An Exercise In Creativity

A question I've gotten a couple times is how I manage to spam so many ideas. My usual answer is creativity or something similar to it. It's no guarantee that any or all of the ideas are good but it's better to filter out the unnecessary that than to struggle at adding new material, at least as it relates to my method for working. I manage to come up with so many ideas by having the ability to link otherwise unrelated objects and how to improve them. It's the concept of taking any idea and simply playing with it to see how you could change it then seeing of you think it's better or worse.

One classic example is building your own card game using standard materials. Grab a standard 52 playing card deck and a pair of dice. Now make a new game you've never heard of before, write down all the rules and ideas behind them, then organize them and present them to someone and have them play your game. It's very basic but helps in the fundamentals of design and helps you learn to think creatively.

Another method I like to use is taking a random concept from a game and then building an entirely new game around it. This is usually video games but it can be any game. The more ridiculous it sounds when you say it out loud the better it probably is as a source of entertainment.