Inspired by....?

[HigurashiKira]

Because there's no such thing as an original idea, what inspired you to make your games? What was the spark that turned on your lightbulb? Was it a game you were playing one day that made you go "Hey, something like this might be good for a visual novel" or maybe a book or a movie?

3 things have inspired me so far: Killer Queen which gave me the idea for Death Rule, Umineko no Naku Koro Ni for a dropped project, and practicly every single erouge game with a stupid male best friend for Heart::Hatred

[LateWhiteRabbit]

My inspiration for the current game I am making is the same as Haneko's was to make Cute Knight - I fell in love with a genre playing Princess Maker 2, only to discover to my horror that the number of games in that genre WORLD-WIDE was only a tiny handful, and most were not in English.

So after waiting for years to see if the situation would change, I finally have a degree in game design, a degree in business, and the art chops to make it happen myself. Cute Knight and Cute Knight Kingdom definitely scratched that itch a little for a raising sim, but there are still things I am adding or changing to the genre that either Princess Maker or Cute Knight didn't add, or that I would handle in a much different way, or basic tenants of the genre that I think need improvement. Not to give anything away, but I am also setting my raising sim game in a setting not seen in the genre before.

Basically, to play the type of game I want to play, I have to make it. Unfortunately, this means I will know all the secrets and special events and defining parameters and what not, eliminating a lot of the fun of these types of games. I am compensating by building in insanely high replay value, and making sure the game is fun and exciting regardless of whether or not you know about certain things ahead of time. This works in my favor as a whole and my eventual audiences' as this genre of game is meant to be replayed dozens of times anyway.

[chensterrain]

Heh, mine's pretty much identical to LateWhiteRabbit's... except for Tokimeki Memorial (though I also love the Princess Maker series, and used parts of it for inspiration). There seem to be more and more indie devs making these types of games lately though, which is great! :B

[RemnantDream]

For my current one, Pickles and Strawberries, I had a rather..odd way of coming up with it..

Interesting tidbit...

Wanna know how I came up with the idea for this and the name? I came home from school today with a migraine. I was hungry so I went and got a pickle. Then I saw a bowl of strawberries and took one and ate it. I had just finished eating the pickle so I could still taste the pickleyness when I ate the strawberry. It tasted soooo weird o_O And I was just like "Those should not go together! They're like sweet and sour." and somehow I was just "That'd be a cool VN. A really sweet popular girl and a rude loner guy."
AND THUS PICKLES AND STRAWBERRIES WAS BORN.

[KomiTsuku]

Several cans of mt. dew and my last few attempts to take over the world. A lot of what I write are loosely based off of those adventures.

[Camille]

I've been playing Japanese otome games (GxB) for the last couple of years, and even the occasional BxB game, but I feel like most of my inspiration for making my own VNs comes from BioWare's games. Though making a visual novel is (obviously) a significantly less intensive process than making a game like Mass Effect, that's nonetheless the general idea that I'm going for: a game with a malleable protagonist where your choices really matter. Of course, my experience with otome games also guides me in what to do and what not to do, just to a somewhat lesser extent. XD

Overall, though, I try to come up with my own ideas and just get inspiration for the overall process or features rather than for things like story or characters. When it comes to working on the UI, I like just staring at http://dribbble.com/ until some of their creativity rubs off on me. :p

[sake-bento]

Most of my inspiration comes from books along with a little dash of real life experiences.

Jisei (and its sequels) are largely inspired by Artemis Fowl and Percy Jackson. I like the idea of intelligent kids doing things in today's modern world with a slightly supernatural twist.

The otome games I write are all inspired by shoujo manga. Go figure. XD

[Lumen_Astrum]

Heavily by the Bible. Also with Greek mythology.

Oh, and my classmates, in an extent.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Heavily by the Bible.

Yeah, the Bible has a lot of ridiculously awesome stories, even if you aren't religious. Read as mythology many of them offer just as much excitement and adventure as Greek or Roman mythologies:

-Noah and the Flood is totally a disaster movie with epic events, high drama, edge of your seat suspense as supplies run low and no sight of land, etc.

-Lot's story of Sodom and Gomorrah includes armageddon, angry mobs and rape, supernatural beings and dire warnings, instant death spells, and post-apocalyptic survival and incest to top it all off.

-Joseph and the Coat of Many-Colors is straight up awesome and epic in scope, with so many great and tense moments and drama, both of a personal nature and scope and the fate of a kingdom riding on the outcome of personal hang-ups. Not to mention dream prophecy.

-Daniel and the Lion's Den, especially the extended version in the Apocrypha, which involves logic puzzles and systematically insulting and proving an entire kingdom to be foolish and gullible morons - and it has dragon slaying before you even get to the lions!

-David and Goliath, of course.

