Ideas can come from anywhere, sometimes even at 4:30 a.m.! That’s why keeping a notebook handy is a great habit. While inspiration may strike spontaneously, good game design also relies on structured ways to generate, refine, and evaluate ideas.
For insight into how to cultivate good ideas, former NASA engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober highlights in his 2015 TED Talk that curiosity, observation, and asking simple questions are essential for spotting opportunities for innovation.
Game designers often draw inspiration from personal experiences, observing players, analyzing other games, exploring media such as books or films, and even noticing everyday challenges that could be turned into playful experiences. By paying attention to the world around them, designers can spot opportunities to create fun, meaningful, and innovative games.
Challenges, Structures, and Play
Author and game designer Tracy Fullerton describes game design as thinking about challenges, structures, and play. These concepts help guide how we evaluate and develop ideas.
- Challenges: What needs to be accomplished? What is the goal for the player?
- Structures: What are the rules, constraints, or systems that shape how the challenge is approached?
- Play: What makes interacting with the challenge fun, engaging, or surprising?
Real-Life Inspiration
The classic action game Freeway for the Atari 2600, designed by David Crane, was inspired by his observation of a man trying to cross a busy Los Angeles freeway. That everyday moment sparked the idea for a game where players help a chicken safely cross a chaotic road.
Generating Ideas as a Creative Process
Coming up with good ideas is itself a creative process. Bestselling author Steven Johnson emphasizes in his TED Talk how ideas often need time to “incubate”, a period where the mind unconsciously works on a problem before insight strikes.
He describes how innovation is often the result of connecting diverse experiences over time, highlighting that creativity is both iterative and patient. This concept ties directly into the five stages of creativity used by designers: Preparation, Incubation, Insight, Evaluation, and Elaboration.
Designing for Innovation
Once an idea is generated, designers need to consider how innovative it is. Innovation isn’t just about being new; it’s about creating unique experiences, solving problems in fresh ways, or appealing to players in unexpected ways.
Designers can ask questions such as:
- What unique or new play mechanics will this game implement?
- What audience or player type will this game reach?
- Are there new or emerging platforms this game can leverage?
- How does the game fit into players’ daily lives?
- Are there creative business models, like free-to-play or subscription-based?
- Does this idea solve current problems in game design, like story integration or emotional engagement?
- What impact could this game have on individuals, society, or culture?
By considering these questions, designers ensure that their ideas are not only interesting but also meaningful, innovative, and capable of standing out in the market.
Before we can develop a full game design “plan”, we need a strong core idea to guide all the choices, mechanics, and systems that will define the player’s experience. Generating ideas is just the first step. Once a promising concept emerges, it feeds directly into the design approaches we’ve discussed, like playcentric design and design thinking. By grounding inspiration in structured methods, designers can refine the idea into a cohesive plan, build prototypes, and test them with players, ensuring that creativity evolves into a playable, enjoyable game that resonates with real players.