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[gunswordfist]

I got an idea for a hack n slash game by watching some Smallville episode where Kent is trying to get past some digital keypad to open something and an idea for a ninja game just popped into the head when I was walking to the store one day. Ideas seem to find me and not vice versa.

[Quicksand-T]

My last game We Want YOU had a background story and gameplay heavily inspired by song lyrics. Here are a couple of the songs:

The National - Gospel



Matthew Good - Advertising on Police Cars -

[Alec S.]

Music, movies, feelings and fancies, poetry, etc...

Another thing I've found is I sometimes get inspiration for a game through another medium.  I seem to remember a Brian May quote about how he likes composing in instruments other than guitar as it causes him to try new things.  It's kinda like that, but cross-medium.  I'm currently working on a game that started as an epic progressive rock song.

[Fun Infused Games]

There is this fake plant at work that is sorta a bonzi tree with many different branches with big, flat-ish leafy areas ontop. Every time I see it, I think how cool it would be to have a game where I got to climb up a tree like that, jumping from branch to branch. So yeah... it's my goal to include that scenario in one of my upcoming games.

[Pineapple]

I pretty much always get my ideas when I'm playing other games. I don't necessarily get the ideas from the games themselves, but I'll notice why I'm playing the game, and I'll try to come up with another game that captures the same entertainment. I'm actively working on a game inspired by the concept that in Eufloria, you have very little direct control (You can only build at planets and tell the seeds around a planet to go places) but the game is so deep that your simple actions can do much more than what's seen on the surface. The other game I've been working on is inspired by Portal. First, there is only on other character aside from your own, who acts similarly to GLaDOS. She seems so helpful at first, but you discover gradually that she's feeding you nothing but lies. Also, the game is a platformer but primarily a puzzle game, with an original gameplay mechanic I came up with by twisting around my ideas for how a checkpoint system might work that I'd seen in another platformer game, the same one I drew my idea for monochrome graphics from.

[oahda]

I get inspired just by seeing a tree blowing in the wind, smelling that lovely scent of my neighbour's tree in the summer nights, or tasting clear and fresh water, or being near somebody I deeply care for. Seriously. All of the tiniest, but beautiful, things around me are all great sources of inspiration. I just need to get a strong feeling from something in order for it to make ideas sprout in my mind.

Another great, great source of ideas is dreams. If you remember them when you wake up, write them down! Write them down as detailed as you possibly can. Even if you read them several years later, you will still be able to remember a lot of the things you saw just from getting reminded by the words you put down all those years earlier, while you can't remember anything at all from most dreams you had and did not write down, except for in those sudden flashes that at least I tend to get every once in a while, for unknown reasons.

Obviously other things are inspiring. Other games, of course. Movies. Books. Song lyrics. Just the feeling you get from watching the movie or listening to the song, or reading that book.

Personal experiences, of course. Childhood memories. Friends. Family. Your own life. Lives of other people! There are sources of inspiration all around you, as long as you keep your mind open enough to absorb them.

[Jules_K]

Movies/series -- especially anime -- have always been not only inspiration, but also motivation for me. Also Wikipedia, of course, and in general learning new things. I also get many ideas while doing boring/repetitive stuff (including waiting for something like falling asleep) and e.g. while jogging.

As for other games: In my opinion, creativity is inherently limited by what you know (this does not mean that you cannot think of a platformer without ever having played Mario, but it does mean, that not knowing Mario puts you one step further away from developing Braid), so the more you know, the better. Of course knowledge also influences creativity and may make thinking of genuinely new ideas harder but I think what it comes down to is this:

You make a game (or any kind of expressinve medium really) to convey something (although I myself have argued for there being a certain value in creating things for the sake of it, I don't think that it is that, what most of us are here for, but correct me, if I'm wrong), so you should use whatever is necessary to do that. What you get from playing lot's of other peoples games are really just tools that have proven more or less effective inside the medium; just like filmmakers have certain camera angles and movements or musicians have chord progressions, etc.

If you already know the right tool for conveying your "message", then don't hesitate to use it only because it was not your original idea. I don't think of 100 FPS with exactly the same mechanics as a problem, if they bring across some sort of meaning to me (which is IMHO not the case with the bajillion shooters we have...). This also ties into the "art discussion": The message is important, not the medium.

However, don't restrict yourself by trying to squeeze whatever you want to bring across into the wrong tools. Especially games are a pretty open medium in the sense that we really just do software of some sort and thus can do whatever we want with the machine we're developing for. I don't think that being influenced by having played too many games is the problem, but rather thinking inside a way too constrained box named "game". Just think in terms of what gets the message across, and then IMHO the more tools you know, the better (and it doesn't matter if these come from games, movies, or whatever).

I hope this kind of makes sense x).

[guille]

I find a lot of inspiration here: http://ffffound.com/
also from movies and from insects (and nature in general).
BUT
the most important thing is to find something and GIVE IT A TWIST, don't use it just like that. get the esscence of something and apply it to something totally different. Like you get the strategy used in football to create an RTS game. shit like that.

[droqen]

I was inspired to make a game by the sheer awesomeness of the real life last name 'Fishbane'.

True story.

