How to Steal Game Ideas (Without Copying)

0:00 What's cracking nerds? This is a game that I made. It's got 412 reviews. It's sold almost 30,000 copies. And today I'm going to give you my take on how to make a game that is good. Making a good game is hard by stealing. Little disclaimer, I'm not going to tell you to clone anything. I don't think you should be cloning stuff. This is going to be a pretty... nuanced take on how to strategically steal ideas from other games because a big thing that I'm always telling people to do is to go play more games. So here's my take on that. First things first, let's check out Jonas Tyroller. A lot of this is based on his fantasy theory. Now, if you've never heard his fantasy theory, he tells people that when you're coming up with game ideas, you want to come up with the fantasy first. And the reason why you want to do this is because you When you're

0:50 trying to make games that end up making money, you do need to think about the audience a little bit. Now, if you don't care about making money, that's totally fine. I'm not saying that you need to be thinking about how to make money. I think if you care most about making money, you should just go clone stuff. But I'm coming at this from kind of a middle angle where it's like, if you want to be an artist that makes enough money to pay the bills, you kind of need to think about your audience a little bit so that you can plan to have some sort of stable income. while also building a cool fantasy that you like. And this fantasy theory that Jonas talks about kind of allows you to have the best of both worlds where you come up with a fantasy that you think is interesting. So for instance, the fantasy to be a vampire bank robber,

1:37 that's a cool fantasy. Vampires are cool. Robbing banks is cool. And this fantasy allows you to one, to sell it because if you say, hey, I'm making a game about being a vampire bank robber, people can instantly understand that and go, oh, cool, that sounds like a cool fantasy I want to be a part of. And you have something that you can go off of now. Being a vampire bank robber can be maybe a turn-based strategy game. It could be a management game. It could be a first-person game. It can be a stealth game. It can be an action game. It can be so many different things. But I think a lot of people start off with mechanics first instead of a fantasy, and it leads them to a place like this. So this is a stupid example, but it's very simple on purpose. So if we go mechanics first, you could say, I'm gonna make a cute bunny platformer.

2:22 You've got a little bit of a fantasy there. Maybe some people like cute bunnies, but it's just super generic. I'm gonna make a platformer. Or as you can see here, having the fantasy, I wanna make a game where you feel like the cutest bunny alive. Now it's like, all right, maybe you're making a visual novel. Maybe you're doing something like in Roblox, where it's like a dress to impress thing, where you're dressing up different bunnies. But if you start with cute bunny platformer or anytime you start with mechanics, you're automatically kind of nailing yourself down to a specific way of doing something. And if you start with the fantasy, you start with the audience in mind, and then you can kind of adjust what the game is to fit what you want to make once you have got something that you think people will respond to. So this might not matter to you, but this is something worth thinking about

3:07 is the sizes of fantasies. Every single fantasy that you have is going to have some sort of market. cap. So there's probably like, I've got my examples here. This is a huge fantasy. Cheating at poker to win big is the fantasy that Balatro or Balatro fulfills. Lots of people have wished somewhere at some time that they could cheat at cards or they could cheat at a casino and win, right? That this is a huge fantasy that millions of people have. And this is part of why Balatro was exciting to people. That's the fantasy that this sells. You can cheat at poker, cool that's that's what got me into it as i was like man i've always kind of wanted to cheat at poker and win and this entire game is built around cheating at poker on purpose that's a really cool really effective really

3:54 potent fantasy that a ton of people have smaller fantasy again i don't really care about mass appeal none of this is to be like hey make your game mass appeal it's just like people are like why didn't my game sell it was really good and it was like You got to pick a fantasy that people actually resonate with if you want people to play your game. My fantasy is about ending the world in a really kind of gory, horrific way. This is a smaller audience. Not as many people want to do that, but there's still an audience for it. It's still a fantasy that people respond to. If I wanted to go bigger, I would think of bigger fantasies, but I just like making games that make me enough money to keep making more games. So if you care about the audience size or the fantasy size, this is something to think about. If you don't, don't

4:40 worry about it. Just make sure that you're picking something that resonates with somebody in the world or there will be nobody out there to buy it. Now, recently I was watching the Game Dev Dream podcast. Jonas Tyroller was on there and he was talking about this fantasy theory that he had. But he said it in a way that kind of helped me understand it a little bit better because you might be like, all right, cool fantasies. I don't really get it. Like, what is a fantasy? When we're talking about it in terms of fantasies, it kind of puts the ball in your court, you're standing in your own dev shoes and you're like, all right, how do I sell this world that I'm making up? And you can kind of be like, I'm going to create a world where you're a toilet and you're shooting people with poop. And that's the fantasy I want to sell. How do I sell this now? So I didn't really like this about the thinking about it as a

