Howdy all

Not sure if there is anyone out there in or closely related to the game industry, but I have a question.

How does one put forth an idea for any games that they have? I'm sure that day in, day out they are inundated with countless upon countless suggestions on the next "Big thing!". What does one have to present and where does one send it, to actually be taken seriously?

I will admit, I do have an idea. I'm currently working on it and am in no way ready to submit it yet (I figure I have about 3 months worth of work just to get the back story and pseudo mechanics down pat), but would love to know in advance who I would have to talk to and how to protect myself from having my idea lifted.

I've flown this by a few people, and they seemed fairly responsive to it, but ultimately it doesn't amount to anything until you have something to present in a relatively whole form.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated. I'm not looking for anyone to do the work for me, but rather just to point me in the right direction.

The reason why I'm asking here? We seem to have quite a few people here with a passion for gaming as well as people that are quite knowledgable as to the inner workings of a lot of these companies that produce these games.

You'd do the same thing you'd do with any other invention to a point - your first stop would be at the Patent Trade Office.

Then you have to decide what your capacity is going to be. If you are going to come up with the concept and only the concept, you write it out in a proposal or sorta script for a video game. This would be fairly detailed and probably pretty long. This concept is already pattened - then you ship it off to the various publishing firms (there are thousands) you feel would be most likely to create your game. If it was a MMO for example, Sony or what have you. Likelyhood of them using your concept is only as strong as your concept is - they generally pay people to come up with ideas in house for a lot less than they'd buy your idea.

Should you wish to actually produce the game yourself, thats another step up and requires serious financial backing. You can find investors, use your own independant wealth, or you can mortage a home for a loan - though the obvious risks with all of these is conciderable. You'd hire a developer or team of developers on a contract (freelance or full time) to develop the game for you. Once the game is finished, you have a few steps you can go from there - you can team up with a company like Sony or Microsoft to distribute it ... or you can distribute it yourself via the web. Putting a game into a store like Wal-Mart is difficult if you're distributing it yourself. It will need to either be part of a successful series (Star Wars or something like that, a proven franchise) OR it already has proven commercial success (it sells well in another store - but that store is also not gonna take it unless it has proven commercial success). Web distribution and word of mouth is your only option here.

I liken it very much to the movie industry - only its a lot harder to make a good low budget video game than it is to make a good low budget film. Small successful companies sprout up all the time, but at the same time tons of small companies which sprouted up lack the success and fall apart.

While I'm not in the game industry myself, I've read that you really need to have a working demo or prototype for anyone to take you seriously. Apparently there is no shortage of ideas.

I keep reading that there are "suites" of software for MMO's that help get things moving along faster.

I guess I'm curious as to what types of software and/or languages would be best suited to this type of work. Obviously, myself having VERY little programming experience, would have to seek out others, but I guess every great journey starts with but a single step.

I'm not in the gaming industry at all, but I've managed somewhat similar projects in the past. Maybe this general info will help.

The end result will be coded in C++, almost without a doubt. Visual Studio is what you'll probably use to code and compile that, for a Windows platform. There are other options, but VS is probably the best.

I think the majority of developers use 3D Studio Max for their modeling. There are plugins for it to export models out to formats for various rendering engines. Textures are usually done in something like Photoshop.

If you wrote your own graphics engine, then you'd also want to look into the Direct3D SDK and the various tools to work with that. Unless the concept depends on it, I would say absolutely avoid writing an engine from scratch.

Really appreciate your input on this guys. I'm working on getting a copy of Visual Studio as we speak. I figure there's one way to learn and that's keep kicking at it till it works. Who knows? I might learn something!

Any suggestions on a guide to pick up that might help me along? IE: Preferred literature to start reading?

Expect to spend a boat load on Visual Studio...unless you find a local college giving classes on a basic .NET class. You could sign up for C# basic class and then the school will sell you a full blown version of Visual Studio for student cost...most likely free download or a couple bucks for the disks. I got mine for $13.

I'll be finishing up my B.S. in Computer Science this August. I took the Software Engineering route and it was a long journey. I didn't bother looking into game design, I'll be doing mostly buisness apps, but can tell you anything to do with Game Design = huge math skills. Linear Algebra, high level Calculous, and various other high level math classes. I know most of the Game Design majors usually are also Applied Mathmatic majors..they are fricken nuts.

I really have nothing to offer in terms of an answer to the original question, but......

This topic was being discussed once before among some folks I was gaming with, before some of the posters here were born, possibly, heh. We were playing "The Mines of Moria" on the Control Data Plato systems, and I was blown away almost every night that I could sit in Minnesota and t-type (tells) with someone in San Antonio that I was playing with at the time. The game was all line drawings, corridors/hallways, with line drawings of the mobs. White lines on black screen. There were four "zones", mountain, forest, desert and caves; each "zone" consisted of 60 levels, and we used to mail maps back and forth around the country as we mapped out the levels using graph paper and the secret doors, etc. There was also a safe area, where banking and character creation and so forth took place.

I thought back then (circa '83-'84) that this was like inventing the light bulb, it was so technologically advanced. Some of the folks though were talking about developing a game that was more three dimensional rather than the flat line drawings of our game, or "Wolfpack", a naval game. There was a pretty even split about why that could never be done, and we would debate for hours on how we had reached the pinnacle, or whether there would be more progress, and the games we loved would take new forms. And the companies making all the games now were pretty much non-existent at the time, at least as far as computer software went. And we never talked about COLOR!

I wonder how many of those old "Moria" players ever made it to Nintendo's Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and on to PC games like EQ....

Sorry for the semi-derail, but this really sparked some nostalgia.

Pretty much no game company will take "idea" submissions. I've worked in the industry, have a credit as a designer on Fallout and did art on some crappy Star Trek games. Your options are fairly limited since the industry tends to be fairly closed... lots of people just move around in the industry and getting in at a entry postion usually requires some beer time with current employees.

The primary way people end up getting their ideas made into a game is to get into the garbage entry level position (QA, Tech Support, Intern) and work your way up to a producer or designer position... and then have the possibility of your idea being turned down, but since you submitted it while working there, they now own it, unless you work some contract magic.

The other way is to build a prototype and then shop it around. The drawback to doing this is you need to have enough cash to fund a startup until you get a contract to produce the game.