Creativity

How do you get ideas for games? How do you further develop and grow your ideas? Do you consider yourself as a creative person?

Since I have long background on so-called non-creative sector, the concept of creativity is not too familiar for me. I have colleagues who consider themselves as hightly creative persons. But in practice most of them are rather systematic thinkers and great problem solvers, than truly creative persons. Of course there are individuals that differ from the mass, but there are not many of them. 

In my daily work (as SoC specialist), most of my ideas are born because of practical need. There might be a task that no one has done before and there is no ready-made solution for that. Also because I am bit lazy by nature (typical engineer?), I will try to find  the easiest possible way to perform the task. Therefore, I write lots of custom scripts for a wide range of applications. This is commonly called as problem solving, and in many cases it has nothing to do with the creativity.

 For game development, I have identified several different ways to get starting points for new concepts. It is quite difficult to describe how my creative process goes because of it's randomness and complexity. I am not a very systematic thinker, and my thoughts are bouncing here and there.

 There are lots of expers telling that creativity is not a random process and it can be improved through different techniques. Maybe this is true, but in my case innovation seems to be closer to chaotic process. Anyways, most of my new (and hopefully innovative) ideas for games will appear during not-so-serious discussion with a person at same wavelength. Most of the ideas are not feasible at all, but sometimes there is a hidden gem among all rubbish.

 I have to admit that all games published by me (or WestSloth Games) have not been very innovative or unique so far. That's mostly because of the lack of experience: If we had tried to start with too ambitious and complex concept, I would bet that we would never got it finished. Now we have f inished (and published) couple of small flash games, and got even some players for each of them.

 I still have a lot to learn in the area of creativity, and commonly used trial and error -method will hopefully lead to better results. Of course, there are plenty of books and online tutorials and guidelines telling how to create new ideas. Nice, but I guess everyone of us has own ways for creating new innovations!

 -Jussi


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