M1W4 – Rapid Ideation 1 (Pt. 1)

The Big Reveal

The theme for the first week of rapid ideation (RI) was revealed in the webinar on Wednesday 17th February 2021. We had been told up front there would be two elements to it.

The first element was revealed as a Dixit card¹ as shown below.

The second element was more open-ended and allowed us to choose an article from a news site to accompany the Dixit card. The news article could be about anything at all.

Initial Ideas

Upon seeing the card I had some ideas straight away, but was worried about how I could/would marry this up with a news article. Putting that to one side I decided to concentrate on the image and hope inspiration hit me for the new article later.

Straight away the image struck me as being ambiguous, in that it could be construed as good or evil in my eyes, so either an angel or a demon.

Based on this I started using mind mapping to throw ideas down using Miro, which is a tool I know and use regularly. The final mind map is shown further down, and shows both halves of the story; the Dixit card and the news story, but to begin with I started only detailing the left hand side.

Fortune

Whilst still worrying about the news story I had a stroke of luck. I use Google Alerts for a number of things, but one of them is for conspiracy theories, as although I disagree with pretty much all of them, what the human mind can conjur up does interest me, so based on the monolith that mysteriously appeared last year I set up alerts for monolith stories and on Monday 22nd February 2021 this news story ² popped up in my alerts. I had my news story.

Using this story I started to populate the right hand side of my mind map, again just throwing down ideas.

Linked Entities

Whenever I use the mind mapping method of ideation, if there are multiple “starting points” as there are here, I always try and link commonalities between the themes, which is what I did here. From the mind maps below, you will see I have closed links either within a theme, or between themes. Where I hit a “dead end” these are shown in red.

Planning

Once I had a mind map in place the idea was to create a Game Outline Document (GOD) which I normally do before creating a prototype.

This is usually just a short 2-3 page document outlining the game/application idea and listing any Unique Selling Points (USP’s) it may have. I find this helps formalise my ideas further.

The Idea?

The plan that formed, from my mind map was to write an old school horizontal shoot ’em up, but with a bit of a difference. Based on the fact the Dixit card was ambiguous I was going to allow the player to play as good or evil. Good would be a traditional left to right scrolling game, where the player was ascending from Hell to Heaven using monoliths to help transport them. Choosing evil would see the player moving the other way, right to left, in an attempt to traverse from Heaven to Hell.

Analysis

I certainly spent too long worrying about the news story, and I think I was quite fortunate that one fell into my lap.

And again, I stayed well within my comfort zone by using mind mapping for the ideation. It’s a tool I’ve used for many years and am comfortable with. In hindsight, we were asked to step out of our comfort zone. I didn’t.

1. Libellud.com. 2021. Dixit – Libellud. [online] Available at: <https://www.libellud.com/dixit/?lang=en> [Accessed 19 February 2021].
2. Artnet News. 2021. In Other News, Mysterious Monoliths Keep Appearing All Around the World, With 200 Reported Sightings to Date | Artnet News. [online] Available at: <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-monolith-still-appearing-1945207> [Accessed 23 February 2021].