Brainstorming Ideas

It's early days and about time to start developing ideas for a game concept. I've played and reviewed 10 games hosted on Kongregate in order to get an understanding of what works and what is popular to date. It's been quite a while since I have played flash games and I have come to notice that they have come a long way. Whilst playing reviewing these games, I have been taking the time to note what game mechanics work and how games look these days. 

After playing and reviewing recent games, I was ready to start brainstorming my own ideas. With a lot of ideas buzzing around in my head and no real direction as to where I might start; I employed the use of a few basic mind map and word association programs to get me started.

Word Association

Here is a capture of a word association map produced by Wordle:

This really is a very basic form of brainstorming, but is a nice way to kick off with some research. I copied in a few collections of text from various sites that tell you, in their own words, what a game actually is. From that, the site using a script to pull out the most relevant key words and then displays them back graphically with the bigger words holding more emphasis. Some of the words that crop up are unnecessarily obvious, yet there are already concepts emerging from terminology in there that I would not have immediately associated with 'Games'.

Mind Mapping

The next logical step was to map out some ideas about the sorts of games I could make, before even considering any limitations I might have with my knowledge of design and experience with relevant software. I decided to employ the use of a program I have used in the past to visualise ideas into a smartly laid out and annotated map.

Here is a Concept mind map made with MindGenius that merely depicts the game types I could go forward with when making a 2D flash game:

In the picture, coloured child labels are game mechanics that came up more than once for assorted game types.

What I achieved from producing this is seeing how open I am to producing an original idea should I choose to run with any of these game types. I noticed that choosing to make a 2D Platform game  would leave me open to a whole array of interesting game mechanics, as it appeared to be the least limited in what you can produce. As I am new to game making, and the design process for it, I felt it most appropriate to make my game a 2D Platform jumper - and then produce something original from that.