, the industry has matured. Today’s younger developers have a much more practical view of the industry. They realize that games, especially big-budget games, are team efforts and that cool ideas are a dime a dozen. 

Sometimes there’s a vision holder who drives a title’s shape and design from the top, but even the most dominant, crystal-clear initial concept requires iteration and refining once the realities of a game’s features, art, and content begin to be implemented.

So if an “idea guy” isn’t always responsible for a game’s inception, how do games actually get started? How do initial concepts get off the ground, turn into projects in production, and finally ship and reach an audience?

I know this is a cop-out, but there’s no single answer.

The Pitching Treadmill

I’ve participated in a lot of project pitch processes over the years, both internally for studio teams and externally for potential partners and publishers. Things have changed over the decades I’ve been a developer, but there have been a few consistent themes.

First of all, publishers and game designers care about different things. Publisher tastes and whims shift quickly with the market. One year, aggressively monetized “season passes” will be on their minds; six months later, “something to do with blockchain” might be the hook of the moment. 

Your game idea might have the most interesting mechanics of any game ever, but a publisher won’t care unless you can frame the mechanics in a way that matches what they’re looking for.

Secondly, developers often struggle to express their vision clearly to publishing executives who haven’t been part of day-to-day development. It’s easy to take “known” aspects for granted and assume everyone understands them.

When you pitch a game to a publisher, you’ve got to quickly and succinctly explain your unique selling points – the reasons your game will have an audience.

Pure “idea guys” often flounder at the pitch stage. They’ve thought a lot about what makes them excited about the game, but they haven’t spent any time figuring out what will make a publisher excited.

How Games are Born

In most cases, long before a team even gets to the point that a game is being shopped to publishers, a team’s got to build a prototype. Surely at the early stages, a focused and clear idea drives the process, right?

Not always. Sometimes games are happy accidents.

In my own career, thinking about a few of the games I’ve worked on in a lead capacity, they all stumbled toward full production on a different path.

For Blade Runner, which I joined sometime after development had already started, Westwood began with several key ingredients. They had a beloved intellectual property license. There was some nifty tech to render complex, visually stunning scenes. 

There was an experienced core adventure game team that had delivered solid, great titles in the Kyrandia games. And there was a linear game script that, while it needed significant expansion, told a compelling story. These elements were all critical to the game’s eventual success.

Liquid’s Battle Realms was an odd duck. The core setting and the story concepts were a long-standing passion of the studio’s CEO, but the mechanics and the details were thin in the initial concepts. The first month or so of development required a lot from the team, collectively digging in and fleshing out the bones of the idea, developing an art style, and building core tech.

It’s the only project I can remember where we started on Day One by building a complete and traditional design document, a requirement of the first publisher milestone. The document was a giant monstrosity that went into far more detail on everything from mechanics to story than was wise. 

In retrospect, we should have left more space in the design for iteration and experimentation, but we allowed the first publishing milestone to drive the process instead. The game turned out well, but it’s not a process I’d like to repeat today.

The first Orcs Must Die! – which I view as a highly successful design, spawning the franchise that Robot has become most known for – was the most accidental of all. Another prototype at the studio had recently been canceled, and a small team was spun up to see what other games could be made out of the existing assets, tech, and random leftover bits and bobs. 

We internally pitched several ideas to the rest of the studio before settling on the core concept: third-person tower defense, paired with an excessively goofy, playful setting. For the prototype, we were able to get a test level up and running quickly which proved to be fun even in a very early form. I’m convinced that the best way for a team to understand their own game is to play a version of it as quickly as possible.

Indie Ideas

Let’s collectively bow our heads and mourn the career death of the poor “idea guy” (and being more mindful of gender-neutral language in the modern world, we should really call them the “idea people.”)  Whither shall such poor souls go these days, to express their genius?

Solo indie games – with all the associated risk, pain, and poverty-inducing outcomes – are about the only place. And solo devs will quickly find they can’t just be the idea person – in fact, being the idea person is a tiny fraction of a solo dev’s job.

Pick up a game engine, learn to write a little code, and do it yourself. If you can’t implement what you imagined, pull in good folks and do the hard collaborative work to build a small team that shares your vision – or at least, shares enough of it to help make it better than you ever could have on your own. 

Most importantly, be open to LETTING the rest of the team make it better, even if the result is not precisely what you first saw in your head. Don’t be so in love with your initial idea that you can’t iterate and adapt.

As I wrote about recently, I’m fumbling along on my indie project (while doing other work to keep a roof over my head, because I’m no fool). I have a definite vision for the core of it, but I purposely left space to experiment and iterate.

I’ve seen enough game development cycles now to know that even for the focused genre of game I’m making – a mechanically light, authored narrative experience – it won’t end up exactly like the original idea.

And that’s okay because it’ll be better.

The Scree Games blog is posted regularly on Tuesdays, with a repost on Medium on Wednesdays.