Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
Locked in a box? Not safe enough. Locked in my head? Now that is safe enough
Well good luck with that. Personally, I'm not interested in using your ideas, because I have lots of my own. And my ideas are more fun to me than yours are to you. Most game designers are the same. (Save for maybe these rare weirdos you talk about?) Your approach is kind of on the side of paranoia if I can be really honest with you. Someone that would steal an idea from "some guy" that doesn't have a sure shot to mass fortune is just sad and anyone like that should be disregarded as a fool. And that's how you should be dealing with it rather than hiding in the shadows like your protecting state secrets.

Sharing ideas can be fun so I like the idea of sharing instead of looking over my shoulder while I code.

My goal is to let the gaming world know what a Jason McMillen game is like, not trying to lay that one golden egg. It's not going to happen with my first outing. I'm planning for longevity rather than a "winning the lottery" scenario. Those that do this will have much more success by going commercial with their games. (Which is the only sense that I can make of your intense concerns at all.)


Moving onto more interesting topics however...

Now this concept wasn't about going commercial, it's about sharing fun game design ideas. (A thinking exercise.) I think it would be an interesting jam-type competition. It would be really interesting to take the winning game design to a second stage where people form teams and try to faithfully create that design into a game. Seeing all the different takes on a single set of design specs would be really neat.

The fun part of the design documents is that it doesn't have to be some boring endless blobs of text, you can draw out your ideas visually on graph paper and illustrate how you envision it on the screen. Of course you would need some description and the more complete concept that tells the full game rather than incomplete ideas would have a better chance of winning of course. You can't design a game from an incomplete vision after all. (Maybe if you are working by yourself, but the idea is that others need to "see it" too!)

Now what would be a good motivator for such a contest. Ideas?