From Idea To Empire: The Art Of IP Development

A Fundamental Framework For IP Development: Part 4

2006-02-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

Imagination and organization are valuable skills to have. They allow you to fashion and fathom the world around you. Yet organized ideas alone are not enough to effect change. Bringing ideas from the page to the stage still takes hard work. Many artless upstarts are intimidated by the prospect of facing challenges— and worst of all failure—in the effort to bring their ideas to life. The more you understand about the development process, however, the more you’ll find that much of the perceived difficulty resides solely in our minds.

This next segment will outline the most extensive element of the IPD framework—the development and construction of ideas.

Development: Constructing Ideas

“Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about”

-Ashleigh Brilliant

When it comes to implementing your idea there are three basic routes you can take:

A.) You can spend most of your time designing/planning the idea in great detail;

B.) You can jump right into implementing the idea with little to no design work; or

C.) You can balance design with implementation; shifting from one to the other based on the task at hand.

C is the ideal you’re striving for here; it allows you flexibility and with experience you’ll learn to identify when things need to be designed and when they don’t.

However, if it’s your first project outing, I would suggest spending time getting comfortable with designing and planning your work; as a lack of planning seems to be the predominant cause of problems during the later stages of development. I will continue into the phases of the construction process with this design-oriented approach in mind.

Regardless of the path you choose, if you are just starting out, there is one maxim that you must abide by: Start small. Finish something. Move on.

Do yourself a favor; get through the process a few times before working on your pride and joy. Your ultimate idea, that’ll probably take forever, will surely kill you should you attempt it fresh out of the gates. Take the time to nurture your skills by developing many small ideas with limited boundaries.

For instance, say you want to write stories. Well try to avoid the epic space operas until you’ve at least managed a few short stories fairly well. In music, what sense does it make to attempt a 30-page classical symphony when you haven’t even composed a song for a single page? Don’t worry. The time will come when you can realize all of your grand visions. But attempting to create the ultimate IP at this point would be as effective as trying to speak a sentence before you even know the words.

So here, let me teach you the words.

The 6 phases of constructing an idea are: Concept, Blueprint, Flesh, Specs, Draft, and Final.

Concept

The first phase of development begins with establishing your vision. Without the end goal to strive for you are apt to wander in obscurity; never certain about what you are doing and where you are on your way to doing it. Although unguided exploration and development are important sources of innovation and unexpected novelty, they are no substitute for goal setting. Setting goals and giving ideas direction is how you practically get things done.

Giving An Idea Purpose

The point of scribing and storing so many ideas during Conception and Gestation is to increase the chances of you being inspired to develop at least one of them. Go ahead and index through a few of your ideas and pick one you think you’d like to work on.

Upon your selection, there is a question that you should ask yourself about the idea: Why do you want to do it?

Are you using it as a skill building project? Are you trying to target a specific market and this idea just happens to fit into that mold? Or is it something that genuinely excites and intrigues you? Why do you want to spend your time developing it?

It’s a simple question, but a very important one to answer at this stage; before you’ve put in the time and energy to work on it.

The end goal and your unwavering passion to reach that goal are the primary constitutes of the concept phase. Without them, your motivations are questionable and your path irresolute.

I’ve started more than a few projects with fresh enthusiasm only to have it quickly sour into mediocre indifference. This was mainly because I did not really consider why I wanted to work on the idea and if it was something I even really cared about. Avoid this mistake by making sure the idea truly interests you.

>> Note

As you work on your idea, it will most likely change; this is just a normal part of its growth and development. Your goals, however, seldom change and if they do, then they should have been considered further in the first place.

Your first task then is to take an idea and give it a solid objective—I want to write an adventure story about my Character X— and to make sure you really care about that objective. If it’s not that important to you, then move on to the objective that is. That’s the one you’ll want to develop towards.

The Vignette

After you have thought about and decided on the direction you want to take, briefly outline the idea in minimal detail focusing on the core feeling, value, and objective of the idea; I call this the vignette.

The vignette takes different forms in different mediums; such as a thumbnail sketch in art, a hypothesis in science, or a one page story summary in writing.

>>Example

At the Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (D.I.C.E.) summit this year, Fumito Ueda explained how he communicated the vision of “Shadow of the Colossus” and “ICO” by making movies using CG graphics, which showed the feeling and style of gameplay he was going for. This is a more advanced level use of the vignette as a prototype for a concept.

Here’s another example of an intermediate level vignette that uses audio and video to convey the mood and basic idea of the concept:

The Mourning Star (5 MB)

At this stage, the concept gets its first review and is either green lighted or rejected depending on how you feel about it. If you find yourself even more excited and passionate about its execution then congratulations, you have just completed the first step towards bringing your concept to life.

Blueprint

After you have vignetted your concept you are ready to start thinking about the high-level details. You know what you want your concept to be, but what exactly does it entail? The blueprint phase is where you will need to figure that out.

Labeling The Parts

Take a moment and look around the room you are sitting in right now. It’s probably full of furniture and objects. Examine them a bit closer. Those objects are made up of many different parts and those parts are made up of even more basic materials; tempered in a certain way to serve a specific purpose, in the composition of the whole.

Your concept is the same. You simply need to deconstruct it and label all the basic parts and pieces.

If you are writing a story, then briefly outline and describe the beginning, middle, and end in bullet point form. If you are designing a game, list and skim over all the gameplay systems that make up the game—e.g. combat system, navigation, camera movement, etc.—;flowchart them to show how they relate to one another. For manga, sequential artwork, or animation, create a series of key images that capture the visual essence of the entire scene or script.

