Hi :) I wanted to ask where do you get inspirations for games you develop. Do you perhaps get inspired by other games, talk to your friends/co-developers about ideas, or suddenly get an idea like in a dream/daydream or you focus on the task of making a certain type of game and research everything around it and then carefully plan it.
As for me I am a mix of all of the above mentioned.
Typically I just have an idea I want to try out, often from a software engineering angle, e.g. I once read the wikipedia article on maze generation algorithms, and I saw one I thought I could implement fairly easily in Unity, programmatically instantiating planes for the walls/ceiling/floor of each maze segment (the trick is to use the same material instance for each plane to get efficient rendering), and then I added a first person controller to navigate it, and then I thought it would be cool keep it dark and add suspense effets and a flashlight (I was playing Resident Evil at the time).
That was basically a one week project (with a lot of updates later) but as another example that ended up taking a lot more work, when the App Store opened up (way back around 2009) and Unity announced support for iOS, I thought the aspect ratio of iPhones was a match for the HyperBowl attraction game I worked on years earlier (2001) which displayed on a tall projection screen, and swiping on the screen could be a good substitute for the original bowling ball/trackball control, so I made a no-frills bowling game to test that control concept (a weekend project) and asked for a license to port HyperBowl, and then it took me a couple of years to get the original set of bowling lanes running.
From another games! I look at them and say - all the time - wow it is so cool! I need to do something by myself this style, but my way. From time to time my way is do different, so there is nothing about object of inspiration, but sometimes i like to call my games as CLONES of another game. Like Space Invaders.
For ideas, just spur of the moment stuff. This extends into stuff like art for a project and further planning. From there, I look at what I want to do, what pulled off similar ideas for comparison, what I like most in an idea and why I like it. I'm not afraid to admit if I'm influenced by an outside source - that honest allows me to go all-in with a direction, so-long as I'm not going too far and outright ripping something off.
Those are just ideas, but to demonstrate with what I've been doing, I'm making a game that's an endless runner. I know the tone will usually be nighttime. I know that I want combo attacks, flight, and the ability to grab and throw enemies. While sketching the main character, I can recognize what I was exposed to in order to influence these ideas: Batman for a dark, urban setting, Klonoa for enemy manipulation, Kirby for fluid movement nuance, etc... Rather than delude myself into thinking that I can replicate what I loved about the source materials, I can use them as starting points to flesh out certain things into an original idea (or, rather, as original as anything else).
Some of my games started as an idea that I started working on, but also, at different points, went and looked up tutorials/information on how to do certain things. Other games, I saw a game and thought it was cool and it inspired a game of my own, or it was that I wanted to make a certain kind of game and went and looked up the game artistic style and then went and used it as a starting point. Still others are from a game jam. For those it was that there was a prompt and I thought about what I could make that would fit, then made it. I also, most likely, went and looked at what else was being made to get ideas of what I could make.
