Be prepared to actually tell some people these great ideas - that's the only way a developer can commit to them. Post some designs here or on a website asking for help making them into a reality. If they're good you won't have an issue finding people to work on them with you. If they're great you might even have people fighting over them. If you're worried about the ideas getting stolen (so don't want to give anything away publically) then it will be much trickier to get anybody on board - in which case it will probably be quicker to just learn how to use Unity or something like that yourself (which is what I recommend you actually do - it's brilliant!)
1. Write down all your ideas. This can be a short paragraph or one sentence. 2. Take the best one and wire frame the main menu screens and the flowchart through menus. This should include all the game modes, options, rules, tutorials, in-apps, etc. 3. Next, sketch out the User interface. When playing what is the player seeing and where on the screen are the things they need to see or touch OUTSIDE the game itself. Assume the game is just Pong or a pixel sitting there. What you want to do is sketch out the frame. 4. Now sketch out Game play area. Depending on the complexity of the game, this could be a few sketches or 100's. You need enough to get across the game elements and concept to developers and artists who think entirely different ways and have entirely different requirements as to what they need to do their job. So if Mario is to run along a horizontally scrolling path, and each time he runs over a Mushroom, he gets 50 points which are shown as a starburst with the point amount in it, you need to get all those points across. Simply writing you get points for running over a mushroom is not enough for either an artist or a developer to make anything but fairly boring crap. You dont need to be Rembrandt or Hemingway with your sketches or descriptions, but be thorough even if its just stick figures and text. 5. This is probably the most important piece of advice I can give you. When you design the game, put everything you can possibly think of in it from the start. Something that may seem impossible or a mountain of work to do can sometimes be easy when explained properly. Whatever bells, whistles, modes, and crazy stuff you want in, put it in this first document. Why? Because it is far easier to take stuff out of a game or off a list, than it is to put even a small thing into a game once development starts. Whatever the cost or time was to put that new something in the game from the beginning is now doubled or tripled because you asked after the development started. So go crazy, dream big, and put everything in right from the start. A great tool for this is Balsamiq. It allows you to sketch on mobile screen templates as a series of slides and share them with others who can edit them as well. I believe the basic version is free to try for a month or something. However you can do this with excel and word docs for many games if that's all you have. If you follow this process, you can easily approach freelance developers and artists or dev studios with your idea and get realistic feedback as to time and cost to produce it. As for protecting your idea, its fairly pointless. You can protect the rules and art of a game but not the idea. So if you want to make Super Dario 3, just make him an italian carpenter and have him run over cucumbers on levels you made and there really isnt too much Nintendo could do. You still need to make a good game & market it, so just copying an idea isnt the key to riches. I hope this helps you on you road to being a game designer. Game design is just as important as the art or coding, so if you feel that is your calling, focus on that and leave the coding and art to others who excel at it. Thinking up new, original, great games is enough of a job for one person. Best of luck. I look forward to playing them in the near future.
I'll say the obvious: Learn how to make games. Hiring a team is expensive, and without experience you will most likely fail. Learning a marketable skill ("I have good ideas" isn't a marketable skill, programming, art and game design are) will turn your idea into a reality.
The spammer above advertising a game making company. Its a joke. The home page has 'Game outsourcing' not Game outsoursing and they talk about core values/high standards !!
Everybody has a good idea. The idea itself is worthless. Very rarely do an artist and programmer flock to someone with no experience in the industry because they have a good idea. I've got more good ideas than I have time to make them. If you can't directly contribute to the game yourself, be prepared to hire a team. It's a totally legit way to go btw, but you better have a few $K to invest.
I agree with most people here: The idea itself is worthless AND just get started. The issue I see with many young would-be-game developers is that they dream of these huge epic games. Stuff that costs way too much time and money. You don't start learning the guitar by working on a huge speed-metal epos either. You start with easy things. The same goes for this: Get yourself a game-making-environment (engine, game maker etc.) There's lots of good resources for this. Then go and make a REALLY REALLY simple game. No. Simpler. Just really simple. And see how this works. Then learn and work and learn and work and and learn and work and so on.
Find someone who has a game engine built in to make [game X]. Find a freelance artist who wants to license their art into [game X]. If you combine the two together, then you can make games! ...or you can learn it yourself. But what a lot of developers fail to do is learn how to sell them to publishers. A lot of my friends developed some -really- fun games, but can't get it published cause, well, they are talking to businessmen who don't play games.
Ahh come on, it's easy! Here's a pitch: GTA + Skyrim + Smash Bros + Forza + Gears of War + Angry Birds all in one game. It'll run on 360, PS3, PC, Mac, iOS, Amiga and ColecoVision. You build it for me and I'll give you 10% of the profits. Do we have a deal?
It's easy. Any problems and we'll just get Disney and Nintendo on board. We're gonna be using all of their characters anyway, might as well let them provide some input.
Also here's a funny presentation from a friend of mine on just that topic. http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/?p=3545
Here's now I've approached development of the game I am working on. I'll preface this with the fact that I have over 10 years experience as a digital project manager in the advertising industry - so I've got a ton of experience creating wireframes, writing scope and spec docs and managing designers and developers. Saying all of that though - I will agree with what Demon_Jim and Black Ops (and everyone else) is saying - the better you're able to articulate your design to artists and developers the easier it will be to find people to help you actually create your game. I would start with a brief (2 pages is a good length) scope document. The short length forces you to focus and refine your ideas. of course, this assumes you've polished the game design itself (you HAVE done a bunch of paper prototype testing, haven't you?). Next I would wireframe the key screens (initial menu and primary gameplay loop). Getting these two docs to the point that you're happy to show them to people will force you to polish, refine and redesign your design - and believe me, you will do a LOT of redesign. You should also be considering what you can build as an MVP (minimum viable product). The idea is that rather than committing time and cash to an idea that is flawed, you build a small portion of it and test the markets reaction. If the idea tanks, you've not burnt your life savings finding that out. Then you can start speaking with artists and developers. But before you do, have a plan for how you'd like to compensate them. Will you pay for their time outright, give them a share of profits or revenue, or go all in and create a studio together? Be clear about what you expect of them, and what you will bring to the relationship. Set REASONABLE time and cash expectations and be very clear about who has creative control. It's definitely much harder getting a game made when you're not a developer yourself, but if you can clearly define and pitch your idea, and as as result get people excited and bought into it, you can build up a team that can help you get it done. Good luck.
