Scenario: My friends are some of the most creative and interesting people I know. We play role-playing games together all the time and in doing so we have thoroughly flexed our creative muscles to build worlds, concepts, and characters. We decided to hone these muscles a little more and have begun slowly, in our free time, conceptualizing a video game we'd like to build. Because we're also pretty busy people, we don't have much time to work on this, so I decided to run a workshop to rapidly develop a concept for our game. Our challenge was to create an intriguing and personal concept through collaborative ideation, and this open-ended nature fostered an environment where creativity and out-of-the-box thinking were highly present.
My Role: As Creative Director, my role is to steer the brainstorming, manage the flow of ideas, and ensure that all team members were actively involved. In the workshop, it was crucial to ensure we all felt encouraged to share our thoughts, feelings, and ideas freely, and that we examine and debate the idea to create something great.
We started out by performing a 'homemade' activity I called "Influence to Ideas." This exercise is designed to help us define what we want this game to be by examining what we enjoy playing and reflecting on work that has moved us.
It works like this:
Each team member lists “influences” like previous works (games, movies, shows, books etc.) or concepts (situations, things, environments, feelings etc.) that capture particular aspects of what they want this game to be within 7 themes.
These themes are as follows:
Together, we then cluster the influences under each theme to point out major similarities, themes, and help us better understand why these are the influences for our game. Then, as a group, we choose from these clusters to define our game through new ideas under each theme. These include (but are not limited to) short phrases to steer vision, elements of the game we want to build, and story points we want to include.
After we performed this exercise, we decided we wanted a story driven game with a main character. So we then started to build a “personality map” for our main character.
The purpose of this exercise is not only to define the personality of our main character, but put them in a scenario in the world we want to build so we can understand how they would react. Further, the activity defines the scenario itself, which helps us more clearly visualize and design the aesthetic of our world by “yes and”ing the situation.
It works like this:
Given this personality map and our Influences to Ideas board, we chose the following as our main themes, and have begun work on building out the plot, mechanics, story progression, and main character.
For the sake of my teammates sanity and so we don't share too much, I will not screenshot the storyboard. However, we are starting big picture, using Dan Harmon's story circle as a device to build out the main points. This works really well for this kind of high level development because it provides us "atomic" story cues, and answers questions like "well, what does the story of the main character moving out of their comfort zone look like?"
These activities helped us solidify the "vibe" of our games world, mechanics, and main character. This is only the first step, but within a few hours, we were able to come up with starting point to move forward with a direction for what we, as a group, want this game to be. Next steps to act on this direction includes:
Key Takeaways: Overall, this workshop served as a powerful testament to the benefits of collaborative creativity and diversity of thought among friends. It reinforced the importance of structure in guiding brainstorming sessions and showed how to manage and integrate diverse opinions and ideas effectively, and the exercises used in this workshop will undoubtedly serve as valuable tools in future sessions. I'm happy I get to spend this time with a group of people who really want to build something interesting and fun. It's been and will continue to be a great learning opportunity.
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