>>Example

Here is an example of a blueprint for a game:

Seda:X² Concept Document (8 MB)

Developing this sort of blueprint takes your concept to the next level, creating depth and giving you a comprehensive snapshot of the final work.

Arranging The Pieces

Because the blueprint gives you a top down view of your concept, it is also an ideal stage to experiment with the arrangement of your work. Modifying the arrangement of elements in any composition can drastically change their combined meaning and effect. Therefore you can cut and paste, copy or crop your concept in various ways to see if there are more interesting orchestrations for it.

>>Example

In an art sketch, you could move subjects around to create more negative space; in a game you could eliminate some gameplay systems and create emphasis on others; or for writing, you could change the point at which your story starts, allowing it to unfold in a completely different manner.

Changes to the blueprint are broad and sweeping. With a twist here and a turn there, you might very well end up with something completely incomparable to your original idea. But hey, who is to say you can’t develop them both?

Project Notebook

Just as you used a notebook to help you compile all your ideas into one place, you can similarly focus your notes, writings, and explorations concerning your concept into one area. Having a central project notebook just makes the development process easier to manage and you won’t have to worry about forgetting where you wrote down the research notes and details of system X for your game.

Your project notebook can take any form—a named folder on a digital recorder— as long as it allows you to group all the information related to your concept.

The power of blueprinting allows you to focus on the flow and unity of the concept. This assures that as you continue to zoom deeper into more and more layers of details, you don’t lose site of the underlying structure, which holds it all together. You will be referring back to your blueprint often so take care to make it accessible.

The next phase will show you how to rear your blueprint from its elementary state to a semi-final form.

Flesh

Once you have finished blueprinting your concept, you should have a basic skeleton in place, ready to be expanded into a detailed design. The flesh phase is where you will take the many parts of your blueprint and focus on each as if it were a blueprint of its own; this consequently advances the entire concept towards its completion.

Fleshing out all the individual components of your blueprint is the second most time consuming task in IP development; outside of implementation. But if you have mastered the Conception and Gestation elements, it is a relatively painless process. It all comes down to generating ideas, solving problems, and making decisions that make sense.

Ideation 102

As you flesh out your blueprint you will find yourself running through an incomplete maze with cliffs and broken ledges around every corner. These are the routes that now need your creative attention.

While you may have developed a vague sense of how the maze works in your blueprint, you must now add the details that bring each hall into its own right (i.e. if I’m doing a painting of a woman holding an apple, I can start creating ideas for each element in the composition— the apple will be purple and the dress of the woman holding the apple will be white).

This is also a good time to refer back to your idea notebook for general ideas that can be used to help you flesh out your project.

Solving Problems

There are many problems that can originate from the goal guiding your blueprint, such as the practicality of the design or feasibility of the concept. These issues tend to arise from the inexperience of the creator who is attempting something in a craft they know nothing about. Problems like these require knowledge of or research into your craft (see The Importance of Research heading below).

If you are new to your craft, learn the basics first and work on an idea within your capabilities. Once you have completed it, you can move on to more advanced projects.

The kinds of problems that I most often encounter usually arise from a logic or artistic conflict between the various parts of the blueprint.

Logic Conflict-I might have Character A’s backstory worked out in full detail, but then I change the history of his hometown or introduce Character B’s backstory and it forces me to revise Character A’s details in order for the story to make sense. This is an example of a logic conflict between elements.

Artistic Conflict-An artistic conflict could be something like Character A’s backstory being too cliché or perhaps his supporting cast being a bit too bizarre for the story. These are matters of personal taste where the conflict is between what you are going for and what you have actually designed.

You must take the time to reconcile and modify these high-level components. But if you recall, changing one thing in the blueprint causes a domino effect of change and hence the nature of problem solving involved at this stage of development.

Sometimes solving the problem just comes down to you making a decision and running with it. Just make sure that you work to resolve all the issues until you are completely satisfied with the results. If you need a little help with your choices, gather early feedback from your peers or conduct some research relating to the decision in question.

The Importance Of Research

Conducting research involves finding accurate information on a subject in order to help you flesh out the various parts of your blueprint. It can also involve studying and examining a specific subject to gather insights into the workings of it.

>>Example

Painters tend to conduct extensive studies on the various objects in their composition, reading about its details or observing how it reflects light so that they can better consider how to represent it in the picture. Other disciplines use similar methods.

A writer, for instance, working on a story that has a drag racing element, will want to find out how such events are conducted and all of the people involved in making it happen. A musician might compile a CD of reference material to help him pinpoint the qualities and feelings he is looking to incorporate into his own work.

The examples are endless and you can tell when someone has put in the extra time to add the essential details to their production, via researching or studying it.

Many are turned off by the idea of research, however, and so they hack together something that’s within the realms of their own limited knowledge. The results are usually less than impressive, seeming shallow and basic. In the worst case, their understanding of the subject is totally flawed and causes all sorts of logic conflicts in the IP. Would you want the foundation of your house built by someone who didn’t do their homework?

Also, because they didn’t explore the material, they are not aware of all the color it may contain. They may miss out on applying something interesting to their work that could accent it perfectly or create a sense of wonder and awe about the subject in the observer; which could add power and subtly to their creation.

Don’t be put off by research. Besides being informative and enlightening, research can also be quite fun, depending on the subject you are reading up on.

