10 years or so ago, when I was a game programmer, I used to have the same "I've got an idea for a game" problems.
Most ideas were useless, some were poorly thought out "Like X but Y", for example "Like Command and Conquer but set in space"; others were far too difficult to construct.
Then, I was told an idea for a great puzzle game. I decided the idea was so great I made the originator of the idea my wife ;)
I don't normally up-vote amusing comments but I really could not resist for this one. The most amusing comment I have read on hacker news so far and the only to really make me smile today. Thank you!
Thanks... I don't submit many longer posts since I've limited myself to checking news sites from my phone (for productivity reasons). So this one-liner generated about six months of Karma for me :)
Limiting the scope of your idea helps a lot with execution. Kenta Cho blows me away with the crazy number of games he releases. He releases a new one every few days! [1] But if you look at his source code, it's very short and about 90% of it is reused each time.
The tower building game mechanic in World of Goo was the result of a similar rapid-prototyping exercise. Braid started out as a quick prototype, too. Having lots of ideas isn't bad; you just need a way to spew things into a playable state quickly so you can filter out the chaff.
This talk by Jonathan Blow (author of Braid) has totally changed how I think about writing games, and certainly since I listened to it I've got much closer to finishing any of my personal projects than I have in years, hopefully will release something soon (I believe that games are one of the few areas where 'release quick, release often' is a bad idea, although I seem to be getting proved wrong by minecraft).
It had a slight iPhone success. ~5,000 copies, never got very much publicity despite an average review of about 4.5, now taken down I'm afraid.
I'm currently playing around doing a HTML (DOM, not 5) version. Unfortunately I don't have as much time as I'd like to play with such things on the side. Everyone who has played it agrees it's fun.
Most ideas were useless, some were poorly thought out "Like X but Y", for example "Like Command and Conquer but set in space"; others were far too difficult to construct.
Then, I was told an idea for a great puzzle game. I decided the idea was so great I made the originator of the idea my wife ;)