I have a lot of problems with making game ideas.I tried every tecnique I could possibly find but even if I find some great ideas I don't see any value in them then I throw it away.
What recommendations do you have?
A very good advice is just placing much less importance and effort into ideas, as "a good idea" is most often worthless - as far as gamedev is concerned. This is slowly but surely becoming a cliche sentence at this point but: Execution is everything. You can have the greatest idea of all time but unless it's executed well, it will fall apart.
However, a mundane, generic or "boring" idea can end up being brilliant if the execution is just right. Remember that Mario is a plumber that's trying to save a princess from being kidnapped by a turtle.
That's a good point: execution is essential but- using your example of Super Mario Bros- the amount of creativity and original ideas in that game was incredible. Especially for 1985 or whenever.
On the other hand, there are examples of games that use another game's concept and just make it better. Doom with Wolfenstein springs to mind. So, if someone's struggling with ideas then building on existing ones might be a good approach. Or maybe combine ideas to create something original- Fortnite is more or less PUBG mixed with Minecraft and Overwatch-style graphics.
I wholeheartedly agree. Improving upon an already existing idea is a very good approach, and as you mentioned, combining them could end up even better.
I think there's this stigma that if you take someone's idea and try to improve it, you're ripping them off - but that's just a bad way to think about it. Nothing is perfect and anything can be refined and improved on. The whole "who got the idea first" thing is just a waste of time. Genres start out with an idea, so if you're making a platformer game, you're now ripping Donkey Kong off (or whatever was the first platformer.) Which of course is a silly way to think about it. But I digress.
One of the most important games ever made, which is Vampire: The Masquerade, was simply based upon the rule of inversion: what if this time, we make a game not about guys hunting monsters, but about being these monsters instead? Take some universal concept, like symmetry and try to apply it to various themes. Modern physics is full of such concepts, read some popular science on cosmology.
Eventually, though, it all boils down to what will you make with it. Gaming genres are pretty much defined, do not waste your energy trying to revolutionize the way to play the game, unless you are going for some new tech, like VR.
Digital gaming is an interactive audio-visual medium, which means, it must involve three impressive enough components: it must make enough sense with being interactive, it must have impressive soundscape and soundtrack, as well as it must feature impressive visual art, not to be mistaken with impressively advanced graphics, though, which is another story.
I would say all digital games further divide between two categories: they are either adventures or puzzles. Adventures need to tell a story. Puzzles, do not tell a story. Adventures can be more linear and naive in a way of structure, puzzles need to be sophisticated in turn.
Good thread! I'm the opposite of this and find I actually have too many ideas, and that it's a case of deciding which things to rule out and the real difficulty is staying focused on one project.
I'm the creative one on a two-man game team, which I think is a good dynamic: I write, design, come up with ideas, sort out the graphics & audio, while my partner handles the coding, problem solving and technical details.
If you can code and are technically minded, I'd recommend finding a talented and reliable creative partner. I find that- unless you're a Leonardo Da Vinci style genius- very, very few people excel at being both creative and technical.
I saw something recently on twitter which I can't find right now, but as I recall the person said they've learned to immediately look for weaknesses in every idea so that they think it through and discard them in a timely fashion if necessary so they can move on to other ideas without wasting time.
Personally, I have a stack of ideas that I've never gotten around to or followed through on, and non-programmers are always trying to tell me their ideas (for a revenue share!), but I only get traction when I think of something simply-scoped I want to try, often just to learn a tool or how to implement a particular thing, and then when it starts to turn into something that I like or other people like then it gets some momentum.
I'd recommend consuming a variety of different genres of video games. Getting as much creative input as possible gives you a solid basis for developing your own ideas. Nowadays, people are able to build awesome Jump'n Runs only because the game mechanics have already been established by Super Mario Bros.
Another great habit is writing down all of your weird ideas, even the weirdest ones, and just let those ideas rest for a while. After having gathered many of them, you might see connections between them that allow for unique gameplay.