How to Get New Ideas

Thinking up new ideas is always important at any time of designing a game. When I was young, there were always many things in real life that I couldn’t understand. However, as I grow up, I feel the truth is that I didn’ t understand myself. Creating virtual worlds is a process of knowing ourselves as the guests and applying them in a proper way in your games. I believe that unique ideas come from people’s raw feelings and unprocessed inspiration in real life. Except for common ways like reading/watching as much as we can or researching on your topic, here I am going to share my methods to fill myself with personalized new ideas.

Pull yourself out of current scene or have a short trip to somewhere else. When I was in college, I used to commute between the city I studied in and my hometown three months a time. The trip was short so I didn’ t fall asleep and couldn’ t do anything deeply. So I would like to pick a random topic about what I was focusing on at that period of time, and thought about it. To my surprise, I could always come up with new thoughts which were strikingly different from my original thoughts because of the rapid change in distance. It’s like doing experiments on your topic by putting it into different environment and taking a trip physically can always be effective. You were restricted in a cage and now you are free. On the train, you are not bothered by outer factors and are ready for meeting strangers but don’t really need to care much. So when you run out of your ideas about a specific topic, try to put your objects in another time or space, pull yourself to another perspective, redefine the relationship between various objects, and something new will come along.

List whatever weird about yourself. Everyone is unique. I personally can easily write down a long list of strange things about my habits or settings, which can be aspects we consider when designing a new character or start a story. They don’t necessarily to be too wild or unusual. By putting them together or modifying to an extreme will make them more dramatic and fun to play with. They are nothing about right or wrong, so don’t be afraid of talking about them. Here is a list of examples of myself:

1.       Good at using chopsticks, can use with both hands.

2.      Can tear up in one minute.

3.       Fall over on flat ground very easily no matter how focused when walking without heels.

4.      Can remember a number/letter sequence up to 50 digits.

5.       Forget lyrics almost every time when step on the stage, which used to kill the drum of a band.

6.      Can put on makeup on a jolt bus.

7.       Have beautiful handwriting. Copy others homework and convinced herself to be the original author by handwriting without words in high school.

8.      Forget what just happened in the last minute.

9.      The last to wake up, the first to arrive at classroom.

10.   Like gambling, seldom win.

Do some slow physical exercise while thinking. Having a good idea means saving lots of work and solving the problem in a smart way. The key to this method is to follow the flow and slow down the cadence of your whole body including your brain. I found this super helpful when I was also in college. It was an extremely stressful time when I was working on a wide variety of activities, promo-videos and assignments. But I kept the habit of go swimming twice a week. It was a precious chance to relax and not to think about anything stressful – at least it was my plan not to think, but it turned out that I couldn’t keep my brain empty and simply focus on doing exercise. So I compromised and started dissect the problems I was encountering in a very slow pace. To my surprise, I was able to notice the inner reason of the crux or come up with solution by slowing down to the pace of exercise I was doing.

Try new routines of your daily curriculums. I used to walk to school every day, and it was within 20 minutes’ walk. It sounds like what I listed above, taking exercise. But here what I want to address is that always find new paths to reach your destination or even simply pay attention to the other side of scenery or go through the same road from the opposite direction. Sometimes I would set out 10 minutes ahead of time to leave some time for exploring new path although I’m going to exactly the same place every day. It helps people improve the intelligence level according to research. To my own experience, this helps me discover new ways to a specific place, learn the construction of the city, and gain the sense of space. I used to be terrible with directions. But after travelling through some squares, subways or other landscapes for a few times, I feel much easier to remember directions and project the positions from the map. As an environment artist and level designer, I feel it very helpful to practice understanding and visualizing the structure of the environment in real world.

Get ready to take notes on your thoughts at any time. Defen Zhang, a famous Taiwanese writer and creator wrote in her books, ‘can’t bear not writing down my fleeting ideas, use whatever I can grab, even a lipstick or eyeliner…’ I agree with this, and I think having a pen and notebook with us all the time is very useful, taking pictures or recording voice can be good choices too.

Connect anything to your game. After doing a bunch of design, I feel sometimes it’s possible to pick random objects and create a game for it. It doesn’t mean that comparing between all the options is useless. But to some degree it is true. Creation is sometimes about combining unrelated things in incredible ways. Pushing yourself with a certain subject is more effective and can be good exercise for your brain.

Apply a mechanism in industrial design to your gameplay. In Chinese there is a saying ‘Da Dao Xiang Tong’, which is from Lao Tsu’s theory, Tao Te Ching. In my opinion, it basically describes the situation that the world has a shared rule set and everything in a substance world obeys these rules. Game mechanisms are always about verbs. By learning how a machine or a system works, we can always understand the ways to control different shapes and some tricks in design.

Link your design with your special experience. Game is about having whatever can be useful for players to capture an experience and make them a whole. Everyone has his own stories. Any specific experience or feeling you want to share with others can be revived through a game.  Have you ever taken an unforgettable journey which is as fascinating as a dream? Have you ever be betrayed by your friends owing to a misunderstanding? Have you ever had the feeling of growing up after a night? Have you had a secret that you never wanted to tell anyone else because of any concern? … I’m sure there is something in your life that only belongs to yourself; it’s hard to look through others eyes. What you can do is to dig into the feelings, why you feel that way, what you want to do, what you wish to happen, what you can/can’t do in that specific situation, and turn them into ideas, which can be an indie game about transformation or an adventure game about a wonderland.

After talking about many ways to get new ideas, you might think I feel it very easy to come up with new concept. But the truth is, whatever we do is not fully inventing something from zero, they are raised by someone else in the past. In the Game Developers Conference 2014, there was an indie talk that each indie developer had around five minutes to express their indie thoughts. One of the speakers, a female developer started her talk with “Don’t worry. Whatever we are doing has been done by different people for many times in different ways…” But what we are doing still worth to be done. I can’t agree more, I believe that the countless ways to organize and present an element make each work different. As what Garfield said, the thing worthy of being done worth to do again and again. What we should do is to get new ideas and dig out unique inspiration from our distinguished life and turn them into games that have something worth sharing.