The thing to be careful about when applying research to your work is to make sure you only apply the information that helps support your concept. Too much detail is dangerous and you must pick and choose what you will use carefully; emphasizing some topics and subordinating others.

Finding Information To Research

There are two main ways that I conduct research. The first way is to seek out general information if the subject is new to me or I have very limited knowledge about it. The second way is to search for very specific information about a subject I have some comprehension about.

For the first method, I always look for material that outlines the basics of the subject so that I can understand the fundamental topics that comprise it. This also allows me to explore more layers of complexity and subtly later on.

The second method is employed once I know a little about the topic and need to find out how specific parts of it work. This method takes a bit longer usually as the more specific detail gets, the more it references other subjects that you, in turn, have to grasp to a degree necessary to understand the original material you are researching.

>>Example

When I had to create a coal mining city for a story, I first researched everything about mines and coal cultivation and production. From there, I was led into details about minerals, elements, molecules, and facts about coal and its uses.

Each subject would branch out to another, which I then had to research until it all finally came full circle and I understood the subject. This allowed me to add unique twists and creatively fabricated details that felt genuine and made sense in the story. It also gave me another conversational piece to exploit should I come across the odd miner or expert in minerals.

As far as places to find information, google.com, Wikipedia.com, and the internet, in general, are great resource for finding basic information on a wide variety of subjects. A library—more specifically, a book— is the way to go when it comes to comprehending vast amounts of details on a given topic. Or, if you happen to know someone who studies, teaches, or practices a subject, ask them questions about it and find out where they suggest looking.

However, nothing beats experience. If your subject is something that you can do or try out for yourself, by all means go for it. You can read about how it feels to ride a rollercoaster or observe others all you want, but that won’t give you the kind of comprehension and detail you could gather by riding one yourself.

Once you have fleshed out your blueprint you will have an elaborate edifice that can stand on its own. The only tasks remaining are to tie it all together and revise it to its final form.

Specs

In most cases you can jump directly from the flesh phase to the draft phase. However, there is another optional phase of development, which is standard in many disciplines, that involves developing every element of the blueprint down to the finest level of detail. These details are called specs (short for specifications).

The specs phase involves the exact same elements as the flesh phase, only to a much greater degree.

>>Example

In game design, specs are needed to assure that the lowest-level of detail in a system has been thought through on the page or tested through a prototype. So if I were designing a combat system, I would have to detail not only the components that make up that system, but also showcase and detail the actual implementation of those components. You can find an example of a spec document for a game combat system here:

Seda:X² Attacks Document (3 MB)

To use music as an example, I might have all the details of my song worked out, but the actual, mechanical way I plan to play each note or series of notes would be a specification.

Unless you are trained to see it, you would not normally notice the specs phase in the development of your concept, because it usually comes to you in the form of the last minute decisions that you make during implementation. It is the same process, only here it becomes a focus of its own.

Draft

Once you have fleshed out all the elements in your concept, you need only to bridge the gaps between them and smooth things out a bit. The draft phase will be your first unified implementation where all the parts are finally drawn together—seams showing.

Bridging The Gaps

Depending on the final form your concept takes, the details of how you have to design, build and complete it will vary. I will use art, music, and game design as an analogy for further explanation.

>>Example

The pencil drawing or under painting is the initial draft of an artwork, reach logically from the thumbnail sketches and composition studies created during the concept, blueprint, and flesh phases.

In music, after each individual verse, chorus, and instrument has been determined, the various parts are combined in their proper order and at the right tempo, to create the rough draft of the song.

Finally in game design, once all the systems have been defined and prototyped, they are weaved together through programming, creating the first complete version of the game, known as the Alpha.

You’ll know you have bridged all the essential gaps that exist when you can experience your concept from beginning to end without any jarring breaks or incomplete segments affecting how it flows. While it might not be as nice as you would like it, it’s all there.

Validation and Alignment

At this point you can see where your creation is headed. Does it match your initial vision and goal? What’s missing? Where are the weaknesses or imbalances and how will you fix them?

This step may require you to return to flesh things out a bit more, ask questions that you hadn’t considered previously, or maybe even make changes to the blueprint and run through the entire process again (hence the importance of starting with something small and manageable, as aligning the draft to the vision can become extremely time consuming).

The key is to make certain that all of the elements work together to accomplish your end goal; the ones that don’t should be changed or eliminated.

Once your draft has been validated and aligned with its initial goal and purpose—or has at least reach a satisfactory outcome— you can at last move on to the final phase of the IP development process; the point where your idea finally gets actualized in full glory.

Final

The final phase of IP Development involves a three step routine of gathering feedback, reviewing the IP, and making revisions.

Gathering Feedback

Let’s say you’ve been working on your project for a long time now and are familiar with all the ends and outs of it. You feel that you have covered all the bases and that it all makes sense. That is, until you expose it to the outside world for feedback and it is ripped to shreds with constructive (and sometimes unconstructive) criticism.

Unfortunately, because you are so close to your project, you are liable to take a lot of things for granted. This is why gathering feedback is important. If you have designed your project so that it can be understood, used, or enjoyed by other people, then you should hear what they have to say about it—there’s a great chance that you will learn a few things in the process or at least find areas of your work to tighten up on.

Don’t take feedback personally. Just take it. Even if you feel the person is just being spiteful and silly, or they have the nerve to talk, don’t let that bother you one bit. It’s just feedback. Nod your head, thank the person, and compile it with the rest of the feedback you have collected for an objective review later on.

