Sources of inspiration thread

[mcc]

Post here: Images / sounds / videos / thoughts / news articles / wikipedia entries / pornography / sequences of numbers etc which could inspire something, you're just not sure what yet.

[mcc]

Photo of a snow-covered volcano in Tanzania, ripped from a British Airways inflight magazine:

[mcc]

Highlights reel of chiptunes from games by 1990s era Poland-only developer L.K. Avalon, mostly for the Atari XL series:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx7OxQUgMGg

[mcc]

Music video with live video mixed with interesting voxel-y effects recalling a Sega Master System game box:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMeJx1jP2C0

[nyarla]

Some artwork from JRR Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas, which I always found magical.

[Jonathan Whiting]

Saw this in the b3ta newsletter of all places.. http://www.dailyrnail.co.uk/bbc-engineering-test-signals Loving it for the music at least as much as anything else.

[Jasper]

Three awesome tumblr's full of random but intriguing videogame images:

http://noirlac.tumblr.com/ (when Kevin wins, the planet loses)
http://spikemaze.tumblr.com/ (Anna Anthropy's Time Tunnel)
http://fmtownsmarty.tumblr.com/ (FMTOWNS Marty, posts images from Japanese horror / eroge PC releases)

These never fail to get me going when in a lull.

[Terry]

The design for the Yucca mountain nuclear waste storage facility is absolutely fascinating to me - the idea behind it, the imagery, everything. Here's a good article about it. (Here's another.)



(I've made a few references to it in some of my games, most recently At a Distance)

[roBurky]

I have a folder of art images saved from places like http://butdoesitfloat.com. At some point, I want to spend a few weeks just trying to emulate a different visual style from that folder each day.

[Dan Lawrence]

Crazy real world places/occurances.

Crystal cave:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeiMfLmJtzk&feature=player_embedded#at=31

Volcano lightning:


Lava lake in Ethiopia:

[skusey]

I'm not usually one for "oh those crazy Japanese", but this has been sitting on my desktop offering occasional bursts of inspiration for at least 6 months:

[Mattias Gustavsson]

I sometimes browse through some of the pictures on coverbrowser.com, especially the Pulp category, for covers like this:


or some of the mystery stuff, like this:


I think it's great to only get a hint of the story, just a fragment, and then to imagine the rest yourself. Makes for great inspiration for stories, if not games.

[Abel Toy]

This song from Omniavatar (which, I think, is a free [as in freedom] band), Utopian Curse, specially the part were he begins with the guitar and sounds like a camp fire (minute 1:48 to 3:20) , really inspires me to make some game, maybe a Metroidvania style of game.

The album is supposed to be a whole sci-fi story of aliens in the earth or things like that, so I imagine some post-apocaliptic world destroyed by some aliens or something, and the protagonist having to survive or something.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

I sometimes browse through some of the pictures on coverbrowser.com, especially the Pulp category, for covers like this:

That's really cool. I love the way you can get a real feel for the story and and atmosphere from these single images, and I'd love to be able to put that kind of feel into my own work. So much fun ;)

[SoManyNinjaRobotMen]

http://the-witness.net/news/

Jonathan Blow's new venture, his latest talk is also very cool, nice to hear how he does things.