Last time I started with the horror of the blank page and white screen. Today I will start with the ever-looming presence of a trash bin in every design journey I have been on.
So, trash cans. As a game designer I have made a lot of things that inadvertedly end up in my trash – wheter the real one or the one on my Desktop. It is a tough thing to deal with, especially when it is just a very early start of another design journey.
When I have sat and thought about what I want to make for this design task, the GDD, I have first came up with completely different idea than a management simulator, driven by narrative choices. My first thoughts have been about the passing of the seasons. I was travelling from Poland, where it was still warm and sunny, to England, where the weather was… very British. It made me think about how different seasons can be translated to a game experience. In that idea, player was supposed to be an entity who could embody all four of the moderate climate seasons, with different actions/superpowers attached to every form. The goal would be to progress through some terrain, a map, and trying to bypass terrain features with the help of different superpowers. All the “seasonal forms” would also have weaknesses that could threaten your existance or hinder your ability to progress. It would be a game of quick thinking and constant switching.
It was a nice idea, but, the problem was it was an idea dedicated for the trash bin from the very start. A trash sacrifice for the design journey, if you will. Because it was the first idea and as we all have probably heard – the first idea is “a low hanging fruit”, “cliche idea” or “your worst idea”.
But is it true?
Well I have no idea. I was taught that it is indeed true but I have decided to use it in a different way than it is supposed to be used. I will never just throw my idea away, just because it is the first one. I imagine the design process as a sports activity. You always plan to go running, for example, and never plan on doing the war-up before and stretch after. It is sort of ritual you go through to access the experience in a safe way. The same with ideation process. When you plan on making a certain design, you should go through a kind of warm-up, strecth your mind to acces your whole capabilities. If you start thinking and get the idea, do not stop there. The design warm-up allows you to get used to thinking, creating, making new and exciting connections. If you go through the first idea and generate the next one, and the next one – that is the moment you can stop and reflect. I always try to develop two or three ideas at once – including the first one, to just exercise my mind. Without going through this warm up, I believe we can seriously injure our self-worth and perserverance. “My idea did not work, I suck”. If you have more than one, you create a safe net, that can catch you, if you fall. Build on a wide fundament, not a narrow one.
The people telling us about the horrible “first ideas” probably mean good (or i hope so), but it also can be limiting in our process. I would say that the most important thing is not to stop on the first idea. I try to go further in, access different elements of my mind to create much more snippets, many seeds of ideas. I feel just a tiny bit guilty if I go back to the first idea I had. It might be because of the bad blood the first idea has with all the self-improvement bloggers, but it should not be excluded simply because of that.
I urge everyone (and myself too) to find good things in all of our ideas, ultimately, we can canibalise our own thoughts, projects and half-baked designs and use them in something new, something different to fill our creative needs.
My first idea was okey, but when i came back to it, to delve deeper into it, I have realised that I did not care about it as much as about the novelty the manageement simulator combined with narrative experience gave me. It is not wrong to abandon ideas you feel are not what you wanted them to be. It is a part of the process and that is why we have trash bins, to safely collect them. I just need to remember that sometimes I might want to reach in, inside the bin, to retrive elements from its endless maw.