May 2014: Game Design Practice

Hello, and welcome to May 2014's topic, Game Design Practice!

I just wanted to make sure everyone knew about the IGDA Game Design SIG's new Weekly Design Challenges on Reddit.  Every Sunday, a new design challenge goes up.  I hope you all will participate.

As with Game Design Aspect of the Month, the idea behind the weekly design challenges is to inspire you and to get you thinking about game design issues.

It's good practice to expand an idea, write it on paper, and try to make it feasible.  There have even been GDC talks from designers who mapped out a game design idea each day for a year.  It's the first step to realizing your idea rather than just talking about it.  It's often said of writers that we don't always have the luxury to wait around for inspiration to hit.  To be a writer, one has to write.  And a game designer, as we have tried to relay, is not the person who sits around telling people ideas for great games, but someone who has the skills to create and fine-tune games so that they can be great.

So for May 2014, I'd like to learn more about your practice and your inspiration for games.  How do you work out your ideas for games?  Do you go straight to prototyping?  I remember a talk from GDC where the designer talked about exhaustive historical research before even approaching what might be a cool mechanic to be in the game.

As always, submission guidelines along with submission procedure can be found on the right hand side of the blog.  Topic suggestions and articles are welcome!