I perhaps idiiotically put the cart before the horse, and made the game
engine before and as I developed the plot/game story.
In hindsight I wouldn't recommend this approach, and would definately
say get your ideas down onto paper first. As was impressed on me by
my scriptwriting teacher, and something I am only appreciating a few years
down the line, that you can almost also guarantee your first nine out of
ten ideas will be useless. However you generally have to get through these
ideas before you discover your own gems.
On the otherhand I have piles of unfinished projects that haven't got beyond
the storyboarding stage, and sometimes the best approach is to just wade
in at the deep end, and concentrate on producing something, and then sticking with it until it is finished.
I found playing an inordinate number of games, also helped to come up with
ideas of puzzles, as there is very rarely anything that is an original idea. Also look at the dynamics of boardgames is also very good to coming up with generalised puzzle ideas, and how different games take different approaches to similar mechanisms, such as collecting a specific set of objects, or getting
from A->B.
I have also found that the point of a game ultimately is to provide an enjoyable experience for the person playing it, and that one has to be careful not to simply punish players for not thinking like you do.... Whatever maybe obvious for you, maybe completely different for another person, and vica versa.
As to starting ideas, I personally find it easier to start with a genre/world scenario and develop the characters from there, and let the game unfold from the original premise.
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