The Blank Page

Last week, while talking about one of my game design projects with a non-gamer friend, he asked, “How do you do it? How do you just… come up with a game idea?”

The question caught me off guard. Concepting games is like tying my shoes: I’ve done it so much, I don’t really think about it anymore. Oh, I don’t mean the iterative process of designing, testing, and refining. I think about that stuff all the time. Rather, I’m talking about the flash of pure magic that takes me from blank page to workable game idea.

Every game is different, but I realized that in general, my ideas come from three sources:

Embracing the Theme: If you have a setting, a story, or a real-life thing you’re trying to replicate in game form, start from the theme and work your way down to the game mechanics. What aspects of the theme lend themselves well to gaming? (For example, in a Star Wars game, you’d be better off making a game about dog-fighting spaceships than political wrangling in the Galactic Senate.) Find a fun way to replicate the feelings of those aspects and you’re well on your way to filling that blank page.

Grabbing a Mechanic: Playing games is super-inspirational. I don’t know many times, while playing a game, I latch onto some mechanic in that game and see how it could be twisted or expanded into something else in another game. (“Yes, building your deck from a common pool of cards is cool, but what if the cards were on fire? Boom! Whole new genre!”) Once you’ve got a sweet core mechanic, you can build a game around that. Even if the mechanics of the resulting game ultimately look nothing like their inspiration, it doesn’t matter; the inspiration is what got you from blank page to game idea.

Going Random: I’ve written a bit about using random game generators to spark new game ideas. I’ve gone so far as to use them for projects here on the blog. Even if you’re working top-down (theme first) or bottom-up (mechanics first), adding a random element to your concept can help spark ideas that might take the game in directions that would otherwise never occur to you.

Now, these aren’t the only ways to dream up game ideas. They’re probably not even the best ways. But they’re methods that have worked for me and, if they help you start filling your blank page, I’m glad to have shared them.