GET GAME IDEAS - The Ultimate Guide!

how to come up with awesome game ideas in huge quantities let's go hey this is Jonas and in my opinion making a successful indie game starts with the correct game idea so we'll start out by talking about what is a good game idea we need to know what we want to generate before we can generate it and after that I'll share with you my three-step process or generating awesome game ideas what is your definition of a good game idea well here's mine first of all a good game idea is something you're excited to work on a good game ID or something with a reasonable scope you know you can execute there's a target audience for your game idea with a somewhat decent size and finally a good game and you're also excites others who hear about it especially those in your target audience now it's relatively easy to come up with a game idea that you yourself are excited about is it also possible to come up with a game idea that having people are excited about and I think yes you can if you want to have a game idea that's also exciting for others not just for you then I think your game idea needs to be easy to communicate if it takes half an hour to understand your game idea then it's

gonna be very hard to get people excited about it this is beat pirates and I think we had pretty much that exact issue here it's a cool game but it just takes too long to explain why it's cool and how it works then next up you should have a good amount of familiarity in your game idea it should be about something people already know and like so you can leverage those positive feelings but then also be careful because too much familiarity will kill the curiosity of your potential players what you want to do is find the correct middle ground between familiar and original four overs Nova ended up way too much on the original side of things for example and I mean yes some people appreciate that sort of originality but I feel like for the huge majority that doesn't create any appeal at all what does create a lot of appeal for your game idea is an appealing fantasy so basically is this something the player would like to do in real life would you like to manage a couple of slimy aliens in space for example no probably not but would you like to be Center and would you like to have a super-powerful slogan on paper that definitely sounds a lot better obviously people have different preferences but

anyway some fantasies are just not as appealing as others the last thing that plays a big role in my opinion is evoking emotion the best example I can come up with at the moment is fellow phobia by Tim Russ which they are pretty strong emotions right into the game idea it's a game where laughs is literally hell so just to recap these points right here are what makes your game exciting and appealing to others but you also need to check all of these boxes right here so by now you should be able to tell that this is not easy coming up with a game ideas already more than hard enough coming up with a good idea that checks all of those boxes even harder I'm gonna share with you my three step process for coming up with great game Anders I think it works pretty reliably at the very least for me hope it works for you as well so my step number one is start with something familiar that can either be a popular game that already exists genre maybe even a real life scenario setting whatever you want just something people know and something people are familiar with cause first of all that helps you to move from a wide sheet of paper to something and secondly it also helps you

to get that familiarity in there right away if you actually want to get something out of this grab a pen a sheet of paper and at the end of the video you will have a couple of cool game ideas to choose from why is it important to come up with multiple new game ideas that's because then we can compare them with the factors we just discussed we're at a stage where producing quantity is still pretty easy so let's do that let's produce a bunch of game ideas and then just pick the best one at the end here I have a couple of examples for you how this could look like really just start with something people know for example a tower defense game or a game about cooking people know what cooking is also pick topics you are excited about for example is arriving on an island or a zombie apocalypse that's the two points we're trying to check off here something people are familiar with and something you actually enjoy and want to work on for a story based game you could start with something like a typical love story or starting with a cool fantasy like building a water park is also a good idea okay number two turn your game idea into something new and original there are a bunch of ways you can do that one of the most popular ones is to add a new

car mechanic so for example we could just take the basic platformer and allow the player to drill through walls or we could make a tower defense game or turrets get stronger when they're idle the question you might have knows how do you even come up with a good core mechanic I think a good way to go about it is to think about all of the problems the player has to overcome in your game for example in a platformer you need to get from A to B you need to navigate you need to collect stuff you need to go upwards so which possible solutions could there be to those problems or to some of those problems in case you find that difficult maybe even come up with a couple of new problems the player has to overcome enemies or roadblocks for example we could also remove a mechanic for example we could remove the jump from our platformers or drilling through walls is the only way to propel you upwards or we could also try to make a match 3 game where you're not allowed to swap the position of objects you could try to combine multiple genres or mechanics I kind of feel like combining our survival game with turn-based strategies or let's do that you can change or specify the setup so oftentimes you can make your

game ideas way more interesting simply by being more specific for our turn-based strategies a rival game we could specify the time and the location for example 600 years in the future on a garbage island with a lot of cool electronic junk you can use to build your shelter how about we try to build a water park in ancient Rome so you can either specify the when and where but you could also specify the watch let's prepare the molecular cuisine in our cooking game for example let's have a freaking zombie apocalypse in Stone Age and knights and Dragons and a cool fantasy universe on flying Islands and finally break the norms so basically just look at the things that you'd usually expect in a game like this and mess with it how about we make a tower defense game where you add the attacker and use enter waves for once I'm also sure you wouldn't expect a cooking game to be a first-person shooter where you have to fire with ingredients let's make our Somme is actually smart and civilized in our fantasy game you will be the dragon and in our match 3 game you'll have a little character that can push the objects around and maybe what

you wouldn't expect in a typical life story is that the main character's allergic to light step number 3 is simply to flash your game while you're out there are a couple of questions you need to answer for your game idea what are the obstacles the player has to overcome what is the victory condition what is the losing condition of the game what is the core mechanic / the core decision so while are you doing basically what is the main thing you do in the game and what else can the player do for some game ideas like our tower defense game answering these questions should be pretty straightforward other game ideas like our life story might need a little more love we need to figure out if this is a point-and-click adventure or our dating sim for example one thing you should also definitely do in this stage is find your USP your unique sell point so what is the one thing that differentiates your game from all of the other games out there in case there are multiple things that make your game unique I'd focus on whatever delivers the best player fantasy next up you want to simplify your game idea as much as possible you know what your USP is your unique selling point you know what the core fantasy of your

game is what makes your game cool so now just cut everything that's not necessary for that did you imagine this dragon fantasy game as a 3d online multiplayer action game then maybe you should reimagine it as a 2d pixel art single-player game cause that's a bit more realistic isn't it next up I want you to create a one-sentence pitch for all of your game ideas just what is your game all about and what makes it special if your game ideas 30 paragraphs long then it's too much you prepare more lecture like astronomy dishes with your food gun that's how one of the pictures could look like for example keep it simple because this is a test of how easy it is to communicate your game idea and I also recommend starting your pitch with word you because that makes it easier for the listener to imagine how it feels like to play your game so you want to be very open-minded sometimes it's very good to let your ideas rest for a while because when you just came up with them you're oftentimes very emotionally invested into them you're very excited about them so just let them rest for a little bit and then maybe in two or three weeks from now you'll be a lot better at

judging how good they actually are also that one sentence pitch that you came up with share that with your friends tell it to people and see how they react maybe don't even tell them that it's your game just tell them hey I found out about a game that buhbuh buhbuh buhbuh buhbuh tell them your pitch and see how they react how excited exactly do they get when a when they hear about it unfortunately you're still not finished your game idea needs to keep evolving during development and you can still turn a bad game idea into a good game you can still turn a good eye game idea into a bad game so I highly recommend you watch the next video which will help you to further develop your game idea do them