How to prioritize your game ideas?

There are two kinds of people working on indie games: those who have a lot of ideas, and those who don't have any ideas at all¹!

As every dreamer, I'm part of the first type. The ideas keep coming, and the best thing I can do is write them down.

Of course, that's not enough. Once the list becomes too large, it becomes a problem, which you can solve by introducing levels of management.

The Art of Idea Management!

For example, here's my first level of management, inspired by Thomas Brush's idea of a "Trinity Hook."

It's not perfect, but it helped. It made me realize that I shouldn't prematurely marry settings with mechanics, or stories with mechanics, or anything with mechanics, for that matter.

I should break down ideas to make them more achievable and iteration-ready.

Obviously not me. Made by BING AI.

Of course, the ideas remain linked, but now they can be done in phases. A game mechanic made before the story can be perfected, and tested in many games before reaching the state of a dream game. It can build your skills, reputation, and so on.

Recently, I thought that I could introduce one more level of idea management. This time around the idea's complexity.

It's not perfect, I'm currently working on making it "good enough".

I lack ideas on how to name different levels, so it might be to this idea's demise.

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When I think of complexity, I think about the amount of work they require, potential dependencies, and how much bug testing is involved (which I ignorantly link to the target environment, be it 2D or 3D).

There are seven levels of complexity:

Jam

is something you can do in a game jam. A mechanic (or anything) that can be implemented as a proof of concept MVP of a game.

I, as in single-I

is what I consider a 2D gameplay-focused. It's more complex to Jam because it can have more levels, but they basically have as much story as a Super Mario game. Might be a shmup, might be Geometry Wars.

II, as in double-I

is a 2D game that introduces story content. It's what the "Lazy Devs Academy" guy calls a game with "and then content happens". Visual novels, RPGs, but also anything that has story content. Why is it different from single-I? Well, the story can be a dependency (it can be done externally, but it might also require a dialogue mechanic, story event mechanics, or whatever you need to introduce an event that appears only once!).

III, triple-I

is the 2D blockbuster! Not only does it have gameplay and story content, it also has wonderful art, beautiful animations, and so on.

Think Sea of Stars, Another World, Eastward, Prince of Persia (the original one!), Chrono Trigger, and so on.

I think the reason why I called these levels I is mostly due to the fact that most indies are 2D (and because I somewhere heard the term triple-I and I liked it).

Of course, indie games can be 3D, this division is for complexity measures and not because this is how the market sees it.

The next 3 categories are for 3D games, starting with

A, as in single-A

It's basically the 3D equivalent of single-I: gameplay-focused, no-story 3D game.

Followed by

AA, as in double-A

is a 3D game in which, “and then content happens".

Think Portal, Mars: War Logs, Night Stones, etc.

And then it becomes

AAA, the dreaded triple-A

With voice-over, motion-capture, blackjack, and hookers 😉 And the optional humongous costs of infrastructure and servers when thinking of live service and/or multiplayer games.

That's it.

Now all that's left is to assign each level to each idea.

Having that I can productively cross out the simpler games, and then reuse everything in more complex games. Or make Single-I games and earn the budget for content-heavy II games.

What do you think?

What does it lack?

Would it be helpful to you?

1. the latter is probably the Big Foot of game makers, people with undirected raw skills who don't know what to do with them, the perfect indie game studio employee!