Honestly, my first reaction was to post something snide and snippy, but I thought better of it walked away. But then I was interested in seeing how people had followed up, and I decided that I'll try to put on my constructive criticism hat. That said, I'm probably not known for mincing words, so try not to take any of the following as an attack.

First things first -- You put zero effort into the grammar, composition and formatting of your post. If *you* can't be bothered to present *your own idea* in the best light possible, no one here is going to take you seriously. You want perfect strangers to take valuable time out of their day to give you feedback, but it looks like you've spent all of 3 or 4 minutes feverishly typing, and that's it.

Next up, having read the whole thing, I'm not terribly confident that it would be all that more coherent, even with perfect composition and formatting. What you have now rambles, and yet somehow lacks any real content. You spend 600 words talking about superficial things where 3 well composed sentences would have conveyed as much information and gone a long ways to convincing me that you've actually spent the time thinking about this that you claim -- Which I have a hard time swallowing right now.

All you've given here is a shell, and not even a particularly promising one -- its the first 30 seconds of a poorly written hollywood teaser trailer butted up against a sequel-teasing plot-twist that doesn't live up to M. Knight. Shyamalan's retarded cousin on an off-day. Not only have you put the cart before the horse, you've somehow managed to get the whole contraption to jump the shark... backwards... too.

You don't do anything to give a sense of who the characters are -- neither the unnamed friend, nor Mike, whose nickname is apparently "Mikey". His nickname doesn't fucking matter, at this point, because there's absolutely nothing here that makes me want to learn anything at all about him.

You don't do anything to tell us what the gameplay will be like, other than vauge allusions to choices having consequences, which we've heard no less than a million-and-one times before. The best image that comes to mind is "Generic Half-Life Wannabe", having the kind of production value that only the finest former soviet-bloc programmers could produce on a budget equivalent to 3 liters of vodka and a sack of root vegetables.

What I'm driving at here is that there was nearly no substance to your post at all. There's literally just about nothing there. You say you've been mulling this idea for awhile, so why is this your grand reveal? Why did you waste so many words telling us nothing of importance? If you can't identify and concentrate on the important parts now, what hope have you to pull things together when there actually is a whole game in front of you?

Quote: Original post by sniper6
Mikey notices red clouds and that it is raining. His friend says that the weather has been odd recently.

Understatement of the century!
His friend is the evil guy who activated the weather machine. Am I right? [smile]

[Edited by - Konfusius on May 10, 2010 7:45:48 AM]

Quote: Original post by Metallon
Your game idea is more a story idea. There is extremely little gameplay information. This belongs in Writing more than Game Design.

I agree.

Normally I wouldn't respond openly to a private communication, but since the OP has aparently disappeared (or perhaps more likely, abandoned this username for a new one) and I spent a rather large amount of time on my response, I'm going to share it here in hopes of it closing out this thread with a few salient points that others may benefit from, or perhaps that the OP may even read it someday, seeing as how he doesn't seem to be checking his inbox.

Quote: Sniper6 via private message:
Thanks for jumping down my throat on my first ever post here. And yeas I did read thread on how to setup a post. Did it ever occur to you that maybe it's not easy for some people to get there thoughts and ideas from their head to paper and have it make sense? I doubt it did seeing as you had not one good thing to say about anything i had posted. I have been told for a long time that if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all. I didn't know grammar and spelling ment so much in a post but to apparently it does. Next time think before you act or type

Look, all that is well and good, but I'd like to point out that, while I was quite harsh, I also made it plenty clear where you had to improve things in order to present your ideas in a more paletable way. I'd also like to point out that, because I realized that you are new, I prefaced my response with what to expect from me and warned you not to take it personally. If I wanted to simply flame you and move on, I could have done that; as I even said, that was my first inclination before thinking better of it (that's the "if you don't have anything nice to say..." adage in action.)

What I ended up giving you may have been a bitter pill, but there was plenty of constructive criticism there, even if its not in it's usuall overly-nice, flowers and gumdrops, everything's okay form everyone else seems to hand out.

