Your game idea and you

"When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools." - Michael LeBoeuf

Your idea and you
So you've just thought up an idea for a game that'll sell millions and make you rich. Not so fast.

First things first, write the idea down. Even if it's only a simple line, "Quake like FPS with cartoon style enemies", write it down. Getting it on paper(Or Notepad/Word, whichever floats your boat) is important. We don't subject our ideas to the kind of scrutiny needed when they're only thoughts.

Once it's written down, it's easier to see possible flaws and you may find that while some things seemed to make perfect sense in your head, once they're down on paper they may not in fact make as much sense as you thought.

There is no way to predict when a idea will come, how long you'll remember it and how good it actually is. Learn to write down every idea you get, no matter how stupid or bad you think the idea is. Some ideas might not seem so great at first but later down the road work together with a different idea or you'll find a way to expand on the regular idea to create something new or different.

Don't worry about writing in order or keeping any, or much, structure (Although there is nothing that says you can't keep things in order or well structured). This is just about getting all your ideas and thoughts on paper. Edison and da Vinci had thousands of notebooks stocked full of ideas, inventions and sketches. Their notebooks were written in a free flowing style, jumping all over the place from different ideas, poems, and observations sometimes in no connection with each other.

Many of their ideas never even got farther than the page but some helped further older or new ideas. Writing all your ideas down will also help you to learn to not only fine tune your game designs but also to communicate your ideas to others, which is very important when working with contractors or a team. It's one thing to imagine in your head how awesome your game idea, it's a very different beast to put it all to words.

Okay, you've gotten your game idea written out on paper and fleshed out a bit. Now, there are two schools of thought on ideas.

One is that ideas are worth almost nothing. That the saying ideas are a dime a dozen probably gives too much value to ideas. People, and companies, are not interested in buying game ideas. There are thousands of people out there with game ideas - many of whom are already working for every game company out there coming up with ideas for them - so they have no need for more idea. The work needed to turn them from an idea into an actual game is where the game is forged and that execution will have more of an impact on if the game is good or not than the actual idea it is built off of.

The other school of thought is that ideas do hold a lot of value and the creative process of forming a unique game idea or spin on a current genre is as important as the actual work put into creating the game. Having a great unique idea to begin with is the key.

Each schools of thoughts have their points. It's one thing to have a great idea but it's extremely important to be able to take the idea from paper and create a polished game from it. A great idea can be ruined by poor implication and lack of polish and at the same time a poorly designed game with great polish can get lost for lack of any new or interesting takes on it's genre.

While cloning proven sellers may help to generate extra sales you can risk getting lost in the sea of other people doing the same. A unique idea with an interesting take on things allows you to separate yourself from others.

However, the most important lesson to learn is that it'll be up to you to transform your idea from paper to reality. Even if you decide to go the route of putting a team together you will still need to be the driving force behind the project - most likely also being one of the main programmers or artists.