5:26 fantasy, but he recently said, think about fantasies as cravings, as cravings that people have. when they're looking for games. People go to play video games and they kind of have these cravings in the back of their head that they want fulfilled somehow. And when they see a game that fulfills that craving, that is the fantasy kind of meeting and letting something happen. So this... kind of puts you in other people's shoes instead of being like, how do I make up this crazy fantasy and sell it to people? You start thinking, what are people craving? And for me, because I play a ton of video games, I can kind of rely on my own perspective a lot of the time. And so I'll just be thinking about what am I craving? What kind of games have I not seen made? That was part of the reason why I made Execute is because I was like, I like Plague Inc, but I

6:13 wanted it to be more violent. And that's part of why I made this game. I missed the really awful... dark, weird, edgy games from the early 2000s. And this is what I was craving. And I was like, if I'm craving it, surely somebody else out there is craving it. And sure enough, 30,000 people are definitely craving that. So be thinking about cravings that you have, especially if you are a gamer, because that's where you can find some of these fantasies and just super helpful to mine your own brain for that as well. All right. So I thought it'd be helpful to have kind of a case study for this, to have some sort of fantasy that I showcased. This is the stealing part. Okay, so if you're like, when are we going to get into stealing? This is how we're going to steal. All right, I'm actually making a game right now that is stealing this

6:58 fantasy. And here are some of the things I looked at when trying to make this game. Okay, here's the fantasy. Control giant machinery. All right, and you might be like, what the heck does that even mean? Controlling giant machinery? What are you talking about? If you've ever seen one of these sitting around, Or even one of these things. Like, these exist. These are so popular at every park, right? And maybe you don't care about digging. Maybe you're somebody who's like, yeah, whatever. Cool. Digging. Who cares? That's for stupid boys who want to be construction workers. I don't care. There's some part in people where they enjoy big machines. They're cool. And, I mean, that's part of the reason why this toy exists in the first place is because... That craving exists and these are so popular. So

7:47 like right now, this is a fantasy that I can see if there's already toys being made about it. This is a fantasy that people like, but this whole game is about controlling a giant planetary artillery gun inside of this cockpit with all of these fun levers and gadgets. So you're literally sitting inside of this thing, the way you would sit inside of this thing, controlling all these buttons, hitting all these, these different things, reading this radar, doing the whole machine simulator thing but you're doing it in a fantastical way that's not quite as fantastical as this but still like you're you're in the future doing working a machine that doesn't actually exist in real life also very cool so here's this this fantasy control giant machinery so what do we steal All right, I don't think you should clone these

8:35 games. I don't think you should say, all right, Armored Core 6, I'm going to make a mech game now where you do this exact same thing. I think this is where people mistake. They're like, all right, I'm going to go clone this idea that clearly worked. All right, Farming Simulator, I'm going to go make my own Farming Simulator. No, like, you can see that this is influenced by this. Farming Simulator is influenced by PVVK, or P... Sorry, PVKK is influenced by things like Farming Simulator, but they... evolved it they were like let's make up our own machine and i can even show you later actually i might as well just show you right now this is a game that i'm working on called grid tweaker where you are controlling eventually this computer is going to be a big window that kind of looks out like pvv pv kk where you're dropping these huge objects onto this big

9:24 power grid and you're using it to make money And I don't know when this game is going to come out. Don't use this as an advertisement, but I was just trying to show you kind of the difference of how you can take that fantasy and kind of warp it and be inspired by it. So again, don't clone stuff. Don't steal the whole game. Don't steal the art. Don't steal the IP, right? Steal the friction solutions. So I know that in PVKK here, If you look in farming simulator, there is some friction in just understanding how the machines work because in real life, it's not always just intuitive, but I know in an interview that I watched with Jonas Tyroller talking to the head at Bip and Bits, they were like, we want to make everything in here extremely intuitive so that

10:09 you understand exactly what things do. Like right now, I've never played the game, but I bet you if you start cranking this wheel, it's going to turn this artillery cannon. And I bet you if we can find a big red button... can't tell if that's a bell or a button but that'll probably fire the cannon right so like steal that steal that perspective from the game and put that perspective in your game and be like i'm going to take that design philosophy if i'm going to make a giant machine game i'm going to make sure that it's very intuitive to understand okay let's take a look other stuff upgrade structures so i know if you saw one of the thumbnails a lot of A lot of incremental games use upgrade structures like this. So if you're making an incremental game, slight sidebar, you know, maybe you steal the tree thing. I didn't do that in Execute

