I think sometimes it can be difficult to be original when it comes to game design. I’ve always thought it was all about making an original experience and the aesthetics were an afterthought. Like people criticize Nintendo for “just making another Mario game”, but to me the wide range of game play is original. Well taking that to heart ive been developing the plans for a unique zombie game. (work has bee.n getting in the way of executing the plans).
Well some damned meme about indie devs and zombie games knocked the wind out of me. Now I feel like giving up on the zombie game to work on another project I had in mind that I think people will see as original, but I personally feel is not due to the mechanics. What is everyone’s take on originality?
Originality simply means something that hasn’t been seen/done before. Ultimately it just means something different. As you might gather, after a while of having lots of originality and differences, there starts to be less and less that hasn’t been seen before and so it becomes harder to be truly unique.
Also part of originality comes down to whether people buy into the suggestions you make that your thing is something different, because at the end of the day most things are actually very similar and only distinguished by flimsy surface appearances that try to suggest they’re different. Uniqueness is usually shown as a different in appearance/form.
And when you do something original, everyone else proceeds to copy it.
While there is something to be said for originality, its often highly overrated. I’ve seen more “unique” ideas that were terrible than great. You don’t have to be completely original to be a great designer/developer, you just need to make something fun.
Take WoW for example. Now, personally, I don’t play it, but they just released another expansion (Mists of Pandaria). Is it original? Not at all. The whole Kung Fu Panda ripoff aside, its still just an expansion and rearrangement of existing game elements. But it doesn’t matter. Millions of people will enjoy playing it, and they’ll be more than happy to pay for it.
Originality is a concept highly overated. The ability to create something “new” not always comes with the ability to create something fun.
There’s a very interesting documentary on originality, called “Everything is a remix”. It’s really cool, look for it.
I’d say that coming up with something original is nearly impossible. No matter what you make… people will compare it to something they know. That’s human nature… I guess. I usually have similar problems… where I feel like making several games, but I almost never even start work on them simply because they don’t seem original enough to me. The thing is… almost no game out there is original. So your best bet is to keep working on the game. Even if it might not seem original… people might like it. And isn’t that why you thought of making it in the first place? You can’t know if people will/won’t like the game unless you try to make it.
If you really feel like giving up and have at last something playable… have some people play it. Get some feedback. Make sure that your not dropping something that people might enjoy simply because you think that they wont. Appearenlty a lot of developers feel the same way until they can actually show the game to people… and see for themselves if it is well received or not.
I wouldn’t say originality is NOT highly overrated, otherwise look at Apple and tell me why when they consistently come out with a new product that is state-of-the-art cutting edge and better than everything else (ie original), the whole world goes gaga over it.
Originality is kind of like a rare diamond. When something is new people experience an awe factor. Take for example when you drive to a new location, initially you really don’t see all of what’s there, all the detail, you kind of skim the surface because there’s too much to take in. You see the big obvious stuff first. It isn’t until you’ve memorized much of the big obvious stuff that you start to notice the smaller details later, and it’s in noticing the smaller details that you might start to see cracks in the illusion of it being so wonderful. There is definitely a honeymoon phase that occurs at the beginning of anything new appearing where it seems at its most appealing and you have, for a while, an extra advantage of nobody having experienced it before, so there has been little to no criticism and little to no copying and little to no apparent flaws. That bodes very well, for as long as it lasts.
Another example would be when I immigrated from the UK to the USA. Everything in the USA was new to me for quite a while, and for several months it was like one big vacation honeymoon, but then after several months I started to notice things I didn’t like and the honeymoon wore off (a normal phase of culture shock). So definitely take advantage of being ahead of your time/crowd while you can… but know it won’t last forever.
Apple is a lot of things; original is not one of them.
That actually further proves the point. Apple has never developed anything original… ever. Yet they make products that people love and spend a ton of money to own.
And multi-touch technology has been around since 1982 and has been pioneered by several companies; none of which were Apple. (P.S. That didn’t stop them from trying to patent it.)
Apple bashing aside, I never really got the whole nothing is original shtick. That always seemed like crap to me. Its like saying that everything was invented forever ago and anything that comes out is unoriginal if you can draw some loose resemblance to it. Thinking like that is best left to apple lawyers. (and we’re back to apple).
Its still true. Sure, there have been some true leaps forward (such as the concept of an FPS or MMO), but even those were spinoffs of existing concepts. If you want to trace that back; MMOs derived from tabletop RPGs, which were spins on miniature gaming, along with a dash of choose-your-own-adventure books (the genre typically spinning from Tolkien books). Miniature gaming came from boardgames and playing with army soldiers, etc, etc.
All creative work is an evolution of ideas. That’s nothing to be bothered by. Accept that and try to make your own branch in that evolution.
I’d like to avoid a heated debate, but I’d challenge anyone to name a game that was actually original.