[TooMuchSpareTime]

I believe that, Droqen. Real reople can be a great source of inspiration.
Case in point: in high school, me and a friend were inspired by the creepy-looking school janitor and our crazy science teacher to make a game about a janitor who saves the school from the mind-controlling influence of an evil science teacher (by fighting the entire school). I say we were inspired to make this game, but even after 3 different attempts (text RPG, then side-scrolling platformer, and finally top-down) over the course of 3 years it was never fully completed each time. I probably owe it to my 14 year-old self to make that game at some point now that I have better skills and technology. Not as a first person shooter though... too soon...  

Environments (natural, man-made, even fictional) and time (of day/year/history/geological age) are what I seem to use for inspiration regarding storylines and themes, more than gameplay.

[mewtype]

I'm with guillermo on the fffound page buzz. Its varied enough to get me in alot of different mindsets.
Also from fffound i have fffound myself off on great internet tangents.

 http://butdoesitfloat.com/ is good ..and i have spent full days tumblin
http://cutter.fullmecha.com/

[namre]

I find that studying children and see how they play, and how they come up with ways to entertain themselves  when they're bored is a good way to get an idea. Too bad, we grown ups have lost that ability. God I wish I were young again.

[jay]

I've heard sometimes that one of the big challenges to creativity in gaming is that everyone seems to draw most if not all their inspiration for games from other games, creating a cycle of inbreeding that makes truly unique ideas more difficult to appear.

I don't think this in itself is a problem. The problem is more how they draw that inspiration.

I feel the inbreeding is so pronounced in games as it largely exists solely at the current (or 'last known') generation. Shiny Game X has a cool mechanic so we've got to have it too, that kind of thing. Rather than going back to earlier examples of that kind of mechanic in other games to see how they handled it. It's the gaming equivalent of someone liking Interpol and so they start a band drawing from Interpol songs so they sound like a third-rate knockoff, rather than digging back to Joy Division, then further back to the Doors and maybe finding a new approach on it.

I feel there's a huge body of stuff out there in gaming that people never really ran with. Especially in the 80's/8-bit home computing scene. Many people have tried to make a new x-com, but they're clearly just cribbing from one source, not bothering to dig deeper. That game has a direct lineage going back to the mostly-BASIC Rebelstar Raiders on the speccy (and going further back still with tabletop wargames). Likewise with Elite spawning so many derivatives, most of them largely cribbing from Frontier-style complexity, instead of trying something else, going sideways from the original design. Most every RTS came from Dune 2 then C&C then Starcraft, where's the Syndicates or Cannon Fodders?

I think there's plenty of room for expanding further from existing game ideas, people just need to do their research better.

[baconman]

Well... this may or may not hit the mark, but the inspiration behind my current gamedev project actually stemmed from a trip to the local arcade. I thought to myself, "lots of people like lots of different games... so what if there was a game about gaming, itself?"

Originally, it was concieved as an RPG (hence the character development tests, the "friends or foes" system), and was at one point even MMO in design. But it became too ridiculously overinflated, trying to make "(parodies of (trilogies of (5 popular gaming series (from each of 10-plus genres; (and occasional crossovers between them each.)))))" Along with employment, income/allowance, tournaments, and transportation systems, and even consoles/portables and game titles and gaming soundtrack CD's/players (for custom BGM on the go!) to purchase from in-game stores. IE: All the unnecessary baggage that makes modern consumer gaming SO difficult to keep up with for real.

Also, there was no PGC planned, except in the Roguelike titles, which for the most part, simply changed graphics/themes and the primary objective of it (speedruns, most kills, most loot, etc.). This later evolved into the element of variable objectives that's planned in the current title. There was even a dating/sex element to it, regarding the NPC's, and your success rate! (So the better you did, the more and hotter the action with your "dates" got.) You could even go see a 30-second "terrifyingly horrible movie based on a game" with your dates. I even considered costumes/cosplay in the works, too.

After admittedly getting way out of the ballpark, I decided to trim down the elements to the ones most appealing; and duplexing them (hence moving the PGC approach to other gaming styles). I also dropped a Tamagochi/PokeMon-like pet system, sports titles, FPS games, and puzzle games (including mixed Puzzle Combat) completely. I also trimmed pinball and gambling (working them into a theme for levels ala Sonic or MegaMan, instead of a totally different game), as well as the hellacious IWBTG-style game (the same way, in fact), and then dropped a game-characters-oriented TCG/CCG (with both "physical" and "electronic" versions thereof, in spite of both being ironically electronic).

The remaining six (Platform Action, Action-Adventure, Space-Shooter, Racing, Fighting, Musical Gaming) are the ones I'm working with now; all simplified by a day planner and results screen approach, and the "friends and foes" system working into the gameplay itself now, instead of the "whole gamer RPG." Finally, I'm even taking that basic idea, dummying it down to the core (for efficiency of programming's sake, as well as having limited resources, and not wanting a gigantic executable that takes 2 hours to load); and developing this first, experimental title, i.M.A.G.E. Zero (hence the "Zero" part). A kickoff so to say - mainly to test interest in such a type of game, bug-catching and troubleshooting. And most importantly...

FOR LOVE OF THE GAME.