Interesting topic.
Been reading through several of the posts and notice that the discussion mostly focuses on ideas and how to translate them into a game. I'm not sure however that this is the most important focus, as in many cases there will be a big difference between your initial idea and the final game.
I would therefore suggest the following:
- Walk around, explore, take notes in all sorts of areas until you find an idea you find appealing
- Avoid wanting to create the Nth version of an existing game. A trap many indie game developers seem to fall into... (unless you're just doing it for fun)
- Find a great team of people with complementary skills and a desire to get things done. You will rarely as a single person have all the skills required
to create something great (storytelling, playability/motivation & UX design, programming, graphic design)
- Create a very basic first version to demonstrate the basic game mechanics and get out there to test with as many different people as possible in your target audience
- Learn by these tests, improve and iterate until you have a game which people find great
The main issue I find, is to find people to create a great team, as it involves:
- Finding the right skills (that's not the most complicated part)
- Finding people who get on well and truly commit to the project (can sometimes be an issue)
- Finding people with an entrepreneurship mindset, who agree to work on a project without any immediate revenue (I find this is often difficult to find, as
people with true skills will often already be freelancing on a variety of projects and may not want to commit several months to a project with the uncertainty
linked to projects at an early stage)
Any thoughts?