Ideas are a Dime a Dozen

i thought i would share a piece i wrote about a million years ago — okay. actually only 5.

i thought i would share a piece i wrote about a million years ago — okay. actually only 5. i was feeling a bit melancholy after having written a pretty decent game design brief, shipped it off to bioware, had it swapped to lucas arts (in exchange for kotor) where it eventually became the xbox game “gladius.”

heh. with not even so much as a pat pat “nice work.”

man, i wish i had taken some screenshots of their ‘back of the box’ bullets when they first announced the title. 70% of them were god damn verbatim. ah well. at least i know i can play at that level, eh?

Game development ideas are everywhere. Everyone has one. How many times have you and your friends been sitting around thinking to yourselves “Wouldn’t it be great if someone made this into a video game?” What if there was somewhere where you could put your ideas and have game developers actually take them under advisement?

This, of course, only works if two things happen. First, you have to be willing to share your “million dollar idea” and, second, game developers have to implement it.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but, that idea of yours may be original and unique and the best thing since sliced bread, but there isn’t a game developer in the world who will sign an NDA to listen to your idea. They get hundreds upon hundreds of “idea” submissions every day. Not to mention the ideas of their own. You have to build it yourself or it won’t get made. That is, unless you push it out there to the game development community at large and hope someone picks it up.

Now, if you can cover that part, we at Addicting Entertainment are hoping to cover the sharing of our collective ideas with the people actually building games. If your idea is clever enough to make it into a game, you finally get to actually experience your idea.

Here’s where you may want to just stop reading and opt out of any idea sharing: We’re not in this to make money. Any ideas posted here are fair game.

By posting your “million dollar idea” you are turning it into a “zero dollar idea.” If some developer takes a fancy to your killer new idea for an FPS weapon, well, it sucks to be you. — In the monetary sense. You, of course, still retain the bragging rights to say “Dude! I posted my idea and id made it real! Woot!” You aren’t going to get paid for it. Not by us, nor (probably) by the game developer. Although, it would be nice if they publicly gave you a slap-on-the-back-you-rock-thanks. But they are not obligated to at all.

You might be asking, “Well, dammit. Why the hell would I post my great idea then?” Our answer? Because you are a gamer. We all are. If you are in game development or thinking about being in game development for the money, you need to rethink your career. Sure, just like in the music business there are a few rockstars (pun intended) but also, like in the music business, the majority of us slave away at our labor of love for free or barely enough to eat. If you want to make money building software, move into enterprise level software development. Boring, but lucrative. Games are fun, but you’ll likely be piss-poor if you do it for a living.

So you might as well share with the community and advance the art and science of gaming.

here’s what i was thinking. i’ll make an open call for user submitted design documents. i’ll post a design brief in a bit as an example. i’ve set up a category for them. i’ll see if i can get a couple up there that i’ve got rolling around in my head. there’s just not enough time for me to make them all, so i might as well put them up here just in case someone else wants to build one or two.

not sure how many i’ll see, but it would be fun to find out.