If they ask you about the feedback they gave you, or what you think. Simply say:

“I don’t think about it yet. I just take it in and review it later, along with the other feedback. I consider everything. If it has a valid point and helps me reach my goal, then I will use it.”

Believe me, you’ll avoid so many needless discrepancies and ego clashes if you are able to take feedback well.

If you feel there has been a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of your work, then you can feel free to explain the reasoning behind your decisions; though you might be more interested in figuring out how it was misinterpreted in the first place.

Just keep in mind, all ideas, no matter how great, must be tempered and gathering feedback is one of the primary ways to identify some of their shortcomings.

Reviewing and Revising

Every change you make will alter the project a bit and so it must be reviewed and validated each time. The steps in the final phase for validation and review are the same as during the draft phase. Take a breather from the project after making a change and then comeback to review it with fresh eyes, smoothing out any issues that crop up.

It is also beneficial to version, number, or tag your revisions so that you can distinguish between the older versions and newer ones. Sometimes you may make a change that you later regret, but as long as you have your older versions on hand, you can refer back to them for the dated information. This is another example of how to make your ideas accessible.

Revising and reviewing are the last steps in the development phase; usually, the more time spent here polishing, the better the end result will be.

Live and Learn

You could choose to revise and polish forever, but at some point you need to call it quits and move on to your next big idea. Before you do that though, it’s a good time to consider what you have learned and how, if you had to do it all again, you might progress about doing it differently.

This information can help you improve any projects that you may work on in the future. It is also a great way to share your experience with others through what is known as a Postmortem. You can find an example of a postmortem for the video game “Fable” here.

There’s no better time to start learning from your mistakes than now. And after years of compound experience from all of your IP development, you will have devised your own system for dealing with the tough issues that arise during the development phase. Who knows, you might even dedicate a blog to it. I do.

The development process is long and arduous, but seldom can more joy be found in a result than in the completion of one’s own vision. With time and practice comes ease. And though you may spend your first days crawling through the journey, you shall eventually learn to walk. Master the walk and you can begin to run. Surpass the run and you may finally dance about with majesty and grace for all to see.

The next segment will outline the many ways that you can take your final production and deliver it to the world.

-Sage

A Fundamental Framework For IP Development: Part 3

2006-02-13T07:59:00.000-08:00

Getting ideas flowing is the first step in any Intellectual Property (IP) development process. It is a skill that you will constantly find yourself returning to at every step of the development phase for every little thing (i.e. story ideas, scene ideas, character ideas, location ideas, backstory ideas, weapon ideas, dialogue ideas, etc.). Therefore, it is important to have a system in place for recording, storing, and managing all of those ideas. This part of the IP development framework will outline a system for doing just that.

Gestation: Managing Ideas

“Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not the cause of it.”

–Jeff Hawkins

Working with students and independents, as well as with professionals, has really helped me fine tune my ability to identify disorder. Over the course of a week, I’ll hear quite a few ideas that my friends and colleagues run by me for review. Here the objective is to communicate their grand vision in as few words as possible. If their idea sounds interesting, I’ll start asking them essential questions about it to help them flesh it out more.

However, one of the problems that often occur at this stage of ideation is the lack of direction and purpose. It seems that the visionary has less of a grasp on their idea and more of a sense about the emotions, feelings, and awesomeness of their idea, even though they have yet to conceive a solid premise for it.

An example of this would be someone telling me they have a great idea for a game about ants. I say,”Cool, how does it work?” The usual answer is “I dunno. Maybe you build colonies or ‘something like that’. It just seems like an interesting thing to make a game about.” Fair enough. The idea is just something they have in mind; it has yet to be seriously considered for further securitization and development, never mind being written down.

Like wisps of smoke in a room of open windows, many good ideas are doomed to dissolve into thin air due to people’s unwillingness to manage them (most of the time it’s just pure laziness). But as most things in life, this symptom stems from their unfamiliarity with the concept. Simply put, no one has ever told them to write their ideas down or given them a valid reason for doing so. Here I intend to not only convince you of its validity, but to give you a structure to help you through the process.

The four phases of managing an idea are: Recording Ideas, Storing Ideas, Categorizing Ideas, and Making Ideas Accessible.

Recording Ideas

Inspiration, if you recall, is one of the most fundamental factors in developing an idea. However, inspiration alone does not lead an idea to total fruition. Sometimes when you have an idea, it will come at the strangest times in the strangest places and you really will not have time to consider it in depth. Writing it down when you have it, however, is one of the ways to salvage it and allows you to constantly be reminded of it every time you see it. This simple act will eventually lead to its full development.

By writing the idea down, this at least assures you will not lose the idea; it also allows it to re-inspire you at a later time. Even if you are not sure how you can put it to use yet, simply record it anyway. Ideas have the power to change as you’re perspective changes; an idea you wrote down several years ago could seem trite or brilliant to you now, based on your constantly varying perception of life.

Wherever you are, no matter what you are doing, you must arm yourself with a pen and something to write on. Ideas ambush. Sometimes they raid. If you are not prepared, you may lose the chance to capture those rare instances of genius forever…

I usually keep an index card, some sticky notes, or a folded sheet of typing paper and a standard ink pen on me at all times. Even in instances where, for some reason, that’s just not possible, or I forgot, then I will find one in my immediate area (dinner napkins or receipt paper from the store are satisfactory) should an idea strike.