Ostensibly, you posted your idea on this site in order to solicit feedback to help you flesh things out. This isn't a site where one can post an idea and expect only positive feedback, if that's what you want, there are plenty of 1-900 numbers you can call where the person on the other end will tell you anything you want to hear for only 99c per minute, but you don't get to pick the type of feedback you get here, or in any other public forum -- electronic or otherwise. The ability to take even harsh criticism in stride, and then use that feedback to refine things further is a necessary skill in your desired field.

If you want to become a game designer, or even any part of a game development team, you need to to be able to communicate ideas and concepts clearly. If putting thought to paper is really that much of a hurdle for you, then you need to work to improve that very vital skill now. Unless you plan to work all your life with your two best friends, who share the kind of mind-meld that only best friends can have after growing up joined at the hip, then you're going to have to be able to not only explain your designs to brand new people, but to sell them on it being a good idea as well.

Everything about your communication is important -- poor formating, composition and grammar is distracting at best, and makes you look incompettant at worst. Overall good composition presents you as someone who has done their homework and paid their dues toward this idea and that is absolutely necessary if you want people to donate their valuable time to respond to your pitches. You should take a great deal of care in making what you post concise, clear, and to present the important core ideas rather than useless detail and trivia -- In short, make it easy to digest, and don't distract with unimportant things; to do anything less is actually disrespectful of everyone else's valuable time.

Another reason your "design" -- which, for the mostpart I'd call a pitch -- felt so flimsy is that nothing fit together. Everying is disjoint and so it feels like a collection of small ideas loosely thrown together in this basket you call a game. Perhaps that's because you haven't enumerated the entire design for us, but usually even a portion of the mysterious whole will display a greater degree of cohesion naturally if the whole possesses it as well. The whole should always feel greater than the sum of its parts -- if it doesn't you have a big problem. This cohesion is what makes a game seem real and makes it enjoyable.

Take a look at one of my favorite game series, Halo -- It brought almost nothing new to the table, in fact, the only original gameplay element it had was the fact that you could only carry two weapons. Space Marines had been done to death, vehicles had been done before, none of the weapons were especially unique. So what made it go on to be one of the biggest franchises ever? Setting aside multi-player, which is of course a huge reason for its longevity and popularity, its the fact that the sum of its parts results in a much greater whole -- all the gameplay elements work together to present a cohesive gameplay experience that is fun, unique, and presents the player with interesting strategic choices. On top of that, the world of Halo is so wide and fleshed out that it's spawned 5 games already, with more on the way, a compilation anime, an entire book series, and in all liklihood will one day see a movie or series of movies. Even simple puzzle games with no backstory at all have a degree of cohesion to their elements that forms a greater whole -- in fact, this is the concept that all pure puzzle games are founded upon -- look at lumines, chess, or othello, where a few simple rules yield deep strategies.

I'd even suggest that as an exercise to you -- take an existing game, something simple -- maybe pac-man or puzzle fighter -- and break it down to its core elements: identify gameplay elements, potential strategies, contrast character traits, identify themes and story arcs if applicable, and then try to write up a few pages to present the game in a really exciting and insightful fashion -- imagine that the game never existed and you were pitching it to a publisher. If you can do that, that's the kind of document you should be creating for your own game designs. Further, you'll have developed the skill of thinking about games critically, rather than simply as a player, which is possibly the number one skill any wannabe game designer needs to have (imagination is a talent, but this is the skill required to hone your imagination to a razor's edge.)

This is my honest and truthful criticism for you. I hope you find it constructive, and carry it with you. These are the things that you need to master as a game designer if you hope for any form of success. At the end of the day, no one is going to hire you into a position that exists mearely to make you feel good about yourself. You will, and should, be challenged daily over your design decisions, and you need to be able to take that heat without burning up. I think you'll find, however, that the more consistant and cohesive your designs are, that you will recieve less and less criticism, and see more happily nodding heads. The best offense is sometimes a good defense -- the fewer kinks in the armor, the less opportunity there is for attack, so make your shit solid, and know your design-fu.

I'm going to close this now, since it's clearly not going anywhere useful. Ideally I would like all posts in this forum to have good spelling, grammar, paragraph breaks, etc, and also have some interesting ideas showing that the poster has devoted both logic and creative energy to their topic. Also ideally, I would like all posts in this forum to be polite, and all posters to give and receive criticism in a calm, friendly way.