Brainstorming a game concept (for a student project)

In my opinion, the creative process is one of the most exciting aspects of working on games. Coming up with a good game concept is not only vital for sales, but picking a fun concept also leads to a fun project to work on.  When it became time for me to come up with a game concept for my senior project, there was a couple of things I had to keep in mind:

1. I am a student, and I will be working on this project with other students. This means, that while we do not have to worry about funding, we will have to work around other time commitments.
2. This is a school project, meaning the team will be made up of about 10 people and we have a definitive deadline of when the project is due (no pushing back the release date).
Noting, both of those items I had an idea of what my scope could be.

Scope is one of the most important aspects when brainstorming new ideas, and is particularly relevant in this situation.  I have always wanted to make a Lacrosse game, but I realize that my team won't have the man hours or experience required to do the game justice.  While EA is able to release a new Madden every year, they have hundreds of experienced staff members working 40+ hours a week to get the job done.  On a student/indie project, you just don't have the manpower to make something of that scale. Therefore, you probably need to cut back on the size of the project.  Although you don't want to make the scope too small and end up with something simple and boring.

Enough talk, what did you do already:

I knew that I was going to have to pitch my own game idea for a couple of months now, but was having a hard time coming up with something I liked.  I tried brainstorming by saying what if I combine the mechanic from game ‘Y’, with the controls from game ‘Z’, and use an art style similar to game ‘X’. This generated several interesting ideas, but never amounted to anything more than 2 or 3 games mashed together.  They would have been fun games, but I didn't want to create the game that was labeled as 'Minecraft with guns' (this is an example, not an idea I had).

So I gave up on waiting for inspiration, and instead forced myself to come up with a game idea.  I decided to brainstorm using a free writing like approach.  If you have never heard of free writing, it is the act of sitting down and writing continuously about random items until you come up with something that you think sounds interesting.  Once you have written down a few interesting items, you can flesh them out and see if any of them are decent ideas.  In other words, I picked a genre and started writing down things that aren't common game mechanics in the genre.

Finally I settled on a puzzle platformer in which the player paints the world to reach the finish.  I knew that using paint had been done in a couple of major releases, most notably 'Jet Set Radio', 'Portal 2' (and the Digipen project the mechanic was taken from), and 'De Blob'.  But the concept intrigued me, and I wanted to see if I could come up with some modifications that separated the project from the previously released titles.  After another 30 minutes or so I decided that I had changed it enough to call the game my own, and I know it will continue to morph if it gets picked by the class.

Did I come up with a brand new concept?  Not quite, but I feel that it is unique enough to call my own.  There are millions of possible game ideas, and I am happy with what I chose.


*Note: I purposely left a couple of the ideas I had out of this blog post. Am I paranoid thinking that people are snooping college student's blogs for new game concepts? Probably.