The Factory of Ideas Has Launched!

I just released a new platform called Factory of Ideas!

No, this is not some new project. I’m fully committed to the online store and educational games.

It’s … quite the opposite in fact. This website is a database of all my (old) ideas that I will never make. Completely free, completely public, completely open. Any new ideas I have, which I think I’ll probably never use myself, are added too. Basically all ideas that would distract me from the online store are released on this platform, shared so that I won’t be tempted to make it myself.

Why?

You see, my hyperactive brain loves coming up with new ideas. I’m not even consciously doing anything, I’m not even putting in effort, and I still end up with 10 ideas written down at the end of the day. This means that, after all those years, my hard drive was filled with tens of thousands of ideas.

At some point, I realized I was simply never going to make most of those ideas. I don’t have the time or energy. I have moved on since from that kind of idea or project. Or perhaps I am simply not the right person to make it. I am “only” 29 years old, and I already have more ideas written down than I could ever make in a hundred lifetimes, and that number only grows every day.

At the same time, our brain has this funny thing where it keeps thinking about ideas. I will regularly wake up with some “solution” to a problem with an idea I had three months ago. As I try to focus on my current project, my brain will regularly think “but hey, remember that OTHER IDEA you had a year ago, that was quite a good idea right, why not make THAT now?”

It’s incredibly distracting. More and more, it felt like ideas became some great burden that I had to carry around with me. Writing it down was not enough to get them out of my mind. Planning to make them at a specific time in the future was not enough. The only thing that works … is just giving away the idea entirely.

How?

As such, I spent a few weeks moving that large database of ideas into a public website. I collected them all and made them all “presentable”, with a simple design intended to help people quickly find inspiration.

Don’t worry, I kept some ideas for myself, the ones I am actually working on or think I’m very likely to make. That still left thousands of ideas to give away to others.

This work went quite smoothly because I’ve kept a clean structure for years, writing things down neatly and filing them away in a sensible place. In general, I could just copy-paste entire folders and files to the website.

It still took a few weeks, though, because most (very) old ideas needed “polishing”. Mind that this was not full-time work—I’d go insane!—but rather spread out like “I’ll spend two hours copying ideas, then switch to less menial work”.

What does “polishing” mean?

• My oldest ideas were written in Microsoft Word. I had to write a script to automatically convert all that to Markdown files.
• That conversion, however, is far from perfect.
  • Most of those files would have strange formatting, ugly symbols randomly inserted, missing headers, etcetera.
  • For example, sometimes headings would be turned into bold text instead, which is just not the same. I need the clear headings to make the ideas much easier to read, search, and use.
• Even so, younger me was far more chaotic (or “less structured”). Many files were a mess of unrelated ideas in no sensible order. Which means even I had trouble figuring it out, which means others would be clueless. More on that in the next section.
• I didn’t want to polish anything too much, though. They’re all raw ideas. Unfiltered creative thoughts. I merely added a slight crucial categorization (such as labeling ideas as “game” or “book”), but didn’t change anything else.

This means many ideas are very raw. Some are just three lines (like “what if we do an X game, but with twist Y?”) Some are thousands of lines of related ideas, but no clearly defined order or hierarchy to them. An idea for a story can simply be a single conflict or a single weird rule about how magic works. It can also be a fully plotted story, with background on all the characters and a font picked for the book cover, which I decided I simply will never write myself.

Later ideas (say, of the past 5 years) are all much cleaner. A clear proposition at the start, then a clear specification, all in simple English.

Bad Memory

Returning to my oldest ideas was … eye-opening, to say the least. About 10% of the time, I could not remember anything. The idea seemed completely foreign to me, as if some other person had it and wrote it down.

It also means that I clearly remembered 90% of the time. And I remembered wrong :p My brain had probably kept thinking about the idea for years. Even though I never opened the file again, never did anything with it, the idea had become more fully formed in my brain.

When I read back my original notes, all the “best bits” were somehow missing. The idea was far more vague and less defined than I remembered. Sometimes the version in my head seemed like a completely different idea entirely by this point.

