Brainstorming is necessary with all creative work. One way to make brainstorming work well is by listening to your subconscious and allowing it to voice its ideas and concepts. Allowing those ideas to come to flurision isn’t the goal the goal is to get creative thoughts going. The main thing is to take those weird and possibly off topic ideas and think about how they could work. This may create something majestic or it may create something to be thrown out, either way it allowed for the subconscious to be part of the creative process.
On top of using one’s sub-self there are some helpful tips on how to brainstorm effectively. Some are commonly used like to listen to yourself and record your ideas. Some are a little more out of the box as instincts don’t tell us this is the way to do the thing we want. So for instance in order to let oneself brainstorm with their subconscious one needs to maintain a decent amount of sleep and to maintain the needs of said subconscious. The needs of the subconscious is where things might get a little weird.
Don’t let your ideas or work be fragile. If it doesn’t work throw it out (or out of that project) and start over. There is a production cycle to follow when designing things. The cycle starts with and idea and moves on to building and testing the prototype(s) which is analyzed for problems and brought back to the designing stage for fixing and the cycle continues until the game is deemed finished. This cycle allows for the ideas to be played out and for there to be tests on how the ideas work or if they work. If the ideas are good and they come across then there is also the bug fixing, that is fixing small or sometimes large problems with the game such as missing textures or falling/clipping through objects.
Amanda Potts 