That any one could have come up with entire concept of Portal, and with little knowledge of 3D modelling and programming, could’ve created what is known as one of the greatest FPS games today.
Just a random thought.
It could have been made by just one person and sold greatly.
Little ideas I guess…
Portal? Or the concept game that spawned it? 
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Both I guess, still the same idea.
If we can just place the Narbacular Drop on hold and look at how Portal itself is simple really
Heh, I like how you were instantly proven wrong.
Quill18 did a livestream of the development of his Ludum Dare 32 game on Twitch. He had listed a whole bunch of ideas for potential games in Evernote visible on stream. Someone asked him if they could take his ideas and he answered that an idea isn’t worth anything, it’s the implementation that matters.
People turn great ideas into awful games all the time and other times they’re just unlucky with their timing/market or whatever really. And when it comes to mobile games it’s just completely random apparently. 
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Portal is actually a really well crafted game. The difficulty curve is pretty spot on. The game learning curve is spot on. The game does well dealing with the spatial disturbances that come with portals. The story is clever. And the technical aspects of building a portal is not trivial either.
There is a lot more to putting a a good game together then just a simple idea. Most good games are just simple ideas. Execution, or the craft of making games, counts for lots.
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I think I almost liked Portal 1 better than 2 for its simplicity… in 2 they added more strange mechanics like the colored liquids and light platforms and such, which although were sort of cool and interesting they were not quite as cool as the spatial-transcendence of the portals. Still, both very good games.
If you want to come up with something like that you have to really think outside the box.
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This a thousand times.
One of the most deceptive things about games is how simple a lot of them appear. Often there is a ton of stuff that you simply never see. Features are tried, iterated on, dropped. Extra parts are dropped.
I’m willing to bet that most really innovative or well crafted games have way more code and content that’s been scrapped, rewritten, or entirely redesigned than shipped.
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Yes, if one person who had all the relevant skills sat down to make what we see today as the end result of Portal, they could make it with enough time. (Lets ignore voice acting. ;))
The thing is, that’s assuming the magic of hindsight is on their side. Looking at it now, we’d know exactly what to make before we started. Now that someone has created Portal of course it’s easy for someone else to come along and recreate Portal, because they’ve got the solution to all of the problems right in front of them.
But making Portal for the first time? That’s pretty hard. They didn’t just not have solutions to the problems, they didn’t even know what the problems were yet. Portal took quite some time to make, and it’s not because Valve didn’t know what they were doing. It’s because they made something, tested it, identified issues, then tried something else to solve those issues. And they rinsed and repeated and did it again and again until they reached the refined product we ultimately got. Along the way they would have tried many, many things that got thrown out, because the sum of their parts was less than the sum of the parts they finally settled upon.
In short, like @frosted said, there was probably far more work on Portal that got thrown out than work that made it into the final product. But making that stuff, learning from it, and throwing it out was very much an integral part of the process that made Portal what it is.
It’s easy to make something when you know in advance exactly what to make. Usually, though, you don’t know what that is until you’ve done it.
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Where’s the fun in ignoring that aspect? According to Wikipedia most of the characters in Conker’s Bad Fur Day were voiced by the same guy who directed, designed, and co-wrote it.
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That’s seriously true. The gap of effort between flat cloning something and writing something original is just tremendous. Iterating, solving problems, and giving up on ‘dream mechanics’ before you sink your entire development effort on them is just so brutally time consuming.
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THIS is the answer, 1000x times over, and I continue to realized the truth of it as development of my new game (Metamorphic) begins to wrap up.
TLDR, creating Wormholes was heinously easy in comparison to the development of Metamorphic. The amount of content I’ve scrapped during development of Metamorphic is easily equivalent to the amount of content the final version of the game will have. While I think I’ve come up with something really quite new and fun (I’m extremely excited to show you guys what I’ve been working on!) the amount of pain and frustration and “lost” development time thats gone into the making of what I’ve got is obscene. To say I had absolutely no idea what was in store for me when I decided I would make a new game with new mechanics that had never before been utilized in a game would certainly be an understatement.
@OP, if you’re asking about the development of Narbacular drop, I would say its quite impressive, but not unreal. There were games out there before ND that utilized portals, ND was just the first to utilize them for puzzle solving. And as far as coming up with the idea of a first person puzzle game – when you distill it down, it really is just a blend of genres; its not that outlandish to see how they came up with it. If you’re asking about the game Portal, I’d say it was developed by Valve, home to arguably some of the most talented game developers on the plant. Is the game ridiculously impressive? Yes, but conceivable considering the company it came from, I’d say also yes.
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I think this gets misunderstood a lot. If ideas weren’t worth anything, then great implementations of terrible ideas would often be successful.
I think the meaning of the quote was that ideas aren’t worth much without a good implementation, not that good ideas don’t have any value. They do! Just make sure you have both!
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Agreed. I think there is also some confusion because the word “idea” is so broad. Basically everything we do is preceded by an idea. I’d guess when people say “idea” in these discussions they are referring only to the very high level broad game concept. If people honestly think there is no value in ideas then I can only guess they have never heard of brainstorming or they have never sat down with a notebook and jotted down several ideas and then chose the “best” one. Because if ideas are worthless there would be no point to doing these things, right? 
