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I helped write Doom and Quake, which means I hear "I have a great idea for a game" a lot, mostly from boys ages 9 to 39.

Great ideas for video games are extremely valuable. However, there isn't a market for them, so you can't actually sell them or license them. It's a silly contradiction, but there you have it.

If you have a brilliant idea, the thing to do is to make a game from it, and not a gigantic, expensive game, but a ridiculously simple game. If you go for gigantic expensive, I promise you that you will fail. This is as true for professional game developers as it is for amateurs.

New, clever ideas should be tested in smaller, humbler games with lower asset costs, because you need agility in your development procdess so that you can iterate on the gameplay, balance, and pacing. The more expensive your art and sound assets are, the less you can afford to modify your game until it's fun. And in today's market, fun trumps everything if your game has a demo. If it's not fun, you can be almost 100% sure they won't buy the game when they're done with the demo.

You can make extremely low-tech art look gorgeous, too. Look at Geometry Wars on the 360. That's based on vector art! That game broke even its entire development budget 6 days after release. From then on, it was all profit, and at a royalty rate of just shy of 70%, checks straight from Microsoft. Do the math on that. If you ship a game for $15, you take home $10. Doesn't require selling many units until you're fairly rolling in cash.

But the catch is that no one will buy your game, even for the modest price of $15, unless they're still addicted to it after having played the free demo for an hour or more.

And the key to making great games is NOT to make great pieces of great games. It's to get extensive experience with the complete production cycle of making great games, from concept to release.

This was the secret sauce to id Software. It's not widely known, but before they were famous for making 3D blockbusters like Doom & Quake, they were a little group of guys at a monthly subscription service called SoftDisk. They wanted to make games, but they were required to release a game every single month.

As you can imagine, this was incredibly challenging at first, and eventually, they got tired of the constraints from being forced to release every month. So they learned to re-use their technology and tools and to streamline their production pipeline so that the programmer could hand off a lot of the issues of balancing to the designer, for example.

By the time they spun off from this company, they were a well-oiled machine, and they had pioneered a way to make one of the fastest 2D scrolling engines on what were at the time bleeding-edge video cards- "VGA". And in fact, many of these techniques and tools were used even in their first 3D game, Wolfenstein, which due to the impressive re-use and extensive experience with the entire production cycle took roughly 6 months from concept to ship.

It is true that they had exceptional programming talent and brilliant artists, and odds are good your talent will be weaker, but you hedge that bet by using stronger high concepts, by finding untapped niche markets, by negotiating creative co-marketing deals.

Making games is no walk in the park, but it can be extremely creatively and financially rewarding if you do it right. Like anything, there is technique to a well-made game. Learn good habits in your game development process, and you're going to have a huge leg up on the competition.

Learn more about this author, Dave Taylor.
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