Picking a game idea

My criteria for a game idea currently is that it needs to roughly fit these 3 things:

1. Something I want to make
2. Something a lot of people want
3. Something I have the skills to make

The fact of the matter is, every idea I come up with seems to fail at one of these things, It's not hard to see how something could fail to fit all the categories.

I want something I want to make because well... duh, I'd get bored if I didn't, why would I make something I wouldn't want to play myself that's just asinine. It also makes sense from a design perspective, I just generally know what I like and don't like from the genres of games that I would want to play.

I want to make something that a lot of people would want to play, since as much as I love video games, and I want to make something that people will love, I also want to reach a broad audience since that will mean the game has the largest chance of success as well.

Finally, I want to make a game that I have the skills to make because It's really hard to finish something you don't know how to make. This does limit me a bit on what kind of game I can make, but I think it's important to stay reasonable!

Well, I have a few ideas rattling around that might work, but I'm still debating a lot of details.

Do I make an adventure game? A platformer? A FPS?

This is a really hard problem and I hope to have some answers soon but unfortunately, I don't have any definitive answers.

What have you tried?

The original idea I had was to make a game that had a focus on crafting, over time though I felt that the crafting would be a main mechanic but also to make sure that items had a dual purpose which many games with crafting don't seem to have, which I understand why: it's easier.

A prototype of the adventure game

Consider this quest: The lady down the road, Paula, needs a new broom because her broom was stomped in half when her husband broke it over some guy's head after an argument as they had trampled on the flowers in front of their house. This broom is a craftable item, but the player never sweeps or does anything with the broom it's only an item needed to complete the quest.

I started to think about what if these items had value beyond the quest. Maybe the player needs to sweep something as part of the quest, or maybe there's something that ranks their home for cleanliness, so an improved broom would be a valuable item. The item is now not JUST an item they need because they want to finish the quest, but valuable to the player as well. The quest line helps move the player to better and better brooms.

So that's the plan?

Well no... That may still be too large in scope, I want to make sure the scale is small enough and I think that may need more resources than I can manage. So in the meantime, I'm also looking into games like smaller arcade-style games, or short story-driven action platformers.

In the end that's what I've got going, I meant to post this 3 months ago but it's been a lot of trial and error as I tried to work on being able to keep the lights on haha.

Hopefully, in a few months I will have more info, and who knows, maybe the next Ludum Dare game people will love and that will just be confirmation that I need to make that game!