: What software/techniques do people use to gather ideas? I'm planning to create a game. It won't be the first game I've created (or even released), but it will be my first game with any story

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I plan in Scapple by Literature and Latte. It's sort of a mind map story board.

At the time of writing this, it's only .99 so very reasonably priced, really easy to use and the technical support is fantastic.

Every possible idea for my story goes into Scapple. I gather pictures of characters, lists of names and titles, I write out bits of dialogue and make notes for scenes. It all goes in until I'm ready to do a full story plan.

The great thing about it, unlike storyboarding on paper, is that you'll never run out of space (the board just grows and grows), you can export all the text and import it into your writing software and even copy and paste pictures across if you need to.

This is my next novel, gradually coming together:

You can download a free trial and see how you like it: www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview
Happy plotting!

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Wiki and Flash are all well and good, but here's an answer for lazy people, like me. I use OneNote. It's already on your Windows, and it requires 0 level of tech-savvy. I am a Wikipedia editor, so it's not like that's beyond my technical skills, but when I come to planning my story, I want to do just that - plan my story. No overhead. OneNote gives me just that: it's intuitive, it lets me add images, links, tables and text formatting, layer notes, Ctrl+F on the whole notebook, drag-and-drop ideas. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

Whatever software you're using, consider this: ideas don't just come when you're sitting by a computer an actively planning. They come when you're commuting and bored, when something draws your attention on the street, etc. A useful way not to lose those ideas is to do your planning on a software that lets you access your file from multiple platforms, including your phone.
@Secespitus gives an excellent answer regarding placeholder names, so let me just stress one element: don't just call your old man OldMan: call him {OldMan} (or some other markup). The difference is that once you have several dozen names for places and characters, some of them still placeholders, other replaced with what you're actually going to use, you can search for the { to find what you still need to find names for.

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Use a wiki
Many people are using a wiki when they are creating their worlds, as can be seen by this answer to the question What software is available for keeping and organising notes about your world? on WorldBuilding.SE.

The biggest one is MediaWiki (the power behind Wikipedia). MediaWiki can be private, and it's not too hard. See this tutorial for information on how to do that. But basically you would create one account and limit it to that. As a bonus MediaWiki is open source and free.
Another option would be DokuWiki on a Stick. This would be a simple home wiki that you could transport around on a USB drive, or possible share over the internet. To see set up look here. And it can still be private. DokuWiki is also open source and free!
There are many other private wiki options but many of them aren't opensource/free.

These are a few easy and free options that you can use to create documents with your ideas and link them to each other. It will be easier to keep track of if you have all your documents in a searchable wiki. And you can link to an existing page whenever you reference it.
For your specific problems:

I could probably write things down - but I fear that doing so would not scale well. I might keep jotting down paragraphs here and there - but once I've done so I may never find it again once there are a few.

It will be easy to find stuff again if it's all in one place with a title. No need to fear that you will have multiple files with each one being somewhere on your computer. Everything will be kept in one place and can be found again if you know what you are searching. You can also simply create a page of "Ideas that are not yet integrated into the story" or something like that and whenever you have a random idea you can link to it there. This will make it easy to keep track of the things that are not yet finished.

Ideas containing events may not necessarily have a character assigned to them yet. How do people even write down ideas when you aren't willing to commit to the names of characters yet? "Person A meets Person B" is confusing to write and read.

The normal way is to use some kind of placeholder. For example whenever you want to have a minor character you simply write down {MinorCharacterWithGrayHair} or something like that. It's best to try of something interesting or somewhat remarkable whenever you introduce a character to make it easy to identify them. You can then create a stub page for them and once you get around to give them a name and some characteristics you can update their main page. Whenever you then come across such a reference you can look at the referenced page and update the name.
If the characters are really just background characters and you feel that the above approach is better to be reserved for you main characters with yet-to-decide names you could of course just use a placeholder without referencing a new page each time. Something like {OldMan} or {LittleChild}.

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TL;DR Anything from Microsoft Paint, to general FlowChart designing programs will work (you should probably start with a flowchart regardless, but that's just me). Everything else in this answer is commentary, with emphasis on how I did it in Flash.

Welcome to the world of plotting. Things here are a little different than what you might be accustomed.

First let me say that I work with what works for me. That being said, back when I designed games, I would work storyboard-style.

Meaning I would start with drawings. I would work out 'stick figure' characters and give them all temp names (just random names from a name generate like nine.frenchboys.net/ ). What I would then do is just work out the story in rough strokes.

So. Simply put, seeing as I used to work primarily in Flash (back when it was Macromedia), I would just start drawing and add frames as I went on a single timeline.

(above is a picture of the TimeLine in Flash)

So, what I would do (and the reason I add the picture is to help anyone that doesn't know what I mean), is put in the still frames of everything I need to happen. If I feel something should happen in between, add a frame between them. One layer would have the stick figures that I can play with as I feel was needed, another would have names, another would have dialogue and/or actions to keep it all in context.

And in the first frame, I would have an overview of how it all ties together (along with frame numbers so I know where to find what). This gave me one 'grand master plan', and helped me to organize. But that was... 15 years ago? Surely someone has more up to date ideas.

But really, I would mostly have the grand scheme planned out in my head, and would usually just put it into visual representation in the master plan file (as a checklist almost).

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