Joyan Jongeling's Profile

they become something better. Shaolin Soccer was a movie about a mix
between soccer and kung fu, and it became a huge hit in Asia. If you're making a
first-person shooter, you could be thinking about new types of enemies when you
read about drones the army is deploying in Irak. Your mind makes a connection
between the two and suddenly you think "Let's have drones as enemies! The player
could even take control of one at some point!"

A big part of getting ideas is to have lots of individual concepts to link
together. A lot of those concepts are the same for everybody. The life of people
living in the same country are very similar: they watch the same movies, hear
the same news on TVs, wear similar clothes, etc. That's what makes popular
culture and it's a good thing, but it means most people have similar ideas. If
you're thinking about the same things as your neighbour, chances are you'll come
up with the same ideas he does.

Game designers are mostly geeks, so they share a lot of sources of
inspiration: they like Star Wars, they read super-hero comics, they play Grand
Theft Auto. It's fine if you do those things, but you need to go beyond this to
find original inspiration that will give you original ideas. Go watch foreign
movies, subscribe to the National Geographic magazine, read books on
architecture, start listening to Jazz -- just try to find interesting stuff
outside of your comfort zone, outside mainstream culture.

Have you noticed how the most creative people are always a bit weird? The
obvious example is rock stars, but even Einstein was eccentric. These people are
naturally attracted to original concepts and things, which feed their
creativity.

Keep a Notebook with You

The problem with ideas is you can't control them. You can't decide when or
where you'll think of something great. If you do as I said above and get lots of
varied sources of inspiration, you'll get more ideas but you necessarilly get
them at a convenient time.

Ideas are easy to forget, so carry a small notebook everywhere you go. That
way you can take notes of everything you think of. Don't worry about the quality
of your ideas -- most will be crap, but take it in notes anyway, it may inspire
you later on when you reread it.

Of course even with a notebook, ideas may come at inconvenient times. I was
watching Super-man at the movie theater the other day when a scene gave me an
idea for a game. I scribbled the idea in my notebook as best as I could in the
dark, trying to still listen to the story. The page is really hard to read, but
at least the idea wasn't lost.

Take Time Off

You can't force ideas to come. If you've spent all morning staring at a white
page and you can't think of anything, go take a break. Go eat lunch at a
restaurant, take a long walk, take a nap, go play a game -- whatever you need to
get your mind off your problem.

The process of getting ideas is mostly the work of the subconscious mind.
Forcing it just doesn't work -- taking a break actually works better.

That's not to say you shouldn't work at getting ideas -- you should, because
you can find a lot of ideas that way. But if you get stuck, taking a step back
can help you. That way you'll see the big picture more easilly and the answer
you were looking for will come up.

Quantity, not Quality

A big mental block when trying to get ideas is to limit yourself only to good
ideas. You filter your ideas before you fully understand them. We all prefer to
work for quality rather than quantity, right?

Sadly, that doesn't work for ideas. Bad ideas often lead to good ideas later
on, or may turn out to be good after all. If you think of a bad idea, write it
down: maybe you'll look at it later on and realize that there's a part of it
that's good after all. Of course, maybe it's a completely bad idea, but who
cares? Writing the bad idea down is better than missing the good idea that
seemed bad at first.

Of all ideas, maybe 90% are bad, 10% are reasonably good and 1% are great.
It's a lot easier to get more ideas than to increase the ratio of good ideas.
Don't try to come up with a single great idea; come up with 100 ideas and keep
the best one. Chances are, it's going to be a lot better.

To be continued...