In certain crafts this can be a trickier task. In music, for instance, I can come up with a great melody in my head, but I may have no formal way of recording it (assuming that I don’t know how to read or write sheet music). A digital voice recorder is a great tool for situations like this. But for those without one, you’ll need to find more creative ways for scribing such ephemeral ideas.

In the past, I would call my house and sing the melody on my answering machine and then as soon as I got home, I would play the notes on my keyboard and store them there for later review and expansion. There are always ways of getting your ideas onto the page; do your best to find them.

Storing Ideas

While paper napkin sketches are ok for capturing an idea when it comes, you will eventually find yourself overwhelmed with scrap sheets of paper that chaotically spew from every desk drawer orifice. Thus establishing a central repository for your many inspirations becomes the next concern.

Tools such as a digital recorder or a keyboard are technologies that I welcome. Not only do they allow you to record new inspiration, but they also give you the means to organize and preserve many different instances of it.

Unmanaged Ideas…

For most ideas though, a standard notebook is suitable for compiling all of your material. It has pages that you can quickly index and it is also easy to categorize and mark sections off with sticky tabs or notes. If you are an artist, a sketch book is a great equivalent. Word processors or blogs are just as fine a place to compile ideas; their flexibility and accessibility can save lots of time when you get into the development process.

The thing to be careful about with digital idea compilation is to make sure that you constantly back up your material with multiple copies being stored in different locations. There is little worse than losing seven years of great ideas due to a computer crash or losing a CD-ROM case with all your backed up material in it; both of which I unfortunately had to experience.

Idea Notebook Preparing For Compilation.

There are a few things that you should consider about your idea notebook when you buy it—mainly its quality and ease of use. A one-dollar, spiral bound notebook from the grocery store is probably not the best way to go. I suggest finding a nice, tightly bound composition notebook that has durable paper and can hold ink well —such as a Five Star Mead notebook. You want to be able to preserve your ideas for life, right? Well then, spend the few extra bucks; it’s an investment.

Once you have your idea notebook, personalize it to your tastes. I suggest at least writing your contact information on the inside cover just incase you leave it somewhere (which you shouldn’t, because that would be a form of child abuse). Start fresh with an idea on the first page, or feel free to have an introduction to the book; maybe you want to compile specific ideas in it. I tend to name my idea books and give them introduction summaries that I can always return to and laugh at later on.

Categorization

As you compile your ideas into your notebooks, at some point you’ll want to begin categorizing them.

When I first started out, I made the mistake of assuming most of my ideas were unique and unrelated, so I never thought of categorizing them in general terms. Safe to say, it would take me forever to rummage through my notebooks and find generic things such as character name ideas.

Discernable patterns exist in all of nature, especially in thought and ideation. You simply have to pay attention to the overall collection of ideas you are shelling out and create a vocabulary for categorization that works for you, based on your personal thought process.

I try to keep my process as simple as I can, heading each idea with a light bulb and a marker such as “Character Idea”, “Name Idea”, “Scene Idea” etc. This allows me to quickly flip through my idea notebooks and find specific information. If there are certain types of information you constantly find yourself looking for in your idea notebooks, you can color code them with pastel highlighters (when you get to that point you know you are deep into IP development @_@).

Compiled and Categorized!

Another helpful thing to do is to draw a checkbox beside each idea. Whenever you use an idea from your notebook, mark it off. This will prevent you from reusing the idea again later on (which is a surprisingly easy mistake to make when you have to pump out ideas in high volumes). The same goes for when you are transferring your ideas from the scraps of paper into your idea book; check off the scraps with the ideas that you have already stored so that you don’t compile them more than once.

Categorizing your work will help save you time and energy in the long run so get into the habit ASAP. Here are a few more examples of categories I use in my books:

Story Instance Idea- a specific character, object, or event interaction that takes place in a story (e.g. Character A gets publicly betrayed by Character B, who was in cahoots with Character A. Character A has to deal with the situation in a witty way to get out unscathed). I usually get these types of ideas from observing real life interactions between people. Having this tag allows me to quickly record it for later use in a story.

Dialogue Idea- snippets of dialogue I occasionally hear in my head or maybe while sitting next to a group of people at a restaurant (e.g. “Who works for money? I come here just to hang out with you guys.”)

Game Mechanics Idea- ideas for gameplay systems (e.g. Continuous Fighting RPG: In battle, even if the player is not pressing anything, characters fight in a pre-scripted manner and actively move around. When the player enters attack commands, they are seamlessly weaved into the scripted fight sequence.)

Again, take care to design categories based on your own needs.

Making Ideas Accessible

Beyond categorizing each individual idea, after enough experience, you will begin to similarly categorize the major elements of your project. This can take place through the use of templates, naming conventions, and a general set of standards you develop for quickly sifting through, revising, and presenting assets. The collective effort you put into managing ideas at this level is what I call idea accessibility.

An example of this would be a document template for your story/game bible. You may have developed a very specific structure to help you store and reference information about your characters, world, dialogue etc. This structure could be easily conveyed to another person and give them the means for accessing and interacting with essential information on the project.

Document Template.

Another example could be something as simple as a folder hierarchy system you devise for quick and easy navigation through complex levels of detail. This is all part of managing and organizing an idea, just at a higher-level.

Folder Hierarchy.

Idea accessibility is a more intermediate level concept that you will most likely not begin to use until you have worked on a few projects and gotten comfortable with your craft. It does deserve the mention, however, and you will clearly see how it comes into play during the IP construction process.

