What do you do if you want to unleash the power of creativity for groundbreaking gaming experiences?

Back in the old days to be creative was to build astonishing results with your limited hardware resources. A great example of this is how the green hills and white cloud in the original Mario use the same texture to save valuable KBs. Now, there is more technology available at the stroke a few keys than ever before. Embrace what's available to you! Players have all sorts of devices that we can start to use creatively. Why don't we try bringing back unplugging the controller to beat the boss in MGS? Or, connecting your gameboy to your gamecube for a personalized screen holding your inventory separate from the shared TV screenspace.

Talk with people about your design, don't keep it to yourself. Attract other developers whom you respect to your ideas. Enroll them in your vision. We can only ever see from our perspective, which is derived from our position and angle relative to our goals. Other people offer you new positions and angles with which you can better define your goals and discover paths toward them.

Take what you've learned and apply it creatively. There are numerous possibilities with no limitations. THIS is the key to creativity. Yes, there will be failures, BUT at least you know this isn't the way, and you're one step closer to blowing people away.

Kind of opposing what the LinkedIn AI is suggesting over on the left: play games. You won't know what innovation is happening in the industry if you aren't taking AT LEAST 10-30 minutes regularly to try out new games. There are lots of cool mechanics out there. If you've got a core, play games that have a similar core mechanism and see how they support and challenge the player throughout the whole gameplay loop. You're bound to learn something if you're paying attention while playing.

Now this is the key to creative game development. Ask a question about your game. Then build an answer to that question. Observe if that brought you closer or further from your design goals. Then, keep repeating this until you've answered enough questions to develop something meaningfully different from existing games and therefore uniquely yours. Can't take the credit for this idea. That one goes to Jonathan Blow, specifically his talk 'Truth in Game Design'.

Playtest playtesters playtesting. Get someone to try out your game demo and just shut up and watch them play. You'll find out what's not intuitive, what's broken, and where your golden moments lie.