Coming up with ideas

As we said, ideas can come from many different sources, so let's try to recap them in a practical list of activities that can help you come up with interesting concepts for future new games:

• Play tons of video games, especially ones outside your favorite genres
• Watch movies, TV, and theatre, and read books
• Travel
• Think how to turn your interests outside gaming into a game (bricolage, wine, fitness, art, music, traveling, and so on)
• Analyze the market and think about unique games that are not quite there
• Ask other people what they'd like to play that is not quite there
• Deconstruct your favorite games, focusing on what would make them better
• Go to game jams where you'll have a very restricted amount of time to create a game around a given theme
• Give yourself a theme and try to make a game around that in a very short time
• Learn the basics of a game engine and do some stuff! Anything: follow online tutorials, try to recreate some game mechanics, just mess around with example projects