11:00 because I didn't think it was that important, but like I didn't do it because I thought it was a bad idea. I just... didn't do it because i didn't feel like doing it there's a lot of freaking upgrades here right this is how these games are made i don't think stealing a skill tree and making your game with a skill tree is going to make your game less fun for some reason so steal the upgrade structure steal the mission loops steal the currency systems like steal the things that that aren't the focus of the game steal the things that have already been solved right right? Like this is part of why I talk about playing more games because as you get exposed to more games, you get exposed to mission loops. Like you don't have to reinvent the mission loop wheel. You could just take

11:46 armored core six has a mission loop structure. That's very similar to lots of racing games. I'm not saying they stole it from racing games, but like this is a good mission structure system. They could have, gone and made up something completely weird and random that people wouldn't have understood as easily and the game wouldn't have sold as well because it would have been harder to to understand and get into so this is what i'm talking about when i tell people to play more games you're stealing the language you're becoming more familiar with the language of video games and understanding what things like a mission loop or an upgrade structure have been solved already we don't need new ways to do these things if like i was saying in execute i don't have a I don't have a skill tree. These are my skill trees. Okay. They're just buttons that you, that you click on. And the reason why I did

12:34 that is because personally for me, I think skill trees, they get a little overwhelming. I don't know what the hell I'm upgrading anymore. I don't think that they're that fun. And so I was like, I want to see exactly what I'm upgrading for every machine right there next to every machine. And that's how I decided to do it. So again, I'm not telling you that you have to go steal all the best ways that everybody's doing stuff, but it, you go and you play lots of games and you decide to steal things or not steal things based on your own experiences or the experience you've seen with other players. I'm not saying I made like a crazy innovation, but like I changed this on purpose because I had also seen lots of incremental games with skill trees. And I was also like, you know what? I just want to do it differently and just see what happens. Maybe if this game had a skill tree, maybe it would have sold better.

13:21 I don't know, but I also don't think it matters that much because it's kind of a side thing. It's more about the fantasy. Let's take a look at the next thing. So we already kind of talked about some of this stuff, but here are some of the things that you could steal from these games if you're trying to make a game about controlling giant machinery. So from farming sims, we could take the clear machinery interaction patterns, meaning the farming. Tractors pull stuff across fields. That is clear. Maybe you could design a game where the intent of a machine is very clear and you can take that from Farming Simulator. I'm sure there's more. I haven't really played Farming Simulator, so I couldn't think of them anymore. But like if you play these games, you can steal stuff from them. Armored Core. You can

14:09 take the mission structure from this. There's one currency in this game. I love that. The more games that I play that have one currency where you're using that one currency to kind of upgrade everything... the more I'm like, God, why do I even bother with crafting systems? This is great. Single currency systems just takes away so much friction when it comes to building upgrade systems. So this is in a lot of games, but maybe you played Armored Core 6. It's already in this machine fantasy. You're like, it already works here. I'm just going to take a single currency economy system and steal that. I'm getting deep here. Like, this is the type of stuff I'm saying that you should steal. Don't go making mech games, steal the currency economy from the mech game, right? The upgrade loop between runs. The upgrade loop here is about putting parts on your mech and kind of balancing the stats, how much power or

14:56 how much weight that you have. That's a really cool system that you could put into a racing game. Even it is in a lot of racing games, actually. So you could steal that and put it into a different machinery system. Maybe I'm giving somebody ideas right now here. The tactile controls, all the UI is diegetic, which means all of the controls and the things that you're interacting with to make stuff happen are fully realized in the world. They're tactile. That's really cool. Visual complexity that is intuitive. We already talked about this, just all this stuff making sense as soon as you look at it. I think that's important. I think that's cool. Lastly, we already talked about upgrade systems, but these are some other things that you should steal. Settings menus. Don't reinvent the wheel unless it's Like something funny that you're trying to do, like maybe you're trying to do some sort of fun undertale thing where, you know,

15:43 the save system kind of messes with you. If you try to reload your saves, fine. Do a fun original thing on that if you'd like, but like don't put menus in places people aren't expecting them. Why conventions like, like having a tab system. That's fine. I know a lot of people don't like the tab system. That's fine. But like go steal some UI conventions from things that people do like. Maybe you see, I've seen a lot of people in Assassin's Creed games, they don't like the mouse controlled user interface. So if you see that and you're like, people don't like the mouse controlled user interface on console, when you release a game on console, don't steal that user interface convention, right? And main menus. Pretty much solved at this point. Okay. Also, all these things are places because they are solved. You could use to

