~jonashietala.se

Generating ideas

Published:
Revised: in bcd6a62

So I got a fairly fun assignment from the game design course I’m taking for once. I should come up with 50 ideas using my own idea generation technique.

I used a sort of “notes in the basket” approach where you placed some notes with words in a basket and randomly drew two and then you should come up with something with the two words. But I’m too lazy to write a lot of notes and it’s pretty damn hard to come up with a lot of good words too, so I tried to automate the process.

I searched for some random words and found this site: http://www.wordswarm.net/ and I pulled out a few pages and got a few thousand words. Then I made a very simple tool which randomly combines two lines from a file and creates a sentence, much like the you would with the notes but this is just so much faster. Granted I had a lot of shitty words and I got a lot of garbage lines but I could go through so many lines it was a very simple task to get these 50 one-lined game ideas.

These are not fully fledged game ideas, but merely seeds from which you could grow a game.

Published:
Revised: in bcd6a62