Applying structure to chaos creates beauty. The more scientists explore nature in the realms of the infinitely enormous and immeasurably minuscule, the more they concur with this theory. In our haste to comprehend and accomplish, we too must take time to explore and try to embrace the order in all things; especially in our own creativity.

You have now learned to care for the concepts you create and soon you will see that those very creations will, in turn, begin to care for you.

The foundation is set! The next post will carry you into the murky depths of IP development and construction only to show you how clear things are beyond the fog.

-Sage

A Fundamental Framework For IP Development: Part 2

2006-02-10T11:25:00.000-08:00

In the last post I emphasized the importance of identifying and mastering the basics of a craft or field of study. Near the end I introduced you to the five basic elements of Intellectual Property (IP) Development. In this post you will learn all about the first of these five elements: Conception: Generating Ideas.

Conception: Generating Ideas

“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. ”
-Victor Hugo

To develop an idea, you obviously need an idea to work with. Of course there are countless ways to generate ideas (and we will explore many of them in this blog), but for now I’m going to generalize and give you a few of the most common methods here.

Inspirations and Epiphanies

Most all idea generation boils down to being inspired by something/someone or gaining a deep insight and understanding about something/someone that thereby inspires you to conceive an idea.

For instance, when I was 12, I was inspired to write game stories by a video game titled Final Fantasy VI. My characters for that game story were inspired by a myriad of other video game, comic, and cartoon characters that I was being exposed to at the time. The locations were inspired by even more games and movies. So on and so forth until I crudely wrote the story to completion.

Inspiration comes when it comes and while you can aid it, the most important thing is to be ready for it (you’ll learn how to be ready for inspiration in the next section—Gestation: Managing Ideas.)

One way to get inspired is to experience many different things in life. Expose yourself to lots of media, people, and places that have a good chance of inspiring you. I’m currently being inspired by Japanese TV Drama. If you’d have told me when I was younger that such a thing would inspire me, I would have probably looked at you strangely. Just goes to show that you never know what can do it for you until you’re exposed to it.

Instant Idea Systems

Ok, take a duck, a guitar, and a giant robot. Now make a hip-hop dance based off of these things. While nothing may come to mind immediately, these seemingly unrelated objects will get you thinking about all sorts of crazy stuff and who knows, maybe you’ll come up with some cool and unique moves.

This thought experiment exemplifies the essence of an instant idea system. Basically, you take random elements, mix them together and give yourself an objective. There are two theories as to why this method works so well.

The first is that creative constraint forces you to completely squeeze as much out of the few elements you have in order to utilize them to the greatest degree. Normally, when you are building a blue sky idea, you will quickly find yourself lost in the possibilities and rants are inevitable. With constraints comes focus. Focusing on a single element can lead to epiphanies, which leads to inspirations for ideas.

The second theory is based on the way your brain records and accesses memories. When you look at or think of a duck you have a certain network of neurons firing throughout your brain. Your concept of a duck may be linked to the park your grandmother used to take you to, which links you to memories of your grandmother and furthermore to that time you were at your grandmother’s house and stole money, which reminds you of a gangster film you saw and so on.

Each object has a completely different network of associations, emotions, and memories that comes bundled with it based off our personal experience. Hence why two people can see the same thing in very different ways; they both have their own, unique associations tied to it.

When it comes to generating ideas for something—say a baseball bat design—, we quickly resort to clichés and stereotypes related to that something—a spiked bat or a steel bat wrapped in some material (red tape for instance). Our brains are literally wired to do so. Therefore by introducing random elements into the idea generation process—a blender and jewelry—, it opens up the channels that your neural networks access and allows you to share resources between subjects you wouldn’t normally associate at all:

Blender Bat- A bat equipped with a blender in the middle that converts gems and precious metals into vibratory energy, which is released in a whirlwind that spins the powerful bat above the handle. The purer the gems and metals that are fed to the bat are, the greater the whirlwind force exerted by the bat will be.

Random Word Search

Another similar experiment is to take a dictionary and do random flips through it, stopping on a page and reading all the definitions on that page. This may take you across words, subjects, and concepts that you’ve never heard of before. Perhaps you can look into the ones that seem interesting. If you already know all the words, try using the instant idea mechanics from above with them.

Finally, how about using good ole’ Google to randomly search topics for you. You can be led down an interesting web of information this way. Next thing you know, you’ll be writing a story about string theory and sacred geometry!

Brainstorming

This is probably the method you have been taught through schooling. Brainstorming deals with taking a central subject of interest and just jotting down whatever comes to mind about it without any sort of discrimination or value attached to it. This tends to work best in group settings where each participant’s ideas can help stimulate the others and you can get many different ideas down quickly. Each idea, no matter what it is, has to be given equal weight and all judgment on them is postponed until a later time.

From there the objective is to review the ideas presented, discuss, categorize, mix and match, and see if there are any that work for your subject matter. I really won’t spend too much time here as there are loads of sites that cover brainstorming quite thoroughly. Here are a few for your reference:

http://www.brainstorming.co.uk/tutorials/tutorialcontents.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming

Dreams

Perhaps one of the most intriguing ways of generating ideas is to look inside. This can come from your dreams for instance. Start keeping a pad and pen by your bed when you sleep and before you lie down to go to bed at night, tell yourself that you will remember your dream. This most often helps you to do so. When you have a vivid dream or see interesting things take place from the subconscious explosion of trippy imagery, make sure to write them down as soon as you wake up! Overtime, your dream log can bring you some pretty outstanding material. Here’s an example from one of the dreams I logged a while back:

"I was falling near death (death being a blue swirling pool emerging from the side of a sand dune), but I passed it and floated up and through the sky to another plane. There I ran atop translucent glass poles as thin as broom sticks. While running I dodged spiked pendulums and similar obstacles until I fell from the poles and landed in the sand before a great sword.

