A sims-like game, where instead of people or a city or a nation, you have to build and manage a galaxy? Set up clusters of dust in strategic spots of certain elements to fuel your galaxy, protect them from asteroids sent from other galaxies/part of space, manage your planet orbits/mass to balance gravitational pulls, ignite gaseous stars to create suns and give life to your galaxy.

Or not. What the fuck do I know. 

1. We're looking into affordable engine licenses for whatever game we decide to make. The budget is only �200, so we can't use the Unreal 3 engine. Does anyone have experience with the open-source/cheap engines such as Instinct Studio (actually a complete dev platform), Torque, or Ogre, and if so what would you recommend?

Best Advice: Decide the game you're making first, then decide on an engine. An engine is a tool toward creating a game, a means to an end, so you should consider what you want to make, and then find which is the best tool for the job. I would honestly avoid Quake3 or Ogre engine unless you're planning to build a 3d action/shooter type game.

As for recommendations, I've fooled around a bit with Construct, which is a decent little development studio. This would be great for creating a simple prototype to help demonstrate or test ideas. http://www.scirra.com/

I've also played with the XNA Framework, which is more likely to be of use for a fully featured game. Some nice strengths are that it's designed specifically for Windows / Xbox360 and there is a ton of documentation. http://creators.xna.com/Education/GettingStarted.aspx

2. For those in the know, what would be your advice on pitching a game in a presentation? Should we, say, focus 50% of the time on the game itself, 25% on the marketability, and 25% on the schedule and plan to develop it? What will the game execs listening to our presentation be looking for?

Presenting your idea is not presenting your design doc. Your entire goal is to convince them that the project you will be doing will be profitable when completed and completable within your timeframe.

So you'll actually want to spend only about 15% of your time actually explaining the mechanics of the game, just enough so it's understood what it is you're making. The rest of the time, you spend on explaining the 'hooks' of the game, it's unique selling points which will draw consumers toward your product. You will want to spend time explaining how it fits in the marketplace and what competition you'd face, and how your product will be superior. Spend some time also to explain what sort of plan you have to create your game, and any risks that would be present as well as your plans to mitigate such risk.

You'll notice I referred to your game as a 'product'. Get used to it. At the end of the day, this is what these execs are looking at, what product they will be shipping and what sortt of return they'd get on their money. This isn't to say that you shouldn't be passionate about how fun the game will be or it's creative aspects, but that's not the focus here.

3. Any general tips for when you're trying to develop and decide on game ideas? It's a little messy at the moment. It seems like everyone and their dad has a "killer game idea" they've always wanted to make, but it's usually either completely unfeasible in the time, or just plain bad. Any tips for inspiration? I'm thinking mainly gameplay/game ideas here, the plot/style is secondary I think.

The other day on the way to lunch, Lunaran was talking about taking the fundimental gameplay of classic games (like astroids, or whatever), and doing that gameplay in a new way so that it's not specifically noticible that you lifted the gameplay. This is the standard approach in the game's industry, due to it's advantage of being easy to see the marketibility of such games.

My own thoughts for becoming inspired for creating games is to look at the world around you, and think of how normal situations could be fun. The example of that climbing game is a great example of this.

A thought I have for a game revolves around helping a blind man walking down the street. You don't directly control the man, but you play the 'hand of god', and move objects and etc other such things so the man avoids deadly disasters. Open Manhole cover? Throw a trampoline down it so he bounces back up. Or place a peice of wood on it. or tie a pillow to a nearby wreaking ball and swing it so it knocks the old man over the hole. The game would be kinda like Mr. Magoo :) 

I recommend the book 'Chris Crawford on Game Design'. Chris is an old school designer from back in the Atari days, and was the founder of the GDC. He covers alot of the questions you ask, and shares a ton of his personal stories from the games he made. 

Bambuz
Good idea! I like it, but as you say it might be difficult to execute. Definitely something to think about throwing in the mix.

Zwiffle
That idea sounds like it would be good for a multitouch screen system... throwing dust here or there, aligning orbits, moving stars... I imagine a really cool particle system behind it and not many on screen menus or instructions, just really minimalistic. There's no restrictions on what controller we use, people have used the keyboard, xbox controllers and guitar hero controllers before. Maybe something could be done with the wiimote.

