What game should I make?

When you are working as a game designer or developer at an established company it will be fairly rare for you to have to create a game concept completely from scratch.  More often,  certain aspects will be handed down from a marketing department.  But, if you are trying to develop a game independently you will likely have a few ideas kicking around.  Good ideas are a dime a dozen.  It’s often not the job of a game designer to come up with ideas.  It’s a usually the initial idea or theme will be decided by a marketing team.  Often times a designer will be part of the team, but they will not have the final say, in fact, often they will only be serving and advisory role.  

Breaking into the industry as a designer is quite difficult.  There is a lot of competition and getting the necessary experience is next to impossible unless you take the initiative on your own.    This means coming up with your own concept and developing a game around it.  When doing this it’s a good idea to have people you can collaborate with.  As we’ve seen, making a game takes a lot of work, and it’s difficult if you don’t have a small team to develop with.  

But how do you know what to make?  There is a gap between having an initial seed idea and having a fleshed out game concept.  Below is a list of potential starting places for you game concept along with some the challenges and affordances that each go along with and a few tips to help you get started.

1. Genre:  Start with a favorite genre and build your game around that.

1. affordance: you will know what kind of challenges the player will be facing
2. challenge: you'll have to spend some time thinking what makes your game different from the rest of the genre
3. start by gaining an understanding of the genre.  What are the key elements of the genre?  Can they be looked at from a new angle?  Can they be expressed in a different way? Can they be mixed with another Genre?  What elements will you take from each, how much mixing will there be?  

1. story or character:  Start with a popular story or character, or a story or character that you have developed yourself and build from there. 

1. affordance: Setting, themes and even art style will be alluded to in the story or background of the character.  The game genre will also be easily determined based on what the character or main characters spend most of their time doing. 
2. challenge:  finding the game in a story or character can be difficult.  The game and story mediums do overlap in some areas but in others they are quite divergent.  Stories have a definitive path and rely on dramatic necessity.  Games can have many different paths and by definition cannot have dramatic necessity as the fate of the character is determined by the players interaction.
3. Tips:  What are the key moments in the story or the key elements of the character's development?  Identify the mood of the story or character's setting this will help determine the games look, feel and theme.  What does the character or characters in the story send their time doing?  Are they fighting bad guys with fists or are they searching for clues and unraveling a mystery?  

1. mechanic:  Start with an interesting interaction for players to execute and build a game around it.

1. affordance:  you know your core mechanic.  This is a huge help because this is the main thing players will be doing while they play your game. The rest of your decisions can be made around this core mechanic.
2. challenge:  The core mechanic is a great place to start but there is still a lot to be determined.  What is the theme and scope of the game.  Will it have a story? How can the core mechanic be enhanced and expressed differently as the game unfolds? 
3. Tips: What are the different ways this core mechanic can be expressed?  Is the core mechanic easy for players to grasp?  How much learning will the player be doing throughout the game?  Can this learning be facilitated by story or will the story be an unnecessary distraction from what should be a fast paced, or concentration based game? 

1. look and feel / theme: Start with a theme such as a game about environmental conservation or a game that takes place in medieval Europe.

1. affordance:  The genre will be greatly informed by the theme.  
2. challenges: similar to the core mechanic issue, there is still a lot to do, but when you start from the theme it's often from the opposite side of the problem.  What will the core mechanic be?  What aspect of the theme do you want to explore?  Taking to wide a view on this question can lead to a bloated idea very quickly.
3. Tips:  Identify what aspect of the theme you want to explore in your game.  What kinds of interactions or events occur within the theme?