Today I want to talk about your ideas.

Your ideas are sometimes awesome, sometimes not up to par, but when you have a great idea that people love for a game and it starts to form into something even better, the feeling behind that idea is what makes it awesome!

What happens when after 2 months of discussing and talking about an awesome idea, it suddenly gets scrapped? Tossed away and never to be talked about again because of a game design change.

That has happened to a few mechanics in our game Are We In This Together? (AWITT) and I know of some people, including myself, who went through a few emotions when it happened.

The first reaction is anger, just anger.
You’re upset and infuriated about how this great idea you had just randomly went out the window, like what the hell! Two months of talking and implementing and you spending your nights working out the kinks, just to be tossed out!

Here’s the the newsflash: This happens to everyone, not just you

Sometimes you have to go for a walk or talk to your pet about it, just rant, but the main focus is the game at the end of the day.

You cannot let something like this take over your opinion of the game.
It’s time to move on, you cannot have 1 idea stop you from coming up with more!

We had a mechanic in our game that acted as a focal point of our interactive system, let’s call it WOE.
We then started to build up the other mechanics of the game and when we returned to WOE, we realized … WOE isn’t going to work in the game anymore.
We manipulated the other aspects of the game so much that WOE couldn’t possibly function.

We were lost and we had no idea what to do.

We thought long and hard about what to do next and what would happen to the WOE mechanic. It doesn’t matter who said it, but eventually, someone made a comment that allowed us to expand the idea further than WOE could have.
WOE still existed but as a shell of what it once was, it had now become WUH, a better version based of the old mechanic. The base mechanic ( W ) was still there but the way it worked was so completely different, that you wouldn’t know what it was before.

We loved this new WUH  mechanic way better, since it merged with everything else so seamlessly. So even though we no longer had this amazing idea, a new one branched out from it to fulfill the role.

You have to keep pushing forward with ideas. Even the smallest ideas that don’t make sense right now, can eventually lead to bigger and better ideas

. Bradley Widner | Game Designer .