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Getting Ideas

Guide info

Short: 7-9 minutes

TLDR - What this guide covers

  • As the first stage of creating, ideas are often crucial yet hard to come by. Many ideas simply aren’t tangible enough to work for levels.
  • There are four main methods of generating more tangible ideas. You can concentrate until something just comes to mind, brainstorm with others by using open-ended questions, take existing ideas and modify them using SCAMPER, or take large amounts of information and deeply analyze them to find new connections.
  • Using these methods should help you to generate far more ideas than before.

1: Make Tangible Ideas

One fact about being a new creator is that you’ll have many ideas, but not the technical skills to make them a reality. This almost seems like a backtrack and probably wouldn’t warrant this lesson; after all, you’d probably have a lot of ideas left over from that stage. However, there are two questions to consider:

  1. How many of your ideas can you remember?
  2. How many ways can you generate ideas?

Even though ideas seem simple to make, there is some science to keep in mind to get ideas more productively. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes but largely fall into two categories: tangible and intangible ideas. The more tangible an idea is, the easier it is for us to sense it using our five main senses.

2: How Much Do You Remember?

Let’s be honest: most of our memories are unreliable. Scientists are still researching the brain and how it stores memories, but looking at our current knowledge, many people struggle with remembering things. One of the main selling points of popular productivity apps is reminders. Reminders are useful for preserving your memories and thoughts when you lose them, just like writing or journaling.

Our imperfect memory is not a bug, but a feature. Humans evolved not to memorize everything, but to survive by gathering any relevant information they could find and removing the junk. This is great for building consistency, strategies, and habits. It also explains why you can’t remember what you wore last Tuesday, but can easily recall vivid details of an embarrassing moment you had years ago. It all depends on what your brain considers important to retain.

Way back in the archaic eras, early humans had no time to think about higher concepts because they had real, tangible priorities like collecting food and staying safe. However, as society grew, we didn’t have to worry about the vitals as much and could use brain power for other things. This free mind leads to the imagination: being able to see things that don’t exist yet.

3: Methods of Getting Ideas

The main goal of this lesson is to convert as many intangible ideas (imagination, vision, values, dreams) into tangible ones (words, pictures, sounds, systems, etc.). Because of how absurd, random, and unrealistic most of these ideas can be, people tend to avoid exploring the unknown and choose to “see reality for what it is.”

Surprisingly, there are a variety of ways to produce ideas, and they can range in difficulty. For this lesson about a jumping square game, we will only cover four methods. Have a go at each if you haven’t used or heard of them before!

Concentration

Let’s start with the most common way: thinking until an idea pops into your head. In writing, people joke that “ideas are made by looking at a piece of paper until a nerve forms in your head”, the same way a nerve forms in my head when outlining this lesson. -# (The same way a nerve forms in my head when proofreading this lesson :D)

  • Pros: No training is required. Stare at the blank blue editor, and then an idea appears.
  • Cons: Unreliable. It’s like waiting for motivation to strike: you never know when it’ll hit.

Brainstorming

For social extroverts, this method will be easy. Introverts, this may take a bit more deliberate effort. Regardless, this method is the most popular due to its social aspect.

For engaging brainstorms, we recommend you focus on asking better questions rather than finding better answers. Why? Because questions give less pressure to take sides or stick to a specific point of view. You aren’t committing to anything just yet, just throwing ideas on a wall and seeing what sticks.

The types of questions matter when brainstorming. You want to ask more open-ended questions (who, what, where, when, why, how) than closed questions (yes or no, agree or disagree). That doesn’t mean closed questions are bad; in fact, they’re excellent for clarifying things. Just make sure your questions don’t become closed-ended until you’ve fully explored your idea. Here’s something you can try using our feedback channels: Rather than asking “Is this part good/bad?”, you can instead ask “What can I do to improve this part?”

Open-ended questions typically encourage more diverse answers and lead to more ideas to consider. However, watch out for “killer” phrases, like “Yeah, that’ll never work,” or “That’s not worth my time.” They can turn your brainstorms into brain puddles.

  • Pros: It’s a great source of networking and collaboration.
  • Cons: Not everyone resonates with this method due to social interaction.

SCAMPER

While on the subject of questions, this method is the most convenient, because it gives you a question checklist that lets you tweak ideas until you find something you like.

This method is the most associated with divergent thinking, and probably one of the more fun examples. Created by Alex Osborne and Bob Eberle in 1991, SCAMPER is an acronym for seven small sets of actions you can do to ideas. In the context of GD levels, here are some ways it could apply:

Substitute - What if you replace it?

Combine - What if you take two or more types of levels and combine them?

Adapt - What old mechanics can you use? Where can you use them? How will this mechanic change?

Modify - What if you make a level about something more significant or something less? Perhaps there’s something else?

Put To Another Use - How else can you use existing mechanics?

Eliminate - What elements can you remove from the level? How will it work then?

Rearrange - What if you take what everyone else has done, and did the opposite?

  • Pros: It’s essentially a checklist of questions; Easy to use like concentration, but also systematic. Unlike brainstorming, this can be done all by yourself. Perfect for trying something new.
  • Cons: Like brainstorming, it depends on the environment.

Ramsey Method

Finally, it’s time for the most difficult method. You may be well into Grade 2 before you first attempt this. It is similar to concentration, but it is more… academic. Ramsey theorized the following statement:

If you take large amounts of information and start looking at it closely and meticulously, you can find new information or hidden links that weren’t initially visible.

You’re essentially a data analyst studying countless sources to find unseen connections, no matter how small. This is like placing every single object in the editor and comparing them side by side to study their shapes, details, object properties, and composition. Similarly, it’s like testing every single gamemode portal and analyzing how their physics works with other gameplay-related objects .

This method depends on two factors: How much information you collect, and the effort you put into studying it.

  • Pros: Very effective, more so than brainstorming.
  • Cons: It’s learny and technical.

4: Wrap-Up

There are other miscellaneous methods like Questions Burst and What Ifs, but you can explore them on your own time. Plus, they’re more like a part of brainstorming instead of standalone methods.

Ultimately, the methods described here focus on the number of ideas, rather than quality; getting as many of them as possible, regardless of how absurd and random they are. Have a place to store these ideas like a notebook, journaling app, a personal Discord server, etc.

As long as someone can think and imagine, they have ideas, which constitutes most people. But that doesn’t mean people will have the same quality of ideas. To evaluate what makes ideas good in practice, “Planning a Level” will be your next stop.

Sources

Return to the Table of Contents here

Video: https://youtu.be/s8DIK6qT8TM

Credits

Created by @Selena and @Vexilo

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Using IDs
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Planning a Level