Games of inspiration

[hallsofvallhalla]

Let's face it we can all trace our roots of game development back to some sort of roots. Whats yours?

Mine stem from all of the earlier Zelda games being so depressing. Sure they were fun but man I they are so lonely. Zelda for SNES was one of the loneliest games I have ever played. Hard to explain but you felt so alone in that world. then came Final Fantasy 7, the best RPG video game ever for me. it really helped me through a lonely time and tough time in my life. Then came Dark Cloud. they all inspired me to do better. To build a more active game.


What inspired you? The best post will receive a $10 Amazon gift card from me.

[Ark]

My best game experience was definately when I first played an RPG which was Pokemon yellow version for gameboy. Maybe because they gifted to my older brother, he never letted me play and as I remember it only had 1 slot to save the game hehe. I've always watched him to play and have to wait like a month for him to finish it, when he did, I finally played it and was an amazing experience, didn't wanted to stop playing it or eat. Me and my brother became obsessed with it, and when our mother go to the US we asked her to brought the fire and blue version, to get all of 150 pokemons. Even though we never could hehe

[Commander]

I would say there are too many games that inspired me, but one of them that inspired me to create my own rpg was Dungeons and Dragons. Other than that I loved the game "Shadowrun" for SNES. It is really a tough game when you get farther into it, and I love challenging games. Not in the sense that they take so long, but in the sense that I am working toward something.

The game that inspired me the most would be Golden Sun for gameboy advance. Every aspect of the game made me want to keep playing it until I finally beat it and then Golden Sun 2 (lost age) came out shortly after. If I were a developer for hand held games, I would definitely lean toward that type of game.

[Torniquet]

hmmm I would have to say it all started in year 4 (5th year of school, 2nd year in primary in the UK i think lol. That was probably about 15-16 years ago) Myself and a couple of friends were obsessed with Tomb raider and Resident evil that we spent hours drawing up a very intricate game plan (and playing out the cut scenes at lunch times lol). It never went further than just imagining and planning this game. It was called Horror Mansion and was really just the first resident evil in our own vision lol.

Anyway after a couple of years hording a ton of paper with drawings and writing all over it, it died a sudden death after we tried sending our idea to capcom (yes we wanted our ideas heard lol).

Then came an idea to make a new card game. It was very basic and lasted a couple of months (we actually had other players from our school). The end of this card game was bought by the finding of RPG Toolkit. (at this point we were in the first year of secondary school, or year 7 as its called - 8th year of school)

We were avid players of Pokemon and wanted to make our own version. But we never really started it and this is where my friends ended their game creation lives. For me however, I carried on using RPG Toolkit right through school getting no where focusing mainly on my coding skills.

Once I left school depression ensued and life went further and further down the pan. I started playing Legend of Mir religiously for about 3 years until I started working on my own server. After a year or so working on my own server (another project that never went anywhere) I found myself unemployed with nothing to do. That is when I decided to learn web development.

I started working on a tutorial set building a social network, but soon realizing there was no particular niche that I could think of, so went back to wanting to build games... Thats when I found Halls videos and this wonderful community

I have deviated from making games now really. I want to get something running on Unity, but Its kicking my ass at the moment and it is frustrating to really focus on while I am trying to rebuild Tap't In lol.

Peace and Love xx

[Foofighter]

It was at the end of the year 2003 when i startet with the Browsergame Galaxywars(it was the first space based Browsergame in the German speaking area) , i never rly was the kind of player who played such games. I prefered First person shooters like cs 1.5 at this time, Day of Defeat 1.3 and WC3 TD or DOTA, but somehow i developed a strong like for this Game, i think it was the community what mades the game so great.
It was less then a year after i started with Galaxywars when i got the idea to start programming some calcs for the game, at this time i had no previous programming experience but as my brother learned Visual Basic at his school ..i convinced him to teach me and also red some tuts on VB and i succeeded with my goal.
I stayed years on this game and also wanted to make my own space based Browsergame, so i buyed myself a PHP book but had never rly the will and motivation to start learning and making my own project...

Years later, a few months ago from now, i found myself bored from work and my daily life. I felt the need to exercise my Mind with something greater and more challenging, at this point i remembered my old php book
So i finally startet all this and luckily i found short after that this community.
Since i started with my Project and learning to program i rly got the feeling that i found the one thing in my life i missed.

