It’s a cliché, but it’s also a real question I’ve been asked many times over the years, so let’s have a look. Where do I get my ideas?

The short answer is anywhere and everywhere. Though, while that’s true, I don’t think that answer will be much help. So, let me dig in a bit. See if I can be more useful. 

Before we start, this question is related in part to the idea of theme-first or mechanic-first design, and that’s another early consideration. I’ve got an article in the works on that, and it’ll be coming soon. For the moment, you can think of the theme/mechanic question as “where do you start once you’ve got an idea”, so you need the idea first. 

Inspiration can come from anywhere. This is what I’ve found in my writing, game design, and art, and is also what every other creator I’ve talked to says about their process. OK. Ideas are everywhere. Fab. If you don’t see that already, how do you make this work in practice?

There are three tricks to learn. 

Trick, the First

The first trick you’re looking for is not in finding the secret quarry from which ideas are mined, but in how you think about the world around you. Be still. Be curious. And listen. 

You can find ideas in any media you consume, and that can be an important slice of this pie. It’s far from the only piece though. You don’t find great game ideas in reviews of games alone. You don’t find inspiration for art only in galleries. You can find inspiration in news items, parent-teacher meetings, by looking up in a city to see the scars of its history etched on its façade, by listening to the other people on the bus, watching the birds in the park, and anywhere else. Observe the world around you. Soak it in. Think about how whatever is in front of you might interact with your favourite creative niche. 

Sometimes it’s something someone says. Sometimes it’s things I say myself in the middle of a conversation. Maybe I’ve just not said it as clearly before. Maybe I needed that other person to draw it out of me. Maybe I wasn’t listening to myself. I just need to recognise it when that happens. 

What would make the subject for a good game, sculpture, or aria? Could be anything, so listen. Leave part of your brain on constant watch and let it examine each thought and experience as you go through life. Actively consume instead of passively doing so. This isn’t about being in different, magical places where the inspiration lives, it’s about seeing the inspiration wherever you are. And it’s everywhere. It’s in you and around you. It’s your unique take on the world. 

Inspired ideas aren’t always or even usually a conscious thing at first. Instead, they’re often thrown up by your subconscious when you’re thinking about something else. The skill you need to develop is to recognise them when they happen, and they happen to everyone on a daily basis.

It’s sometimes easier to spot relevant ideas when you’re already focussed on the topic. Maybe this is a good place to start. As Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”. I think that he’s talking about ideas only being realised if they’re worked on, but it also applies here. If you’re already in the right zone, it should be easier to spot the inspiring ideas. 

Expect inspiration to arrive when you’re not asking it to. Be aware that it could be lurking anywhere. Be busy, be open, be curious, be ready. And, when it does arrive, pounce on it. 

Trick, the Second

The second trick lies in recognising and accepting each opportunity. Having inspired ideas isn’t enough, you’ve got to realise you’ve had them. You’ve got to greet them with open arms. What I mean by this is that everyone has moments of genius, and most folk simply don’t do anything with them. They appear and melt away, undeveloped, unexplored, and unnurtured. 

I used to be afraid of latching onto the wrong idea, of missing the good and promoting the bad. Nobody wants to look foolish, that’s normal. But here you’re going to need to take a risk or two. You may decide that an idea is great, only to change your mind in a week when you start to develop it. Maybe it doesn’t work as well as you thought it would. Welcome to creativity. Everyone who ever made anything novel or interesting went down a dozen blind alleys and dead ends before they latched onto the gems you know them for. Everyone. 

Artists bin hundreds of sketches for every piece hanging in a gallery, tens of thousands of words lie discarded for every finished story. The process is wasteful, it will lead to many more duds than successes, and you need to lose your fear of this exploration. It’s not you. You aren’t a failure. You’re on the cutting edge of your own creative exploration, and that’s a scary and dangerous and thrilling and wonderful place to be. And, over time, you will get better at recognising your best ideas, and you will get better at honing and polishing them to be the best they can be. But you will always have failures along the way. Everyone does. Just promise yourself that you will learn from them and move onto your next possibility. 

One related quote that I return to frequently is supposedly from Maya Angelou: “Do what you know how to do, and when you know better, do better”. That is good moral guidance, and also solid advice for using any skill (such as your ability to spot inspired ideas). Do what you can now. By doing, you learn. Then you can do better next time. 

Trick, the Third 

The third step is getting good at capturing and nurturing these ideas when you find them. Stephen King famously says that he doesn’t use notebooks as the good ideas will stick anyway, and this obviously works for him. He uses his natural forgetfulness as a filter to winnow out the chaff. An interesting approach, though it’s not what I’d suggest. 

For me, taking notes is a core part of the process of harvesting good ideas and maturing even better ones. I write down ideas that I read or hear about, make notes of discussions I have with friends, doodle graphics I like when I see them, note new game ideas, or ideas that are inspired by them. Incidentally, more than once I’ve misunderstood a new rule in a review, or jumped to a conclusion when I’ve guessed where it was going, only to be wrong. And that misunderstanding has pointed me in a more interesting direction than the original. My notes capture all of this inspiration wherever it’s from.  

Making notes is also a great fertiliser for future ideas. Among the thousand plus notes in the app on my phone, and the dozens of notebooks filled with doodles and scrawls, lie all manner of half-baked ideas, flashes of genius, and other flashes of utter idiocy collected over decades. Far more ideas than I will ever have time to realise. Occasionally I look through them, and by doing this at random I present them to my brain in a new, different order each time. This sparks all manner of unforeseen synergies, which lead me to adding to the notes, fleshing them out a little more, or even creating entirely new ideas, generated by the combination of previous thoughts and observations. Often, these second order ideas are better than the first ones, and the process can turn mediocre notions into striking concepts. This approach has given me some of my favourite game ideas, and wouldn’t have been possible without writing them down. So, I love my notebooks. Always full of exciting thoughts. I feel sorry for Stephen that he misses out on the fun. 

The Minority

Remember I said that ideas weren’t usually a conscious thing? Well, that leaves some times when they are. What of them? 

The most obvious occasions are when someone says, “you could do a game/cartoon/opera/whatever about X”, and you realise that you could. For me, this usually happens when a client wants me to design a game based on something they’ve already worked on. Sometimes they’ll have a vague idea, other times it’s going to be fairly specific. My Mars Attacks game, for example, was done for Mantic when they’d got a license and needed a game to fit that world. Until they suggested it, the idea had never crossed my mind, but there was nothing subconscious or random here. It’s a different source for creative ideas, but it’s still inspiration. 

To Summarise 

Inspiration can be found anywhere, and happens to everyone. What you need to do is learn to harvest the ideas when they appear. This is done in three steps:

1. Be open. Observe. 
2. Recognise the opportunity. 
3. Capture it.  

Naturally, there’s an implied fourth step of exploiting the inspiration you’ve had to make something, but that’s for another day. 

So, where do my ideas come from? The same pace as yours: everywhere. I’ve just had more practice capturing them.