Why You Sometimes Need to Leave Your Best Ideas Behind

When my friends and I sat down to plan out the theme of our video game, we stumbled upon an exciting, fresh idea. What if the Greek and Roman cultures never died out and stuck around until the Industrial Revolution? And what if their distinct ideologies (at least according to pop culture) caused a civil war of sorts? A civil war that would impact the gods themselves? As far as we knew, these thematic questions were unique. And the Greek and Roman influences would stand out among other tactical RPGs—our chosen genre.

It was a great idea. But ultimately we made the best decision possible for that idea—we ditched it.

Prune isn’t a sexy word. But without proper pruning, some trees and bushes will never reach their full potential. Sometimes even the best ideas need some pruning. Every creative process involves more than one great idea, one perfect plot line, one remarkable riff, or one beautiful brushstroke. If you allow one idea to take over your entire project, it might choke out the other branches.

As we continued to work on our indie game over the past couple years, we kept pruning. We loved the idea of mixing Greek and Roman culture with a steampunk aesthetic, but the task was beyond our small team. Perhaps a more experienced team with a legion of concept artists could figure out a great way to believably blend the two concepts. However, our primary focus was to make sure our art looked good and stayed consistent. 

But we could leave behind the art stuff and still keep the world building concepts, right? We tried. After all, with tons of centuries under their belt, the Greek and Roman empires would probably appear quite a bit different. Maybe they would grow tired of all those columns and chariots. While the idea of pitting Greek myths and ideology against Roman myths and ideology was a great design constraint as I molded the world of Alkanaur, that constraint became less and less helpful. I realized that many of the good ideas that had spawned from our initial thematic questions could thrive on their own. And so Alkanaur eventually became its own world with its own gods.

Does this mean that our initial idea wasn't that great after all? Perhaps. But I don't think so. To get started on our video game, we needed more than a good idea—we needed the best. That gave us the energy and excitement we needed to gain momentum on our project. But as the project grew we needed to be brave enough to take care of the whole tree and not just the best-looking branch.