Hmmm the idea there was just Zelda. That’s a perfect example of horrible execution.
Not to mention you still had to go darn far to get that one. If your concern is real, there should be plenty of titles going out every year you consider to be based around horrible ideas…
The idea to put cheesy FMVs with Zelda…
Cheesy was a quality of the execution, not the idea.
Well excuse me princess. (i really liked that show 
the cheesyness made it good)
People don’t buy a concept or an idea; they buy a finished product. Actually executing an idea is vital to reaching that.
Also, do we really need another of these ideas-type thread?
The reason why most commercial games have good ideas is because the ideas are thought through. They have professionals working on them. But indie games can be more prone to poor ideas. The concept can sometimes be something like “balloons” or “pong”. These games are great to make but just how many of them do you want to play?
As Legend said:
The idea was not to make things cheesy. That Zelda game was not even an FMV game. It was a horribly executed platformer game with heavy cartoon cinematics used in between levels and certain portions. The execution was horrible, but no one wakes up one day and says “hey, know what would be cool? A zelda game that had cartoon cinematics that appear to be drawn by a 5 year old!”
The actual idea, Platformer with heavy use of cinematics, was used for Mega Man X 4 extensively, in my opinion one of the best games in that series.
Do you have any other examples?
Note I did not limit your choices of examples to professional games. If you have an indie example, go for it.
However, what you describe now is not “bad ideas” but over-saturation. The fact that Minesweeper is fun and cloned is evidence that it’s a great idea. The fact that the market is flooded with clones that are garbage just shows that few people can do a proper execution.
There are few ideas that cant be made into a fun game with enough execution and polish. As the Myth Busters have shown, you can even polish a turd.
BTW, you keep saying “balloons”. What balloon game got in your bad side?
Editing the post to elaborate on this a bit more:
There are a lot of “simple” games out there. Plenty of pong clones and the like. The reason is not a lack of ideas. The reason is they are simple to execute. A learning developer can create a pong clone on his first few weeks of learning the ropes. He may also think he may be able to get away with charging for such a simplistic game.
He is not doing that game because the idea was easy to come up with, he is doing that game because he think it’s within his reach to make such a simple game with his level of skill. And to be fair, I wish more devs in these forums were capable of sticking to realistic goals (although if all you can do is a boring pong clone you may as well not publish anything until your skills improve past that point.)
“Balloons” is just an example. But a balloon game is not something I’m looking forward to playing any more than a clone.
To me, the exception to this rule is when you have a novel idea. If you -do- have a novel idea, if you keep your mouth shut you at least have TIME to get the execution, bells and whistles in place.
If you blab it all over the forums…don’t be surprised if a very talented group or studio rolls out an awesome game using your idea…a year or so before you do.
And, can you really compete with the resources of an entire team, or studio? Go check out Crush the Castle, and compare its success to Angry Birds.
Once the idea is out you can’t take it back. But if you keep it to yourself, at least you will have TIME to give it your best shot, before it’s out.
omg a Zelda CDI reference! the idea was good, but like mentioned,.they cheezed out the execution,…
How’s this for a terrible idea that got made into a game,…
You already heard the responses about ‘ideas’ so I won’t repeat it.
What I will say that the term “Sounds good on Paper” comes to mind and a good game designer will evolve with it AFTER it has been executed/demonstrated in some way,…
I’m not gonna tell you to grab a C# book and hit the ground running ( though I, and many others here, did) so here is an alternative for you:
Paper prototyping: Game design
/cheers
-Welby
Darn, Journey Escape was my first owned cassete tape ever (stolen from older brother :P.) Loved that cover and always imagined am amazing R-Type shooter inspired on it.
Didn’t know there was an Atari game. Few Atari games were worth the time, though. So I bet that sucked big time.
The idea is like “how you’d describe the game in one sentence”.
For example… if someone tells me, lets make a game after some movie. In the core, that’s a great idea, if you ask me.
You can describe a game as “robocop game” or “superman game” and it’s already appealing, at least it was when I was a kid, and truly wanted to play those games based on the mere idea.
But it is known that usually games based on movies aren’t great! But why?
This is because of the execution! those kind of games are rushed out to meet premiere dates, and cash in on the hype, at the price of quality.
Now, if someone ever told me “hey, lets make a game about an italian plumber that jumps on top of turtles”, I’d say it’s a stupid idea, but hey… mario is a great game anyway, right?
