I generally talk a lot about making licensed games. That's what people typically know me for, and usually what I make the bulk of my income off of. But, during last year (after finishing Batman) and during lockdown this year, I've focused a lot more on original designs.

Granted, it remains to be seen which of those I'll actually be able to sell and get published, but that's where a lot of my creative energy went, so let's talk about sources of inspiration and why most ideas are basically worthless without the labor to implement them.

Inspiration for me comes from a lot of places. Sometimes I read a book or watch a cartoon and pull a concept from there, other times something in real life inspires me. Rarely, I've even dug deep to create games that are emotionally important to me, such as Android.

Inspiration usually hits me as emotion. The opening sequence of Laputa: Castle in the Sky was one of the very first animes I'd ever seen, and that was so breathtaking that a lot of creative energy for awhile went into trying (and failing) to recreate that feeling for others.

Other times I've been inspired by jealousy, or even anger. For me, there's something about experiencing deep emotions that gets my creative juices flowing like nothing else. An angry "I can do better than THAT!" is the source of more art than most people can imagine.

It's nice when more positive emotions inspire creativity, but there's no real good reason to turn down inspiration that comes from negative feelings. Often, working through an artistic idea is helpful in understanding and working through the emotions attached to it.

I'm sure a lot of you are thinking "Well, really, how much art is there in a boardgame design anyway? You schlep fancy math equations, don't get too full of yourself." and yeah, a lot of the thinking I do about a game never actually makes it into most of the games I design.

I often write pages and pages of material that never gets used. Themes, emotions, story ideas and nuggets, and how those things all interact with game mechanics. I throw a lot of it out because A) it sometimes doesn't work out, and B) I design games to be published and sold.

For me, because I'm designing for audience consumption (and professional publication) most of the time, a lot of thematic and emotional elements get pulled back and softened. I still think about and design around a player experience I've imagined, but I don't COMMUNICATE it all.

But I'm starting to digress a bit. I made a claim about the worthlessness of ideas without implementation, and I should talk about that some. See, ideas are a dime a dozen, and most of them are poorly suited to become a successful boardgame.

One of the skills a game designer needs to develop is the sense of "Will this idea make for a fun game experience?" And really, even seasoned pros will often be unsure of the answer to that until the first (or third, or fifth) playtest of the concept.

Every designer I know has thrown out more ideas than they've turned into actual games. Whether because the concept is too hard to work with, the play pattern isn't as fun as they imagined, or because they don't think there's a market for the idea.

And honestly, it's a lot of labor to take an idea and get it even to THAT stage. The "Okay, I guess this this a thing." stage. At this point, a savvy game designer has only created the most barebones structure - just enough to field test the idea in friendly circumstances.

That's because when part of your job is throwing away your bad ideas and working on your good ideas, you try to get faster and faster at spotting the bad ideas, which means less (wasted, and usually unpaid) labor invested into it.

After this point, you now have to do the bulk of the work still. There's always a ton of framework to fill in and then testing, refinement, testing, refinement, throwing away chunks, redesigning them, testing, refinement, collecting player input, redesigning, testing, etc.

By this point the idea you started with is either a tiny speck of what the game has become or has been changed or excised entirely during the process. There are exceptions, of course, but so often the beginning inspiration is just a starting point for a long and crooked road.

I guess the rambling point of this is that the idea is just the starting line, and by the time you've run the race, usually it has long since faded into the distance behind you.

For me, what I try to keep til the end of a project is that initial emotion behind the idea. That's the fuel for my fire. The worst projects are the ones where that emotion burns early on, and the best ones are where it stays strong all the way to the end.

Not everyone works the same way. But when I'm working, I spend time at the computer, trying to get into the right headspace - to summon up the right emotions, and then I'm off to the races. Sometimes a week of design will go at a snail's pace, then I'll have a good day and WOOSH.

Even understanding that, it's about putting in the hours and work. It takes time to get into that flow state, and any distraction can drag you out of it. So, I have to plop my butt in front of the computer for hours, hoping that it'll click, but knowing I have to work regardless.