Language…
8 users online: Brian94, Brutapode89, Klug, Metal-Yoshi94,  Nanako, ShadowMistressYuko, TheOrangeToad, Tsquare07 - Guests: 233 - Bots: 288
Users: 64,795 (2,377 active)
Latest user: mathew

How do you come up with ideas

Im wondering how you guys come up with things such as level names, themes, overworld design, etc. Im having lots of trouble trying to think of themes for my hack. If you have ways to find themes and such what are they?
The thing with ideas is that there isn't any universal solution so no one may have come up with a response before. That being said, there are ways to find out potential ideas.

Let's start with general ideas:

Brainstorming: Brainstorming simply means you think of random works and try to use them for your thing you're trying to build. You then filter out which ideas work really well and which ideas only work great on paper.

Getting inspirations by others: While you might worry you'll just end up others, keep in mind that many works (not just hacks) are hardly purely original but took others from but also added new mechanics to differenciate from the source (from clones to genre).

It'll come at some point: Ideas will pop up randomly into your brain when you can't think of anything else. Not all ideas come in during the planning. In fact, there is even a specific sub-type of random ideas:

Experiment: If you look at some concept arts and prototypes of other games, you'll see that they sometimes really don't look like the end product. Instead, features were tried out and scrapped while in other cases, existing ideas had a lot of ways to expand.
Game Maker's Toolkit has got a great video where you can see some examples of this happening.


These are the more general ways to find ideas but.

Level design: You can just look around the ASM sections which gimmick would be interesting, to the graphics section on how the level might look like. Heck, even music might give you an idea how to design your level because many are specific to certain appearances and fit certain types of designs better than others.

Overworld: Overworld is generally build around the levels you have made. Sure, you may have planned some rough ideas on how many levels a world contains before as well as how many levels have got a general theme (e.g. grassland, ice and water) but inserting some level elements to the overworld will help you to finalise the overworld.

Lastly, level names: As a rule, level names tend to be the following: World Name X, something related to the level (either setting or gimmick) or just word salad. Level names may also contain a pun in it or any other stylistic choice (see the names in Yoshi's Island and Donkey Kong Country). Ultimately, it's good if you focus on the level names last since unless you want to give each level a unique name, these are very dependent on the level you're creating.
Thanks a lot, escpeccialy for the level names!