Dave Gilbert is the president of Wadjet Eye Games, publisher of acclaimed point and click adventures such as Technobabylon, Primordia, Resonance, Gemini Rue, and author of Unavowed and the Blackwell series. One of the main figures behind the genre's resurrection in the second half of the 2000s, Gilbert is often compared to the great designers of the LucasArts and Sierra's era, but has built up his reputation using a free and approachable game engine (Adventure Game Studio, aka AGS) as the technical backbone of his works.
Unavowed is undobtedly his most mature creation, but as it often happens at the start of a new project, his previous experience didn't spare him confusion and uncertainties. One of the ideas that encouraged him to push through came from Damon Salvatore, co-star character from The Vampire Diaries TV series:
his is the quote "There's no such thing as a bad idea! Only poorly executed awesome ones" Gilbert references in the image above.
What may sound as a simple catchphrase at first, devoid on any real meaning, acquires a different contour when stacked up against a matter of fact: nowadays and much more than in the past, creating a videogame is not so much a matter of technical expertise but rather one of practicality and determination. Many are the low cost (or even free) tools capable of giving shape to a creative project, and many are the channels through which the final product can be brought to the public eye.
It is true that the powerful push of digital platforms contributed a lot to the status quo, with their constant hunger for new contents to bring to their audiences regardless of the source, and Gilbert itself actually doesn't speak from a neutral position: he is a publisher after all, owner of an online store, which owes part of his success to the wise choice and promotion of games from other garage authors. Nonetheless, his approach to game development keeps nurturing a certain amateur, family-style flair, from which any aspiring game designer can pull inspirations.
The first one says that bringing an idea into the realm of doing is always the best way to assess its worth. The next step consists in preparing to embrace all of the changes that idea is certainly going to go through during production, in a positive way. This second point is maybe the hardest to take in, as it implies potential departures from the original intentions and desires, but at any level, whoever works in the field will agree that making videogames is an experience of constant revisions and adjustments, and a discarded idea often plants the seed for something better.
Dave Gilbert himself knows a thing or two about this, as he recently had to trash a stalling project draft, only to come up with a second one, different and more complete, in a fraction of the time it took to make the first. Luckily enough, familiarising with the job's routine doesn't require Rockstar Games or anybody else's resources. Just practicality and determination.