16:32 be kind of fun. Like if you look at Signalis or I can't think of any examples right now, but like there's main menus that are super fun and interesting because they've been solved for so while you can kind of dunk on people because you can do something really fun with these mechanics. I guess you would call these all mechanics systems that have been solved. Right. So finally, I already said this, but if you go online, play lots of games you expand your fantasy lexicon so you get introduced to lots of new fantasies like this one fantasy I'm sure there's other games that fit into this fantasy but if you start thinking in terms of fantasy you can go back to a lot of your favorite games and be like man I've always wanted to make a game like Slay the Spire but realize that you don't like Slay the Spire because it's a card game you like Slay the Spire

17:19 because it's about climbing up a giant spire oh my god just like in Hunter x Hunter holy crap This is a really cool concept. Climbing up a spire is cool. Why didn't I think about the fantasy of climbing up a spire? I can make a whole game about climbing up a spire. Oh my God. Careful with this one. Somebody already made Tower of Guns, which is where you literally climb up a spower. Sorry, a spower. A tower made of guns and you just collect guns. So just, I didn't want to get somebody super excited there and be like, Oh my, Oh my God. Holy I've thought of it. I'll just make a game like borderlands, but you're in a tower and ah, it's already been done. Sorry. But yeah, you expand your, your fantasy lexicon. You give more mechanical vocabulary. Like we've been talking about mechanics here, like, you know, single currency economies, right? Like if you can't

18:07 talk about games in this way, if you can't break down a game into all of its different parts like this, it's going to be harder for you to make games. I'm not gatekeeping here. I'm not saying you can't make games and I'm not suggesting that you don't have the ability to do that, but the more vocabulary that you have from playing games and the more that you can talk about games and think about games, this is why I make these videos. People are like, oh, thank you for making these videos for me. These videos are for me, guys. I'm making these because it forces me to sit down and put my thoughts on paper and not on paper, I guess on paper, on digital paper and to talk about these things so that I can have these ideas solidified into my head. So it makes me a better developer. All right. That's the number one reason to have a

18:53 dev YouTube channel is accountability for your ideas, right? But having this vocabulary, super important because then you can kind of look at all the games that you've played and look at the games that you're trying to make and And you have this really awesome, cool vocabulary that you can use to mix and match together, or you can use to analyze games. Or if you're talking with your other developer teammates, you can use that vocabulary to specifically extract or inject new mechanics or pull out mechanics that you don't like, right? Also, the more games you play, you kind of see the friction points that have been solved. So if you played games for long enough, or like you go back and you play old games, and then you play new games, Like playing old platformers and then playing new

19:39 platformers, platformers haven't changed a ton, but you can kind of see the friction points that get solved. Most notably in platformers, it has been the life system. You know, if you die in the original Super Mario Bros, especially if you die like three times without getting a one up, you go all the way back to the beginning. But in newer platformers, the life system is basically gone. And there's really, really generous checkpoints because people have realized that it's not really fun to punish you that much. Not in every platformer, but that's kind of a thing that's been solved that you can steal and put in your platformer. But you wouldn't know that unless you were playing a ton of platformers. Increases recombination potential. I think this is also a really good way to just come up with fantasies is to just play a ton of

20:25 games and combine them in new ways, right? So yeah, this is the end. This is for you. If you like it, you know, define your fantasy, find similar games, identify what works, extract frameworks, rebuild it in your own context. This is the important part. Don't clone stuff, rebuild stuff in your own context, right? And usually if you go out and you find a fantasy that works like vampire survivors, people did a whole bunch of survivors clones, but then when somebody went and, and then they rebuilt vampire, sorry, yeah, vampire survivors in their own context, it did really well. Okay. Also, this guy's really good at YouTube, but like still, this is just a good fantasy of the fantasy of auto killing lots of enemies in a different context. If you look at all the other vampire survivors clones, they were the same game. They were

21:13 like top down 2D. And this is very similar. I think the guy even says in his own dev logs that he stole from vampire survivors, but it's, it's, it's in its own context. Okay. So yeah. That's all I got for you. Thanks to my Patreon supporters. Thank you to everyone else watching this. If you want to support me, go buy Execute. If you just like the video, leave a like. If you're not going to watch my future videos, please don't subscribe to me. Because, yeah, there's the algorithm. So, yeah, cool. Peace out. Thanks, y'all.