Scampie
Thanks for the in-depth replies dude, they are very much appreciated.

I take your point on deciding on the game before choosing the engine. The Construct development studio looks really good for prototyping stuff, maybe we could make a video using that which we could show in our presentation too. I looked up the XNA framework and I'm still a little unclear about what it has in it... I like that it can export either a PC game or an Xbox game pretty easily and that it has same good content management stuff in it, but I can't tell if it has it's own rendering engine? I saw a couple of engines like Suva3d and TorqueX which apparently run on XNA, but it didn't look too good.

I'm beginning to finally understand what the pitching process is all about, and it makes sense. So basically, we should explain the basics of how the game plays, explain the hooks - the unique selling points, then go into where it fits in the market, and why it would sell very well. Is it a good idea to step back and come up with game ideas by looking at the market first? How do you go about finding what would sell? Is it as simple as looking through the charts and the magazines, or are there shelves stacked high with pie-charts and graphs everyone looks at?

Your game idea reminds me of one of the previous winners in the competition actually, a game called Bear Go Home. The idea is that there's an adorable bear you have to control, but you can't move him directly, you actually control a firefly thingy that can pull down on the bear's head to make him squashed, let go to make him jump, you can ping his tail to make him run forward, you can pull on his mouth to open it, and so on. Also you can move things in the world to help him, like move an umbrella over his head and so on.

I see where Lunaran is coming from... actually one thing I've been looking at a lot is flash games, because they often have more simple and unique gameplay than most stuff that gets a commercial release, and it's good inspiration. In particular, I've thought about extending the Tower Defense format to a full game setting, maybe combining it with a bit of the survival-horror genre, if you can imagine that. The market is undeniable, TD 1.5 is the highest rated game on Kongregate, and just on that site it's got 16,000 ratings and has been played almost 2 million times. Anyway, cheers again. 

it'd take a huge amount of assets though since elaborate tracks and events would have to be created and lots of buildings and characters, with animations and textures...

Unless you could somehow reuse assets from somewhere like the sims? I don't know...

If your game is more geometric in style and idea then it's possible you don't need so much assets... The same money for much less investment! 

oh dear 

you know I'm a fan of puzzle maps/games. fps without monsters and lots of puzzles/physics was my dream until Portal came out. for now I'm thinking of haunted house game idea where no monsters exist to affect the gameplay but the entire house is alive and scares and tries to kill the player. this should be kinda atmospheric horror game with lots of sounds/effects/physics/dynamic lighting to scare the player instead of monsters. another feature of such game is different types of sight or even movement in different location (rooms). complete chaos everywhere. some time tricks also possible.
that's my idea 

Like the haunted hotel in Vampire: The Masquerade? 

something likу that but even more weird and much longer 

That would be a great game -- you'd have the core gameplay of guiding some Mr. Magoo-esque character, who is given to wandering into trouble, and could have all kinds of side characters and incidents. I'm speaking in general, not just in Starbuck's case. 

reminds me a bit of all those garrys mod videos and the chains of objects triggering each other (can't remember the term for it)... 

James Salt from DICE talks a bit about their design process for battlefield heroes:

http://www.fz.se/filer/?id=5396 

"well we liked TF2, and we haven't made an original game since bf1942 so we figured we would just rip valve off totally"

Sorry, its been a long day :/ 

and it's mostly general dev tips with heroes as an example. 

What happened to this project? 

I'm a bit more interested in understanding what line of thought moved these guys, who explicitly stated not to be interested in "generic shooters", to ask this very forum for help... 

a generic shooter is fine, but after every kill you need to attend the funeral of the person you killed.

it's edgy enough that the anti-video game violence people will love it.

goals include:
- console the widow of the soldier killed.
- write a moving eulogy to bring the hardened uncle of the soldier to tears.
- become a good male role model for the soldiers children. 

A good role model for the children... whose dad you just killed? Boy I'd like to see that... 

You guys do realize this thread is 8 years old? :) 

we came with fresh ideas after 8 years of research 

no... no I did not.

brb making a widow-consolement simulator. 

Spend 80% of the time planning, 15% making the game, 4% bugfixing, 1% cramming for release.