Execution is definitely very important. Obviously, if you have two people using the same exact idea and one executes it so much better than the other does… the one with better execution will end up with the better end result.
Where it gets gray, I think, is when one person chooses a bad idea (the broad game concept) and executes it as best as they can (within the limitations of their bad idea) compared to another person working with a brilliant idea who is unable to execute it as well as the other person. At the end of the day these two may end up at the same place. One was limited by the boundaries of the idea they were working on and the other was limited by their ability to execute their idea.
I don’t think anything like this really happens in practice.
“When I was 12 I had an idea for a game where you run around through a present day city as a small time thief. I totally had the idea for GTA, and like a decade earlier than Rockstar! Rockstar totally stole my idea!”
Before an idea is communicated, it is literally nothing more than a figment of someones imagination.
In order to communicate that idea, you need to materialize it. You need to take those figments of imagination and make them solid and concrete. I’m not talking about a couple paragraphs of scribbled notes.
Maybe you start with concept art. Maybe you start with a GDD. Maybe you start with a prototype. In order to get someone else to see your idea clearly, you need to start with something.
As you continue to clarify the communication of the idea, you solidify it. You add more detail to the prototype. You add screen mockups to the concept art. Maybe at this point, if you show what you have to someone else they might have a pretty good idea of where you’re going.
In order to communicate the idea clearly, completely - you must execute on it.
All an idea is, is a jumbled mess of questions that you haven’t answered and a bunch of work you haven’t done.
Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are great examples of different social network websites. They were absolutely not ‘the same idea’. They were three sites that had similar goals, but entirely different philosophies, approaches and experience levels that went into realizing those goals.
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Completely agree the idea has to be expressed. Of course if the idea remains just a thought that is all it can be.
However, even if not expressed it may still be a fantastic idea… much better than other ideas that have been expressed. And later on if this person decides to express their idea OR if another person gets the same basic idea and they choose to act on it then we can see it was a great idea.
The part I am talking about is this “ideas are worthless” stuff. Any person in business or whatever will know this is not the case. There truly are “better” ideas. There are people paid just to cone up with better ideas. Even in software engineering there are better ideas for how to execute. So that is all I am addressing is the notion that ideas are worthless. Of course, if people are looking at only the surface level saying an idea is worthless unless it is expressed then yeah I can see that. Although I’d stil see it as a better idea just one that is not expressed yet.
It’s like in software development or whatever… we may be working in a section of code and realize “oh man this should really have been done in this way not like it is”. Just because we don’t at that moment have the time to completely refactor it all to conform to our new idea doesn’t mean the new idea is worthless. The idea always has value it is just waiting for someone to express it.
Again… just my view on it.
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I see where you’re going and you have a point.
I think that ideas in the realm of software might be kind of extreme in terms of falling more onto the ‘execution’ side of the fence compared to … well most other efforts. Software just has so f’n many little details, so many tiny questions that need to be solved. There really aren’t many industries where the difference in execution can be so vastly different than in software.
Even though Software is the high water mark for efforts execution based, Games are kind of on the tippy edge that high water mark. Slight differences in execution can make for entirely different games.
But you’re absolutely right, there are, sometimes, truly better ideas.
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Flappy bird, just saying.
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I’d say its as common if not more common in business to consider ideas worthless. But its not really that ideas are worthless its that there are plenty of worthwhile ideas, and its really hard to tell which ones are worthwhile without testing them. Even the worthwhile ones rely on many other factors: for example see this TED talk on the “Single Biggest Reason Start-ups Succeed” (its not the idea).
So the throwaway line “ideas are worthless” is really just an idiom meaning something like “your idea might be good but YOU need to do something about it to prove it”.
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I agree with this. Being more of what we could call a literal type person I tend to receive things exactly as they are presented. So when I see over and over “ideas are worthless” my first thought is always that is wrong. Either people are trying to greatly simplify the whole thing or just believe ideas have no value.
If this was qualified as “ideas that are never expressed are worth no more than no idea at all” or “an idea never expressed has no concrete value” then I would completely agree with it.
Looking at marketing companies, writers, movie directors and so forth I am sure all of them would agree having a great idea to work with is a major factor in their success. This doesn’t mean that execution is of any less importance. I think sometimes people are looking at this as a “one or the other” thing. Also, I realize it is used often just to “shoot down” the so called “idea guys” who come to the forums with a “super fantastic idea” and want a team to build it for them.
I suppose another difference between my view and others may be just because when thinking about a game or any project for that matter whether at the concept level or the execution level… I am always thinking and coming up with ideas. Mulling the ideas around and picking what seems to be the best idea. It is just such an inherit part of creative development almost inseparable it confuses me when people say “ideas are worthless”. In contrast, I see it all as being driven by ideas. Major ideas. Minor ideas. Iterations of ideas. Many ideas prove to be bad and many ideas prove to be much better. At least in my experience.