Same here. I had “an idea” once. I was lucky to have an idea that was good enough to generate a buzz and actually pull together a team. I then quickly learned that I was an “idea guy”. I had no idea how to design a game, or how much was involved in the process.
That was 10 years ago. I’m now an expert graphic designer, an average C# programmer, and a damn good game designer. NOW we’re finally beginning real production of my idea from a decade ago.
I have about 70 ideas a week. Maybe 7 of them are any good.
I’d point out that this isn’t true. Each person needs to maximize the value of their time - some do this via diversifying their skill sets but others do this by specialising and being involved on multiple projects.
Nothing says a Game Designer has to spend all his time on a single project or team - a good one could work a dozen different projects.
I agree with both of these.
The thing is, coming up with ideas is neither the main part of a designer’s job or even the important part. To the contrary, a lot of what I do as a designer is discard ideas. A good designer (which I’m not claiming to be, by the way - though I’m far better than no designer) doesn’t come up with individual good ideas, they come up with many ideas and try out different combinations and permutations, eventually settling on a subset of the ideas that work together and assemble them into a design - discarding the rest. You may even discard many individual ideas which are highly interesting and novel and seem awesome from the outset because the solutions they fit into, as a whole, aren’t as good as others - and it’s the value of the whole that matters, not an individual idea.
If you’re not discarding significantly more ideas than you’re using or implementing then you’re not doing it right as a designer, because you’re not exploring enough before you settle on a solution. Even if you end up going with your first general approach, chances are that it’ll be improved by exploring other approaches and seeing their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, doing this also improves your justification for a given design even if you don’t change it at all - it’s no longer just the first thing that seemed to work well, but something that has been compared to other designs and won out for some reason.
What’s more, as a designer, you shouldn’t just be relying on your own pool of ideas. You should be getting ideas from others as much as you can, and they should be valued just as much as those which come out of your own head in the design process as a whole.
I know the feeling! Luckily it hasn’t happened to me personally yet to that extent, but some really close friends were in the exact same situation. Basically I was doing my own project at the time so I wasn’t involved but my friends decided they were going to make a game themselves and form a team. They wrote a nice game design document and even got some of the assets done but ultimately it fell apart after a few weeks for the reasons you mentioned…I warned about what would happen too lol
Actually (and this HAS happened to me), writing a nice and detailed GDD before making your game is one of the things that most easily leads to that unachievable AAA masterpiece. If you’re taking the time to write a formal document, you want it to sound as awesome as possible obviously…Lots of ideas that sound great on paper however just aren’t practical, while lots of ideas that terrible on paper are actually perfect, which is one of the dangers of having a dedicated idea guy. If they’re an amateur and have nothing else they can work on, they want to do their only job as well as possible so they want to make the ideas sound awesome, quickly leading to ideas that sound great but aren’t realistic. If they have the technical skills to go with it, there’s less pressure to make things sound awesome since they can just prototype it themselves and show everyone and its easier for them to just keep things simple.
For me, I believe that everything starts in the mind and the quality/artistry that comes out as a game really depends on the state and quality of mind of the people working on it. It can be totally invaluable to be coming from a creative mindset with great ideas and input. It’s a little hard to say that such a person should get paid for just thinking creatively, it would help if they can be more involved perhaps as like a creative lead or game designer/supervisor kind of role. Great ideas plus great implementation/realization of those ideas is what’s important. And without some artistic/creative ability programmers by themselves can come up with boring or immature stuff.
Totally, my first game idea was an idea and that was it. I didn’t know what design documents where or anything that had to do with programming. It was completely unrealistic and couldn’t be done by me at the time. Now, it’s coming along nicely, just look at my signature.
I’m not a fan of “idea people” that don’t do anything else – they rarely have ideas that are both usable and unique.
A big idea man can pitch an idea to kickstarter and get funded then just hire a team to do it.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/22cans/project-godus
Molyneux is not just an idea guy though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux#Games
If by “big” you mean “world famous with multiple titles to his credit” then sure. But then, you don’t really even need a very good idea.
If you just mean a guy who has a “big idea”, then no.