Dreaming Up The Next Big Idea

Dreams are a very bizarre part of the recuperation process for human beings.  Whether you think they are your subconscious trying to relay something important to you, that they're just your brain trying to store and analyze the goings on of that day, or that they are your imagination trying to either mess with you or entertain you, you can't deny that dreams are just weird.  They also can affect your day to day by making you mad at someone for something they did to you during the dream.  But dreams can also be a wellspring of ideas that wouldn't come to you in your normal train of thought.

I personally like to use the more imaginative and fun dreams as a starting point for my games.  The original idea for Suspicion came from a dream, only with a vastly different setting.  I dreamt about a council of werewolves, vampires, and other monsters that had an agreement with a nearby village where the villagers would give them a few villagers every once in awhile for the monsters' purposes, but then the monsters would leave the rest alone.  However, one of the monsters secretly went to the village and started killing villagers on his own.  So it was up to the council to figure out who the traitor was and give him the angry mob approaching the castle before they reached it and killed all the monsters.  Being a dream, it wasn't as coherent as all that, but there was enough of an interesting setting and ideas there to start from.  Then I had to extract the crazy dream logic (you know, like when eating a sandwich can turn you into a dragon or something and that's perfectly normal in the dream) and extrapolate the ideas that I liked from there.

Sometimes the dream gives me a mechanic that I would love to see in a game.  Another time I had a dream where I was playing an RTS game, but I could build my species in a Spore-like editor.  I could make the creatures look however I wanted and then give them certain predefined abilities.  Like make a basic melee unit and design his building and an archer unit and his building.  But then the cool thing was I could take two units and combine them to start building a tech tree.  So if I had built the melee building and the archer building, now I could build a new building that made guys that had the abilities of both of the original units.  The building and unit were also a combination of the originals, which you could then edit if you didn't like how the computer combined the two things.  I'm probably never going to make this game, but I think it's a totally feasible idea for an RTS were the players could build their own species as long as the game functionality (how a unit attacks) and its price are separate from how it looks and all the game mechanics are balanced against each other.  You would also give the players a few premade species in case they didn't want to go to all this trouble.  So someone with more of an RTS background than mine, steal this idea (I give it up freely) and make this game and make it awesome!

TV Show Idea: Matrix Murders

Synopsis: In order to convince people that they are inside The Matrix, a group of humans that have escaped (red pills) enter in and solve otherwise unsolvable crimes.  The operators outside the Matrix are able to hack the system in various ways (disguising the people inside the Matrix, changing the environment, giving the people jacked in tools and weaponry, etc.).  The more frequently the operators hack or the jacked in people bend the rules of the Matrix, the faster the Agents will find the group and eliminate them.

Basic episode plot: Someone's loved one just died/someone is being stalked by a murderer/etc.  The heroes approach that person and convince them they can solve the mystery.  As the operators read clues from the code and the jacked in people bend the rules to access areas normal people couldn't, the Agents start to chase the heroes.  Eventually the mystery is solved, the heroes escape the Matrix, the person saved/involved is rescued from The Matrix and brought to Zion.

Season 1 overarching story: One particular Agent is obsessed with catching the group and progressively bends/breaks more and more of the Matrix rules in order to catch the group with a climactic battle ending with the Agent being disowned by the other Agents.

Season 2 overarching story: A group of humans who don't agree with Zion or its goals have split off and formed their own city.  They are trying to work with the Agents to bring all of humanity back into the Matrix because it is more peaceful than their current existence.  This group is constantly working against the heroes all while the Agent from Season 1 is trying to find where he belongs.  Throughout the season his alignment shifts between working against the heroes and working to help the heroes.