That's pretty amazing that you get to work with someone like Will Wright at such an early point in the creative process! Has it given you ideas for your own games?
You hint at one of the other issues that arises. So much of what a piece of software becomes (game or otherwise) is formed as it's being written. Something sounds great, you implement it, it doesn't look so good but leads you to something else, etc. In the end the game might end up being 50% of the original and 50% from prototyping.
One of the things that gets me is the person who says "Implement my idea. I don't have any money to pay you but you can have a percentage of the profits". Is there a single word that means naivete + ignorance + hubris? This is especially true for those who say they have a great idea for a game, but don't want to tell you because they don't want you stealing it.
I fell in love with SimCity when I first saw it in the 80's, and I got a chance to port it to Unix as a third party contractor. Although it didn't make a lot of money, it did show I could make something work while respecting the original design, so he later hired me to work on The Sims.
His approach to game design is very exploratory, which involves making a lot of prototypes, playing around with them to evaluate the game play terrain, and then climbing the fun gradient towards the high points, and looking around for new ideas from that perspective. He purposefully designs for emergent behavior, but nobody has any way of telling what that behavior will be without actually playing around with a working prototype. It's the kind of stuff you can't just imagine, that you have to experience. So I would say the end product is more like 5% of the original idea, and 95% from prototyping!
The kind of person who wants to do the fun part for glory and have other people do all the hard work is very common, and I've run across many of them. It's a form of narcissism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism . Will is not at all like that: he's very humble and willing to listen to anything anyone has to say, and very good at explaining his ideas, and that's why he's been so successful, because people enjoy working with him, and enjoy playing his games. Though I don't know him personally, I get the impression Notch is a lot like that too. (Although I'm sure his lawyers wish he wouldn't shoot his mouth off all the time! ;)
Here's a write-up I made of a talk that Will gave back in 1996, before I went to Maxis to work with him on The Sims. He described his ideas behind "dollhouse" and gave a demo of a very early prototype, so you can see how he not only had the ideas in mind, but also a working prototype, and was willing to show it and share his ideas with a classroom full of students (and a developer who was just sitting in on the class), instead of being afraid somebody would steal his ideas.
You hint at one of the other issues that arises. So much of what a piece of software becomes (game or otherwise) is formed as it's being written. Something sounds great, you implement it, it doesn't look so good but leads you to something else, etc. In the end the game might end up being 50% of the original and 50% from prototyping.
One of the things that gets me is the person who says "Implement my idea. I don't have any money to pay you but you can have a percentage of the profits". Is there a single word that means naivete + ignorance + hubris? This is especially true for those who say they have a great idea for a game, but don't want to tell you because they don't want you stealing it.