How do you come up with/develop interesting and original game concepts?

Game Development Writing and Content
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TL;DR: The title above XD

For a bit more information though, I have been wanting to get into Choiscript and Interactive Fiction for a while. I have been training in coding for a few months now and I am confident enough in my skills where I technically feel ready to start and finish a serious project.

In practice however my main issue has been that I have not really found a story which I am super passionate about telling or which I think like needs to be told. Don’t misunderstand me, I have some ideas which I could work on, stories, worlds, ROs, etc. But I feel like none of them are particularly interesting or original. A lot of them feel very derivative of other WIPs which I am obsessed with and think about all day every day anyway.

The wellspring of creativity has truly been letting me down so seeing as this place is flooded with super talented people, I wanted to get more opinions/tips on how the great folk of this forum come up with their own concepts.

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Play video games, alot of them. Thats how i have so many ideas. Too many actually that i cant finish a narrative

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Well, half my life is playing WIPs already so I am halfway there? :sweat_smile:

I do think so that this is another thing I have been having trouble with. Like I will play a game, fall in love with some aspect of it, think of a story where I can play around with that element even more and then realize that “oops, I am just doing this thing that another author was doing only they are better than me”.

That might just be a me issue, but it does keep happening to me. :rofl:

I do hope you manage to finish a narrative eventually btw! Too many ideas can be just as tiring as no ideas.

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This is something I understand all too well. I have a few ideas that are way too advanced for me to approach (one I’m super excited about has nine ROs). While I know it’ll take a while to get to where I can write (and code) that monster, I focus on what I can do right now.

For me, that’s writing a short story with a clear goal for players to go after and a few different endings based on what they do (or don’t do). My current project, for instance, has no stats but dozens of booleans. Fairmath makes me highly uncomfortable.

So, for now, I’m willfully avoiding it. I’ll learn it eventually. Especially if I want to write the story with nine ROs that I have an entire folder dedicated to (I know the name of every person living in the town the game takes place in, locations, a few events, backstory, yada yada yada).

The best advice I’ve ever come across is this: write what you’d like to read/play

You could have the coolest concept, but if you don’t enjoy it, it’ll never get finished.

Think about stories you like to read. Games you love to play, movies you can rewatch more than twice, and scenarios you’d love to explore are rift with ideas you could develop.

Base a game around the things ensnaring your attention.

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For me: I read, watch, and play a lot of things, not just fiction but non-fiction as well. I visit art galleries and museums.

It’s worth engaging in other kinds of media for inspiration as a refresher. I have a ton of ideas percolating away (that I’m not working on at the moment) that were inspired by The Green Knight film, John Le Carré novels, a number of paintings and photographs, nature and travel documentaries, and more.

Not every idea will work well for a game, though, or for a game of this type. Broadly, a setting and PC and goals need to mesh together for me and then I can develop it into a plot where choices push it in different directions, and figure out mechanics.

You mentioned you have a lot of worlds and ROs in your head - it may be worth spending some time on goals and PC roles and choices, if that feels like a gap?

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I am really curious about that game with the 9 ROs. Sounds like it would be tons of fun to play and a hell to code. My admiration for when the time comes that you have to do that!

That is very good advice and I have been trying to follow it to some degree. But whenever I start developing one of those concepts, I just feel like I am retreading walked ground if that makes any sense?

Like things that I love to read/play have already been created. I have some concepts which are at least partly inspired by pieces of media that I love (the Infamous and Abyssal WIPs I have respective concepts that they inspired, same goes more faintly for the Wayhaven Chronicles and ASOIAF). But when I actually sit down to develop these ideas which are inspired by something else, I feel sort of dirty? Like I am stealing someone else’s thing or being creatively bankrupt.

To be fair, nearly every kind of story has been told so it is hard to be original. Maybe I should just ignore that first instinct and see wherever things take me from there.

@HarrisPS omg, the author of Creme De La Creme aknowledged me. Best moment of the week. (Just for the record, I am only joking, though I do love your games).