If you think about it, at the time mario was released, it was great quality gameplay (the controls, sounds, music, color pallete and aesthetics) all that is how you execute the idea!
[quote=“Torsh, post:26, topic: 477909, username:Torsh”]
The reason why most commercial games have good ideas is because the ideas are thought through. They have professionals working on them.
[/quote]Not just ‘thought through’ - professionals are not any better at coming up with ideas than anyone else - but ‘worked through,’ in that the professional have been immersed in them for the duration of the execution and have tweaked and tuned them to get rid of the bad bits. Believe me when I say that the details of a commercial game usually do not end up resembling what the designer laid out at the beginning - this is why established designers usually don’t bother writing hundreds of pages of fine detail during preproduction, and also why game designers are required for the duration of a project (they don’t just write down the idea in immense detail and then go off on holiday until the game is done).
[quote]
But indie games can be more prone to poor ideas. The concept can sometimes be something like “balloons” or “pong”. These games are great to make but just how many of them do you want to play?
[/quote]Because most indies - of the ones you’re talking about, anyway - don’t know very much about how to make good games. They don’t playtest, they don’t research what other games do, and they generally don’t approach their projects in a professional manner. Most indies don’t care about making good games - they just care about making something, and having a bit of fun while doing it. The poor quality of an indie title is actually becoming a bit of a badge-of-honor (which could be dangerous for games as an artform).
You certainly can come up with great ideas. It’s better though if those ideas are created with the limitations of the medium in mind. So long as you have some sense of mastery over the tools you’re using, ie you understand what programs can/can’t do, you understand what graphics are capable of, you have a grasp of how much time things will take, etc. then you can work with that to use it in whatever artistic way you can dream up. You can even be totally unconvential in your use of the tools, so long as it’s actually possible to pull off what the idea needs. But then just as much as a great idea is important, so too is that you plan out and implement the idea very well, and test it, and prove that it achieves what you fantasized it would. Often ideas that you have in your mind in a fantasy daydream seem to have an allure and magic that you just can’t seem to translate into images and activities on a screen, or at least it loses a lot of its feel. Execution without a great idea is crap. A great idea without execution is crap. You need both.
Looks like a simple vertical scrolling dodging game.
Obviously, like many olden day Atari games, “the fun never ends” … until you lose. The concept does seem a little silly, but the mechanic is nothing surprising really.
If you think about it, dodging is half the implementation of every Vertical / Horizontal Shooting game in existence (I mean, if you don’t dodge, you lose really). This implementation is fairly simple, but think about what the idea evolves into over time - like Bullet Hell games (granted, those types of games are more of a touch and die concept rather than a form of “HP Based” damage).
http://www.giantbomb.com/bullet-hell/92-321/
A Balloon themed game that is basically Joust (and if people don’t know what that is, I’ll be depressed about feeling my age):
http://youtu.be/1zpQo0llLV8
A Balloon themed game that is just a Side Scrolling Platformer:
http://youtu.be/-MgtV7Uwwuk
What other games can you make that involves “Balloons”:
The point here: If you consider a “Game Idea” to be nothing more than the subject and a feature, you’re thinking about it too narrowly. Games are about execution. A Balloon Game with cutscenes doesn’t tell you anything about what you are playing, much like Zelda CD-i and FMV isn’t a complaint about the game execution but a feature quality complaint (I’ve watched videos of the gameplay, so yes I know it plays horridly, but I’m trying to focus on the subject of “Feature” vs “Mechanics” here). You really can’t call all balloon games “bad” for the sole reason that they include “Balloons”. You can certainly complain that the features aren’t executed well and detract from the gameplay.
“Balloons” is not an idea for a game, any more than “swords” is. Your using super-simplified strawmen for your arguments.
If anything, the ideas behind most AAA games are far more simple than indie games, because they can afford to spend a humongous budget on making the mechanics and gameplay of the game so good that people will buy it regardless of how derivative it is.
Most indie games live and die by being unique and unusual, intelligent concepts, with comparatively lower production values.
Want to hear a bad idea? Game actions: take out the trash, check the mail, do homework, go to the bathroom, go to bed. As you skill up, you’ll get a trash compactor, have bigger bills, do homework faster, get an improved toilet, and sleep faster.
This game was the most successful series of all time and its creator, Will Wright, is a legend. The moral? Game ideas aren’t good or bad. The execution is.
Gigi.
Yea, Grand Theft Auto 5 sounds epic!