Additionally, I “remembered” having this habit of writing down good ideas since I was young, but that clearly wasn’t the case. My oldest ideas are still not very old, because I did not write anything down before then. I must have wasted thousands of promising ideas when I was younger because I just forgot to register them somewhere (properly).

Then, as I got older, I did write them down but in a completely illogical way. For example, this is how many ideas were laid out.

• Random thought
• Random doubt about the idea
• Hey, here are some alternative titles for this project to the one I picked
• Let’s finally define the core idea here
• Hey, here’s a link to a YouTube video that’s barely related
• Let’s specify that core idea, but leaving some gaps with question marks or @TODO: Figure out later.
• Let’s end with a list of thirty separate ideas, some of which are great and actually part of the project, and some were superseded and should have been removed from the file.

Impossible to parse. No clarity, lots of words that meant nothing because they were replaced by better ideas down the line, and so forth. That’s what took the most time. Reading it back. Removing the chaos and the clutter. Cleaning it up to be the actual idea that was good enough to write down. And, of course, removing random links to unrelated YouTube videos, or even worse, personal info that had no place there.

It wasn’t too bad. Private details in these files are incredibly rare and I have never written anything offensive either. But it still took quite some work to read it back and, honestly, be very disappointed with my older self. No wonder I never got anything done back then. The text shows just how much of a mess my creative mind was (and is).

It did confirm that it was absolutely the right call to “give up” (personally) on these ideas. There are thousands of them. I’d only call hundreds of them “(very) good” with my current knowledge. But even then, they’re just an idea, an inkling of a spark of vision. I hope others can take that, be inspired, and execute it/turn it into the project of their dreams.

I have questions

I know. This is an odd move. I don’t know anybody else who has done anything like it. Then again, I don’t know anyone with my weird brain and life journey.

The website contains basically 99% of all ideas I ever deemed good enough to write down. I kept back the ones I am working on or will definitely work on—which is still a lot.

Aren’t you afraid this will hurt you in some way?

Not at all. As I said, I will never do anything with those ideas. I wrote it down 10 years ago, then never opened the file again until now, so clearly not an idea I want to pursue further. I know myself; I know I have not written anything offensive or infringing or hurtful in all these thousands of files.

Aren’t you just giving away your “bad ideas”?

Nope. First and foremost because there is no such thing as a bad idea. I might find something uninteresting to make, while another instantly latches onto the idea and wants to make it. Conversely, I have games I love to play, but would never make myself for various reasons. Ideas mean different things to different people with different means. Execution is what really matters.

Or see it this way: if I thought the idea was bad, why would I spend hours cleaning it up and presenting it online for no personal gain? I think many of these ideas are good. That’s why I wrote them down. That’s why my brain kept bugging me about them from time to time. I just came to the practical realization that I can’t or won’t make them all. I’d rather help others, rather make it exist (even if someone else made it), than let them gather dust.

Many ideas on there are things I thought would be my big breakthrough success, my bestseller, 5 or 10 years ago. I simply share them because I think the idea is so good and might help others. But I have personally moved on and feel no interest in making it now.

Is it really that bad to be creative and have lots of ideas?

Not bad per se. But tiring, exhausting, draining. I’ve become increasingly unable to choose anything. Because how can you? How can you pick the right next project out of thousands of options? Publicly giving away the idea means it can go out of my head and stop annoying me. It’s the final signal to my brain. And it’s the best one, too, because others can use it and be inspired by it.

This project allowed me to shrink my “possible next projects” down to a much more manageable number. Once I was finished, I felt a clarity I had not had in ten years. I could look at ~20 possible next projects, sort them quite easily, and the next day decide with some confidence about which one I’d pursue.

What about any new ideas? What about the future?

I’ve already updated the website a few times with new ideas. I’ve grown a practical intuition for this decision now, or so it feels. I can distinguish between “I will make this idea myself” and “This is a nice idea, but for someone else”.

