Design from head to paper

So many people have good (and sometimes great) game ideas. But if they only ever stay in your head, they'll remain only that - ideas!

Start getting comfortable with putting your thoughts on paper - physical or digital - as quick as possible.

Committing ideas to paper serves two strong purposes:

1) It gets your thoughts down onto tangible media that you and others can begin to appreciate and start offering feedback on, as well as critiques toward iterations and clarity.

2) It also provides you a continual reference to refer to without the clutter of other thoughts and ideas trespassing into your brain, which can cause loss of vision and distraction.

It can be a bit intimidating and difficult to write out or your thoughts, impressions and ideas, but it will start to create order and objectivity from an otherwise subjective or jumbled mess in your head.

Don't worry about the disorganized or non-linear way that you may write thoughts down. There will be time enough to organize and associate them later.

It's like pouring out puzzle pieces onto the table. Sure, it's disorganized, but at least there are objective pieces to reference, allowing you to bring them together in order to create a whole.

Ask any good designer. A pencil/paper or stylist/tablet are never far away and always accessible, so that when thoughts queue, they're equipped and ready to take it captive and jot it down before they fade.

So, get your ideas out of your head and onto paper quickly! Don't stress about the order in how they may be streaming, and keep it simple to start (so the devil stays out of the details) until you've established a good solid core allowing you a firm objective foundation to start platforming from.

It's not that tertiary ideas are bad, but until the main scope, fun factor, story or mechanics are template and realized, no amount of fluff or ancillary features are going to stand firm on a foundation that isn't there.