This sword was as tall as a sky scraper and shined like gold. It came alive and swiped at me, but I effortlessly blocked it with my forearm and assumed control of it. I was feeling good I think.

From there I ran forward and met an unknown 'thing', I don't know if it was God or what.

It flashed the entire spectrum of colors and assumed multiple 2D forms in 3D space. It looked like a tie-dye shirt with African masks or Easter Island statue faces moving across it, but it was blinking and moving like the aliens from the Atari video game Space Invaders.

I fell to the ground in a seizure. The sword was stuck in the ground in front of me and it had shrunken to the size of a normal sword. I thought I was dead at first, but I wasn’t, because a white man in a black suit, who said he was 'death', picked me up and laughed at me. He took me inside a white elevator with no front door that was sitting in the sand and up it went. He pushed me out as the elevator rose and wished me good luck.

When I came around to standing, I looked up and noticed that I was facing a beautiful woman, smiling eerily and staring at me, seemingly unable to blink. Without a word her head slightly lowered. I said 'Hi' and she made no motion at all. Thinking this was a test or something I began to walk pass her and she malformed into a demon snatching me back in a weird way with odd appendages that came from her body out of no where. Yet she returned beautiful and smiled and stared when I re-faced her.

I tried to please her by playing music. There was a keyboard in front of me now. As I started to play she beheaded me with a haberdasher like weapon and my head rolled. I thought this to be my end but then she beheaded herself and her head rolled in front of mine.

I tried to speak, but as I did, her face erupted a white milky substance that flew into my mouth as a continuous stream and this substance reattached my body to my head. I arose glowing all gold like. I had transformed into a super saiyajin or something. Then I woke up...”

Besides dreams, meditation can bring you profound insight and inspiration by flushing out your subconscious and giving you a clearer view of your life and all things in it. Heck, if you’re diligent enough you may even reach that rare and blissful ‘experience’ of oneness with being, nirvana, etc. Nothing’s gonna stop you from getting ideas after that.

Tasked Ideas

The final way to generate ideas that I’ll cover for now is to be given the idea to create or the problem to solve.

Let’s say you’re a composer/choreographer working for an orchestra and you’ve been tasked by the producer with making the orchestra physically move and play a human game of chess while they are performing. Each piece interacting has to be playing the main melody while the other instruments play softer, supportive sounds until it’s their turn to move or be taken.

You may not have come up with the idea, but now it’s yours to develop and this inevitably will lead to the need for more ideas about exactly how you are going to do it.

In the end, ideas act like goals that eventually lead you towards their actualization. Goal setting and establishing the vision is usually the first and most critical step in any creative or practical endeavor, which makes this element—Conception— your most basic tool for creating IP.

You will learn all about taking an idea forward from the core vision in Part 4 of the framework series. But we shouldn’t get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. We must first learn how to manage and organize all these ideas we plan to generate. The next post will show you just how to do that.

-Sage

A Fundamental Framework For IP Development: Part 1

2006-02-09T23:02:00.000-08:00

The creative process can be confusing for those starting out. It’s easy to get lost when you don’t have a conceptual model in mind that allows you to see the whole picture all the time. But there’s no need to worry, as there is a science to it all.

What I am presenting here is a fundamental framework for dealing with the creation and construction of an idea; be it an idea for a game, song, or otherwise. From working on so many productions in a wide range of media, I have found that the basic process is surprisingly similar.

The concepts that I cover are hardly new, and, if you are a specialist in your own field, you will be able to interpret them easily from your point of view. However, the way in which they are categorized, assembled, and related across disciplines in these posts should bring a new perspective and flexibility to the way you think about them.

There is a lot of ground to cover, so I will be going over each part of the framework one step at a time, constantly tying in previously covered material and finally reviewing it all to assure that you walk away with a basic comprehension of what IP development entails. From there, it’s just a matter of putting the theory into practice and modifying the framework from the lessons learned.

Mastering The Basics

Whenever I speak with budding college types, I often hear the same complaints from them concerning their courses. Something along the lines of: “My teacher’s so stupid! I hate having to do/study/read this?” Upon further inspection it is revealed that the true frustration they face has little to do with the teacher or the task alone. More often it is their own lack of understanding of the big picture and the smaller parts that make up their craft. The only error a teacher can make here is to separate the task from the craft and not emphasize exactly how what they are doing relates to the whole.

There are many untrained artist who can draw fantastically; they know well enough how to do what they do. Even though they may not have a real understanding of what they do until they study the science of art—the elements and principles of art— or distill the concepts from their own actions through examination and analysis, it is almost a given that they have a firm grasp of the basics that govern their works; be they consciously aware of it or not.

In the event that they do get around to studying their craft, they will recognize the tasks given to them by a teacher based on their previous experience and innate understanding of it.

However, this is rarely the case with students. More often the inexperienced tend to dive into the deep end of the pool without first learning to swim in shallow water. The result is a long, hard journey with what would otherwise be perfectly avoidable obstacles, forever snagging them asunder until they finally sink or return to shallower depths to master the basics.

The argument is that it forces them to learn and make mistakes— true; mistakes that are often already understood beforehand with myriad solutions available to them. What it really does is force them to waste time reinventing the invented. Sometimes it is good to do that, but not usually at the beginning stages of their development.