For the most part, any ideas clearly meant for my online store will not be shared. Anything else is fair game. I mean, let me remind you, even after giving away hundreds of ideas for books … I still have ~20 ideas I have not shared. Twenty book series, with tons of notes and sometimes even drawings and music, all of which I find good enough to keep with me and hope to make in the future. The online store (The Wayward Melody), a separate folder, has over one hundred educational stories that I think are valuable enough to write for it.

I am not running out of ideas, ever. And now I have a nice space where I can immediately post 90% of my ideas because I know I’ll never make them myself.

Won’t you feel bad if someone else gets rich/successful off of your idea?

Nah. I never really understood that sentiment. They put in the work and found success, why would I think I deserve any of that? The idea means nothing, it’s the execution that counts. The same idea will lead to a thousand different products in the end.

In fact, that’s what already happens every day. A successful game launches, all game devs are inspired and copy that successful idea … and a year later, a hundred completely different unique games launch. There is nothing new under the sun. If the idea is simple/barebones enough, it has been had a million times. But not by you, at this time, combined with these other ideas, that inspired you to make this completely new thing.

Look at it this way. I am terrible at marketing. I am terrible at making longer projects and seeing them through until the end. Not even “bad” or “I don’t like marketing”, I am actively against all of that, which hurts my income and projects.

I would be glad if someone took an idea of mine and actually made it successful!

I would be validated—the idea is good—and it would actually exist and I’d be happy for them. For the most part, I have these ideas because I want these things to EXIST. Not because I think I should make them, or that they’re amazing ideas that will make me rich, or whatever.

Woah, you’re like the ultimate Idea Guy stereotype!

Kind of, but not really?

There’s this joke about how many people call themselves writers or game developers, and think they’re really great and should get rich, but they’re really just “idea guys”. They just tell other people to make their amazing ideas, they never do anything themselves.

There are a lot of people like that, yes. And you can recognize them by how protective they are of their ideas, how secretive, yet wanting to profit fully from the idea. So that’s already a reason why I’m not one of them :p I share everything freely and I ask nothing in return.

Secondly, I have actually executed hundreds of ideas myself, from start to finish. I’ll admit it was hard, much harder than coming up with the idea, but I guess that’s true for everyone. Anyone can think “High school for Wizards!” in two seconds, but it takes years to write the Harry Potter books. Idea Guys usually stop at “What if we do Pokémon but different?”, while many of my ideas are pages full of notes about the specifics of the idea and how one would implement it.

The bigger problem, I believe, is people who are stuck or in need of an idea. The opposite of the Idea Guy! I see it nearly every day: posts, requests, comments from people who are itching to make something but they’re not sure what. Hopefully my website can help those people out from time to time.

Conclusion

I actually learned a lot from this process.

• I learned that I improved massively in the quality and specification of my ideas. All my ideas from the last ~5 years are much stronger, more specific, and written down more neatly (and in English!) compared to all that came before. It’s nice to see this improvement and a good sign for the future.
• I also learned that I should make a lot more sketches/drawings/demos. It takes 5 minutes to just quickly sketch the vision in my head, either in Paint or on physical paper, and it would clear up so many questions I have about my own old ideas. It’s a shame that I did not do it, and I need to get into the habit of adding visuals to all ideas from now on.
• And it somehow opened my eyes again just to how busy my brain has always been and how stupidly optimistic it was about how much work I could do in a day. There’s nearly a thousand ideas on that website now. Did I really believe I was going to make them all!? How did I fool myself for years that it was okay to get new ideas at ten times the rate I can actually execute/finish them? I’m quite certain now that this was a good move, and that my brain can be more realistic about all of it from now on.

Now I’ll be returning to the scheduled programming :p With a hard drive that has “only” some hundred possible ideas to choose from. Honestly, I think I’ve been too conservative still, and I’ll throw way more of those “most promising” ideas online in the future.

Maybe nobody will ever ever use anything that’s on this website because they think all the ideas are rubbish. Maybe I’m the only one who just can’t let go of ideas unless I’ve shared them, and everyone else thinks this website is weird and will just “come up with their own ideas, thank you very much”. Fine by me!

Tiamo