-King Saul and the Witch of Endor, a monarch disguises himself and goes amongst his subjects seeking out a practitioner of necromancy - when he had forbidden and driven out and persecuted all such people as official policy! When a witch is found, a ghost of a famous figure is summoned for advice and Saul is called out for being a hypocrite and he is told his future - in the next day's battle, he, his sons, and his army shall all die. And despite everything he does to avoid his fate and the terror the prophecy has created in him, he watches it all slowly come true the next day, culminating in his death. And there is room to interpret that the witch was a fake and was surprised by the appearance of the ghost herself!

The list goes on and on. I think a lot of people have just had these stories preached to them in a very dry and archaic manner, but reading a modern translation is considerably more exciting. Japan is releasing a big budget title based on the Book of Enoch where Lucifer is an ally. I don't know why more developers don't pull from the same well - you don't have to imbue any of the stories with religion any more than you have to do so to tell stories of the Greek, Roman, or Egyptian gods. And as I've pointed out, a lot of those stories are awesome!

[SilverxBlue]

My games are inspired by almost every manga I've ever read and by every game I've ever played but to be more specific I guess...
A bit of Tokimeki Memorial for Caught in Between most specifically the third one... even if I only know bits of its plot.
And when I was coming up with a plot I saw my two nephews fighting over some girl they both like and that idea poofed into my head in an instant.

For (My) dark little secret, this game was mostly inspired by my desire to make a mystery VN kinda like Jisei and the gender bender thing was just another idea I came up with because I was watching Mulan while drafting ideas. XD

[curry nochi rice]

Root beer. Windmills. Stars. Snow. Ice. Japan. Anime. provinces. Mountains...

[pondrthis]

-Agree with LWR about holy texts having awesome plotlines, whether you see them as mythology or what you believe to be true. Or something in-between.

-My current project came from a mix of two thoughts. First, an attempt to think up something terribly disturbing, because I doubted my ability to do so. (I still do, actually.) Second, an awkwardly-translated line in an al|together game LEAVEs which read something like, "She looked just like me. Except, she's obviously a girl. And I'm not. Obviously."

Just before, the unseen protag kept saying how much this girl looked like "him", so I was like, "Oh! That awkward wording was probably to preserve some ambiguity! She's obviously a girl, but the protag ISN'T OBVIOUSLY!"

And thus the idea of a protagonist that is female, despite the audience's preconceived notions that she is male due to things like having a girlfriend. Twists were developed. Awesomeness is ensuing. Slowly, though, due to RL issues... T.T

[Glasskitten]

If I could be completely sure of what inspired me, I'm pretty sure my real-world social circle would rally to have it banned.
I used to think I was inspired by cute ren'ai games, mainstream anime, my largely secondhand knowledge of manga, etc., but I never managed to draw much out of that. I don't share the experiences and background that created the originals in the first place. (And if I did, they probably wouldn't retain the alien novelty that interests me about them. The clean, enigmatically marked Japanese architecture wouldn't look like a magical fantasy world; the uniformly adorable high school kids would make me roll my eyes in exasperated recollection. (If someone ever asked me to redo my own high school years, I suspect I would throw my shoes at him.))
Yet, I seem to be inspired to an unhealthy degree by "those trashy movies!" my father sometimes rents on a whim, and by my googling/trope-reading about similar movies as a substitute when I do not visit him as much: After a certain critical quantity of plotless battles against aliens, senseless shooting sprees, Heroic Sociopaths, contrived romantic subplots, emphatically neuro-atypical villains, and so forth, a part of me snaps and goes, "UR DOIN IT WRONG!!1! "
Combining that with the real-world stories I hear from family, friends, the drug counseling center where some of the aforementioned people work, and occasionally news articles, the result tends to be...God have mercy. X_X

[Applegate]

Most of what I write (and don't end up publishing) is based on experiences in day-to-day life, or a song that stirs something deep inside me. The one story I published here was inspired by the tune "Sing-A-Long Song" and "Two Less Lonely People On This World". In its first incarnation it involved a NEET girl getting on a bus and, by chance, meeting a boy who got interested in her and tried to get her to go out with him. It eventually changed into the story I published now.

I continue to be inspired by random experiences and music, writing many stories but few I would actually share with the world due to how awkward they bring across the experience or feeling I wanted to convey.

[RemnantDream]

I get inspired by the most random things. It's not usually by things I see, read, or hear. It's whatever crazy shit I happen to think of. My train of thought...well, it's more of a train wreck. I'll start off thinking of one thing and end up thinking of something not related whatsoever. My friends think I'm on crack .-.

A few examples of how my brain works:

One day, I was walking around my house and I imagined a beautiful woman dressed in all white. She said, "What do you desire?" That one image and sentence evolved into my newest work-in-progress of stories (the one in my signature). For my project Perfect World, well it actually is sort of Pretties-esque (Uglies series by Scott Westerfield <33). But I came up with the idea for it because I imagined a watch talking to me. I have another story about a serial killer that I conceived from imaging two lovers committing suicide together.

What is this I don't even..