I have not been having too much of an issue in PC roles and choices and the like. Plotting stuff out has been more of a trouble in that regard. Sometimes I feel like I am failing to account for all the choices/character costumization that a player may want, but it is something I am trying to improve upon.

I see your point in maybe looking to other pieces of media for inspiration. I have never gotten an idea for a game from real life (museums, art, etc), but that is something I should most definitely look into.

I had an idea at some point of just picking a cool playlist and coming up with an idea based on it. Probably not feasible, but still! Close enough.

(just remembered I can respond to more than one person per post and that is probably for the best, hence the edit)

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I’d say ignore the first instinct. Every story has been told. If you’re inspired by what someone else wrote, make a note about why you love it so much. A book or game built on the love of another is, in my opinion, the highest form of praise.

As an example, my favorite game growing up was Harvest Moon 64. I adored the game. When Stardew Valley was released, I was over the moon. Stardew Valley was built by a man who was inspired by a game he adored growing up, and the project as him learning to code. The game he built is now one the greatest “cozy farming games” ever.

Are Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon 64 the same? No. Do they have a lot in common? Yeah, but in a way that builds on what came before. It was built out of love. That’s important.

That particular game is one I’m much in love with. A friend and I started developing the concept of it together. The gist of it is that the players find themselves locked into a town they can’t escape from that’s on the verge of being wiped out of existence. In order to survive (or escape), they have to build relationships with the townspeople (saving many of them in the process), unlock areas that were swallowed, and uncover the mystery behind why the town is the way it is.

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That is a fantastic concept. I definitely get why you are in love with it. I wish you all the best of luck in your undertaking of that task. I will most certainly enjoy playing it.

That is what I will do I think. It will likely be hard for me, but hey! What good thing in life is not hard?

I still have an issue of needing to settle on one of my like 4 concepts, but I will be able to do that with some soul searching I think.

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Thanks for your answer. It helps me a lot.

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There’s a quote by T.S. Eliot that goes “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.”

While you can interpret this whatever way you want, I think inspiration is a wonderful thing–readers love reading things that are similar to what they like. Obviously don’t plagiarize or lift someone’s plot and world, but if you were to take your own unique spin on what you love, I think you’ll be able to make it uniquely yours :slight_smile:

Otherwise, I’ve recently read a post by someone on reddit that suggested you take inspiration to build your world this way: Harry Potter, the Iliad, It

Instead of stories/worlds/genres closely related to each other like: Harry Potter, ASOIF, etc.

They said it better than me, but I can’t find that post :sob:

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T.S. Eliot is much wiser than I and so I shall not doubt him.

not super sure what you are saying here though :sob:

But I think I get the spirit of it all the same.

Plagiarism here I go! (for legal purposes, I will clarify that this is a joke)

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Lmao I’m awful at explaining stuff when I don’t remember half of what was said–but thank god I found the post! Idk if it’ll help you, but I thought it was pretty creatively inspiring if I were to craft a new story.

Every individual thing has been done before. The important thing to not being derivative is just not taking too much from any one source.

And the more disparate your sources are, the better. eg. borrowing from harry potter, narnia, lotr, and asoiaf: prob boring.

borrowing from harry potter, hamlet, the iliad, and the cold war: prob interesting and ‘original’.

Mixing story elements up in a unique way is what originality is so don’t think of it as being unoriginal. And even if you do come up with something you’ve never seen before some jerkass will come along and tell you about this weird japanese video game it’s vaguely similar to

Now go forth and plagiarize! (for legal purposes, I will clarify that this is a joke)

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Really helpful advice on how to come up with new ideas! I agree wholeheartedly that true originality lies in the unique blending of different elements. I thought the example with the combination of ‘Harry Potter, Hamlet, Iliad and Cold War’ was great – it really sounds like an awesome mix that could spawn something completely new!

Your joke about the Japanese game at the end is spot on. It’s always someone who says, “And this one looks like…” :smile:

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My personal advice is that original ideas always come from unoriginal sources. Identify the general setting of your story and then consume popular medias of that setting.

