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Good Ideas - giving your ideas the best possible chance

Description

Why we don't just code your ideas right right away? There are numerous reasons, and I'd like to explain them a bit for you.

Immediate Denial

Some ideas we get can be easily and quickly denied as being something we definitely don't want to do. Such reports tend to fall into one of the following categories of report:

a) Incomprehensible ('well u should put the thing i see here into a line of code and make it DANCE until CHICKENS COME OUT!!!')

b) Not very useful or detailed from our perspective ('lol, fix combat lol')

c) Not in fitting with our theme ('I think we should have magic boomerangs!')

d) Not in fitting with our game design philosophy ('I think I should have a button I press to give me ten million XP')

Of the ones we deny that don't fall into these categories, they tend to be just too much effort to code for limited benefit. We alas don't have unlimited developer time, so we need to spend it wisely. For example, we often get reports along the theme of 'There is a <thing> in this room - I think it would be cool if you could do <awesome thing> with <thing>'. The chances are, we probably agree that it would be awesome - but if it's an idea that takes an hour to develop and only five people are ever going to see in action, it's not a good allocation of time. You'll often find these denied with the keyword 'situational'. They may be cool, they may be very funny, but we just don't think people are going to notice or appreciate the time put in, and we always, always have more work than time.

The Ones That Don't Get Denied

Those ideas that we like and don't deny go onto the Rainy Day File. It's kind of a triage - we get people doing a pass over all our open idea reports, and we deny the ones that aren't suitable and then mark the rest as rainy day. Each individual idea in itself may be quite small (perhaps an hour of developer time), but it needs several magic ingredients for it to come to light:

a) It needs a creator who finds the idea interesting enough to code

b) It needs a creator who has the right combination of skills, attitude and access to code it

c) It needs a creator who has the time to devote to coding it and maintaining it.

It's tremendously unlikely that all three of those ingredients are present when your report is first read. If it is, the chances are it will be coded instantly. When those ingredients are not present, the report can go to the rainy day file for people who are actually looking for things to do. Sometimes they will be looking for new features in a development. Sometimes they will just be at a loose end for a couple of hours and looking to do something with their time. The Rainy Day File then is a resource of 'hey, pick me' ideas that people can browse through at their leisure and implement when they tick all three of the above boxes.

See Also:

idea reports, idea