November 2000
Inspiration and
Ideas
 "When
we are inspired great things happen."
If you drive by the
Compaq campus in Houston, Texas, you'll see a series of
square, red signs planted in the ground outside the
campus entrances. Each sign contains a single word,
together comprising the phrase, above. Presumably, the
signs heralding inspiration are designed to inspire the
Compaq employees and, perhaps, inspire Compaq computer confidence
in the passing potential customers.
Sure, great things do
happen when we are inspired, but how do we get that way?
What inspires us to great ideas?
What
inspires ideas?
Many times, great ideas are
inspired simply by necessity. For example, Benjamin
Franklin was frustrated that he
had to constantly switch his pairs of glasses. He wanted
the ability to see both near and far with a single
frame. To accomplish this, Franklin had the lenses of
two pairs of spectacles cut in half and put half of each
lens in one sole frame. Voila. The bifocal.
But what if there is no real
"necessity?" For example, when GIG
decided to change the look of our site, there was no
real necessity in doing so. Sure we wanted to improve
navigation, but, primarily, we were just tired of the
old look. For inspiration we turned to a favorite
artist, Piet Mondrian. His clean lines and judicious use
of bold colors inspired us. Inspired by our inspiration,
we decided to ask a few game industry types where they
get their inspiration for professional creative
endeavors? A song? A movie? Dreams? A painting?
Gregory Fulton
Senior Game Designer
Westwood Studios
Current project: C&C Renegade
"My
approach is 'whatever it takes.' I like
having a resource library spanning all creative media:
music, art, books, movies, comic books, kids
toys, television, daily news, and of course arcade,
console, and PC games. Specifically, when I'm
doing level work, I listen to music. When
brainstorming character concepts, I litter my desk with
art reference. Recently, for our game's main
menu, I looked to the web for interface ideas.
I continually harp on my design staff to do their
research. Not only does it sum up the
competition, but it tells you what underground
material is going mainstream, and how to put the
correct twist on the current conventions. If all
goes well, you'll be slightly ahead of the popular
curve when your game hits the market."
François
Dominic Laramée
Freelance interactive game designer, developer and
producer
From The Game Designer's Toolkit
"...You should read, see and experience as much as
humanly possible, write down the relevant (and not-so-relevant) bits on
note cards, and store those in a folder. This folder will become your
most precious possession; it should be a physical one, and not a
computer file...
Carry a miniature tape
recorder or a notepad with you day and night. Use them to store
impressions, bits of dialogue, ideas that come up at 4:00 AM. Your
brother's new girlfriend tells a funny story at a party? Write it down,
along with a description of that quirky little smile she flashed while
speaking. You lose an argument and think of the perfect put-down six
minutes later, in the subway? Your character may need it someday. You
drive by a dynamite factory, and it's the only building standing in a
sea of rubble? There may be a story there.
Read the little
two-paragraph items at the bottom of page B12 of your newspaper. They
may hide treasures. For example, my folder contains an article about the
life and death of the last Chinese eunuch; another one tells of a
controversy concerning whether Spaniards beat the Brits to Antarctica in
1819. Will these events ever make it into a game or a story of mine? Who
knows? But some of the hundreds of odd bits I have gathered in
there certainly will...
A couple of years ago, a
scandal shook the Canadian Red Cross when several hemophiliacs were
infected with hepatitis or HIV after transfusions involving tainted
blood. I remembered the myth of Faust, and I wondered: what if you
received a blood transfusion and then signed away your soul to the
Devil; would the donor owe part of his soul as well, since the
contract would have been signed in part with his blood? That's the
basic idea behind Mephistophoria, one of my current projects."
(For even more inspirational
ideas, read The Game Designer's Toolkit
in its entirety).
Kris Kapp
3d Artist
spudk@texas.net
"Most of my sources of inspiration seem to come
from taking a normal everyday occurrences and adding a
twist. The idea for my next animated short came about
from watching some brown leaves blowing around and
thinking that their color would really set off a green
rabbit. What I like to do is to take a normal situation
or setting and then add a really jacked up element to
it. My short, The Rabbit of the Apocalypse (Ed
note: Check out The Rabbit of the Apocalypse on iFilm.com)
came about by taking a normal alley and then adding a
psychotic 6 foot rabbit. Songs help me when I am trying
to figure out timing for certain animations. Music can
get me in the mood to do some good work. I get pumped
when a decent song comes on the radio, but I don't have
a set musical selection when I am working. As an aside,
last week, as I strolled the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, I couldn't help but notice that a lot of
advertising themes we see today appear very derived from
famous paintings."
Michael Presley
Game Artist
Retro Studios
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