Medieval fantasy ? A cocktail of The Witcher, LOTR, WoW for world building and one session of DnD for story

Science fiction ? A marathon of Interstellar, Back to the Future and The Matrix

Horror ? One movie night with IT, Paranormal Activity and a copy of Call of Cthulhu

Consume all of that and then mix it up by reading about mythology, theological and historical texts and you will have something ( don’t forget to use Interest Check thread )

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As it’s been tirelessly mentioned, fantasy books, games and the likes are a great source of inspiration. It shows you things that work, it shows you structure, and it gives you ideas. I think it’s also important to understand not just that things work, but why they work. If you want to write a story, it’s good to understand not just that a thing is great, but why it’s great.

Going a bit beyond those, though, music works for me. Sometimes a line or multiple from a song give me a vibe, an atmosphere, or the seedling of an idea that I like. Sometimes it’s for a whole story, sometimes it’s for a single character.

–

With that said, there’s nothing new under the sun. Sometimes a setting isn’t very original, but the story that happens within is told in a compelling way. Sometimes the story itself has been structured a thousand times before, but it’s a new story that gives a sense of familiarity to a reader due to the structure. Hero’s Journey is a story structure that’s happened a hundred times and will happen a hundred times more, for example. The same for medieval fantasy (whether high or low magic).

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Honestly the best advice I can give is to try to write your ideas. Just open up your editor of choice and give it a shot. One of them should end up hooking you over the others and being easier to write, flowing out better, that’s your winner. I have a few dead WIP scraps that I attempted before I landed on my current project, because that was the one I was actually able to put proverbial pen to paper on without it becoming immediately halting.

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I access the akashic records

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I send $25 to a P.O Box in Poughkeepsie and they send me a six pack of ideas.

Sorry. Had to get the Ellison out of my system.

I admittedly come at this from a slightly different perspective than some of the other folks on here, as I started with novels, not with games, so grain of salt on my advice. My problem also doesn’t tend to be lack of ideas as much as lack of follow through.

A big thing to try is pinning down why you feel like you don’t have that thing in an idea that lets your write it and get hooked. Are you getting bogged down in “originality?” There are only three stories in the western world: man vs man, man vs nature, and man vs self. Everything else is a riff on those three. Or there’s 36 stories. Or there’s 7. Whatever tack you take, originality isn’t the end all, be all, and is frankly a bit overrated. One of the most successful franchises of the past decade is literally fan fic with the serial numbers filed off.

However, I do have a method I like, stealing shamelessly from Joshua Palmatier, the Editor in Chief of Zombies Need Brains. I can’t track down which random blog post it was in (When they put up their anthology calls each year, they announce each one on a different blog, with a new piece of advice on writing for the anthology on each of them.), but the method he recommends for coming up with something that doesn’t feel either too derivative or too out there is as follows:

Write down 20 ideas, all on some theme (If you’re inspired by something in a WIP, use that a starting point, or make it 20 ideas with one genre, or 20 ideas that share one game mechanic. Whatever works.). No more, no less. Then, axe the first and the last five of them, unless one really screams at you that it’s right. Typically, those first five ideas are going to be the most derivative or obvious interpretations, and the last five are probably going to be a little too disconnected, esoteric, or out there. Somewhere in the middle ten, you’re likely to find that sweet spot.

I would also recommend giving this talk a listen. It’s from Mark Rosewater, who is creative lead on Magic: The Gathering, and has a lot of great advice for creativity and creation. The GDC archive in general is a great resource, but I’m very partial to this talk. Gets me fired up.

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Concepts are the easy part. Got plenty of ‘em. The issue comes in both putting in the work to make them manifest and determining which ones are most worth pursuing.

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Huh? Why did no one let me know of that? The internet torments me truly. (jk)

If I am totally sincere, this might be some of the most intriguing advice I have seen so far (not to discredit any of the other wonderful folk who have responded to this thread, whose contributions have been equally insightful). I just have never thought of this strategy before and I do think it might helo me out a hit.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Commiting to an idea and seeing it through is another thing that scares me, but I have not come to the point where I need to cross that bridge yet :sweat_smile:

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