Focus on the basics. The initial time you put into understanding and practicing the basics will reap long-term rewards for you. Trust me on this one; I am a 50+ project veteran as far as this is concerned.

A short side note for you folks that have no clue about the basics of your craft. Pick up a beginners book at the library or Google the topic to find an overview. Then step through each topic and put it to practice until you have satisfactory comprehension. After that, move on to the next sphere of relevant topics that ties the basic elements together.

I’ll go over how to identify and define the core elements of a craft in a later post, but for now get ready to learn the basics of I.P. Development!

IPD Basics

The five basic elements of IP are:

Conception: Generating Ideas
Gestation: Managing Ideas
Development: Constructing Ideas
Presentation: Communicating Ideas
and Examination: Studying Ideas

These are the essential areas that cover 99.9% of all IP Development work. These elements are scalable and can be used for just about anything you can think of: stories; characters; dance performances; software applications; buildings; carpets; food…whatever.

Take a moment and look at them. It’s easy to read them and see how they might relate even though you don’t have the details about them yet. Imagine each as a hierarchy of process and methods, tools, tricks, and troubles used in every craft, but given a different name. Look at them one more time. Keep their order in mind as we progress into each element and get an idea of how to they function.

The next five posts will outline each individual element in detail.

Until Then,

-Sage

Blog Topic Categories

2006-02-09T11:22:00.001-08:00

Before I jump right into the framework of Intellectual Property (IP) development and lose you all, here’s an overview of how posts on this blog are organized and the kinds of topics that will be covered here.

To keep blog navigation easy breezy, each post will be categorized based on what IP topic it covers. There are four main topic categories used in this blog: IP Theory, IP Development, Media Studies, and Miscellaneous Thoughts.

IP Theory topics explain the high-level concepts concerning IP development. The framework, elements, and guiding principles for IPD are examples of IP Theory topics.

The IP Theory in this blog starts off general and all inclusive, and then as the topics become more advanced they start to focus in on media specific theory (i.e. game design theory, music theory, etc.)

IP Development topics examine process details and information on workflow, skill building, and other low-level issues that crop up during the development of an IP.

These topics also take you through specific systems and mechanics that I have developed (i.e. story creation systems, game users interfaces, etc.)

Finally, IP Development topics include posts showing IP works in progress as well as finished IP productions.

Media Studies topics include short reviews of IP from many different cultures and kinds of media. There is occasionally an in-depth media study that focuses on breaking an IP apart into its basic elements and explaining it in detail.

As more and more studies are compiled here, I will begin to classify common elements and patterns found throughout a range of media. These patterns will then be integrated into IP theory for more advanced use.

Miscellaneous topics feature IP relevant news and articles on cool and emerging arts, sciences, and technologies. They also act as a white board for my random thoughts and ideas. Anything that doesn’t fit into the previous three categories and which does not justify its own category can be found here.

These topic markers can be found near the top of each post for your convenience.

Now, on to the good stuff!

-Sage

The Big Idea

2006-02-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

After much procrastination and deliberation, I’ve finally gone and set up this blog. Now I officially have a place to post all those IP related works of mine that could never quite find their way into my personal journal or inspire musing from non-existent philosophers.

Throughout all of my mischief in the realms of art, science, and technology, I have constantly found myself drawn to something I call IP development.

What exactly is IP development you say? IP means intellectual property. It’s defined as any product of the human intellect; quite a broad reaching definition isn’t it? That’s exactly why I like it.

In the professional world, it often seems that you need a label— something that describes who you are and what you do fairly quickly so that others can see how you fit into their picture. I’ve been called an artist, a musician, a writer, a philosopher, and a designer all in error. I have been all these things and much more at some point and time, but only when I find them useful as a form of expression for a particular idea.

It is the idea that is at the heart of IP development. A video game is limited, a work of art is limited, a musical performance is limited, but the ideas behind those works are not.

In his book “On Intelligence”, Jeff Hawkins proposes a model for the development of intelligent machines based off of a new framework that considers how the brain actually functions. His theory of how the brain works is known as “The Memory-Prediction Model”. Its basic premise is that our neo-cortex functions entirely off of one cortical algorithm that simply plays out in many different forms. That is to say that the way you see, hear, touch, taste, and your sense of smell are all one “idea” in the brain being used in very different ways by the body.

This is exactly how I view IP. There is no limit to the kinds of media that I am willing to venture into and the more barriers I cross, the more I find the same underlying principles—the ideas— exist in each. They are simply expressed in different ways.

By calling myself an IP developer, I inevitably provoke curiosity from those who I meet. It is my chance to augment their world model by providing them with a definition of something that is open ended and broad. In truth, beyond all the jargon and elaborate explanations, all I am really saying is that I am me—I am the collection of ideas that I have about the world— and that I have a purpose— I search for means to express those ideas through the various arts, sciences, and technologies. That’s all.

This is my IP ideology. I am hopeful that it will explain the motivations behind my reasoning on many issues that I will cover concerning IP development. However, the true purpose of this blog is to explore and transcribe the high-level principles I have found in the many art, science, and technology disciplines and to tie them together to create more interesting IP (i.e. to figure out how to make cool stuff!) I have my own views, but I’m hoping to gather input from many of you and examine your perspectives as well.

My next post will explain the process that I go through and propose a high-level framework for the development of IP that has worked for me in many different fields.

Until then, take care.

-Sage