[Jackolantern]

I will probably feel a little older for this one, but I knew I wanted to make games on Christmas Eve 1989, the night I got my own NES for Christmas lol! As soon as I played Super Mario Bros., my mind quickly switched from "I want to play this" to "I want to make something like this" and open my head to unleash all the stuff that was swirling around in there into this new (to me) medium. I spent countless hours thinking about making games, but sadly, I was quite young, and this was still in the pre-Internet days, so there was very little information about how to get started making games.

If only someone had listened to this disturbed-looking child pacing around in his yard day-dreaming about making video games, because I was actually thinking ahead of my time. I say this not that I was a genius, but rather that I had no clue how you would even start making games. Instead of thinking about coding, I was picturing something that more resembled Game Maker, Unity or Torque where you are painting a background, and then dragging and dropping characters and monsters into the game and adding interactivity with menus. Tools like this were still far out of reach of the average programmer (and I don't believe existed for anyone at that time; most professional game coding was actually still done in assembly), and would be for about 10 - 14 years after that. But that is how I imagined making games would be, because that was the only way a kid with no exposure to the real process would imagine it. About 2 or 3 years later, I got my first taste of real game programming in school on Apple IIe's (yes, we were behind the times lol), and I realized how much work went in to just getting simple graphics on the screen.

I kind of let go of game making for a while, and then it came blazing back when I first played Everquest, and then Final Fantasy XI a year or two later. Suddenly that same feeling came back, where I wanted to make these virtual worlds much more than I wanted to play them. I wanted to be the person who designed the rare gear that people stayed up all hours of the night to chase, and wanted to create a living, breathing fictional world. And yet again, I completely misunderstood the amount of work to get something like this done. I thought I could just sit down and create a completely functional 3D MMORPG from scratch with C++ in a year or so, and I would just "buy the art" haha! And again reality set in, but that has really brought me to where I am. I am still in love with the idea of developing online games, but not so much chasing after that MMORPG. I would still love to make one, but I am more realistic now, and instead I am looking for design-based shortcuts to achieve that lofty goal. Shortcuts around art, pre-designed content, etc. That is how indie developers can (and have) made MMORPGs. But I have also come more at peace with just making games, whether single-player or multi, casual or hardcore. Just so long as they are fun and people like them. Maybe that is just me maturing, or possibly it is reality crushing down my vision and aligning it with itself. Either way, I am happy where I am, and will always keep hacking away at it!

EDIT: Great story, FooFighter! I feel the same way, that game development and programming in general fill up something that was missing in my life; possibly the mental stimulation, like you said, and the need to create.

[mattykins]

Inspiration is tricky for me, there isn't really just *one* game that I can trace my roots back to. I can only probably narrow it down to the N64 system, that was my first exposure to gaming and I loved every minute of it. I started to find flaws with games though, things that I didn't like and thought, "Hey, I think If i did that I wouldn't of done X, or I would've implemented Y". So a few years later I started to look into programming, and I started with basic HTML and Batch scripting (fake viruses and such but hey i was in like 5th grade.) I then realized how hard it actually was to make a game. So i stopped for a while.

So here I am (a few months back) again with the urge to make games and strive for perfection. I found this site and you guys really helped me get started. I began to learn to program, mainly doing basic ASCII text-based games (Like Console Craft v1) and other simple things. The jump to graphics and 2d/3d games was the biggest jump I think i've ever made in programming.

Now that I have knowledge of programming and game design I've come to realize something. Programming is an art, and anything you can imagine can be done, there are basically no limits to what you can do. You want a game where you can play as a cow and try to eat as much grass as possible? You can do that if you want(Although i tend to get a little more creative than that ) And the fact that I can make anything I want happen in the virtual world is amazing to me. Its actually helped me through some recent stress in my life as well, just shutting myself in my room eating pizza and programming for a few hours is a great way to relieve stress.

So as I mentioned before inspiration is tricky for me, I can't pinpoint it on one game or thing. The inspiration really comes from the infinite possibility of games to make and things to do in the virtual world. And I think the freedom and art of programming is whats truely great about it.

(OFFTOPIC: I have a new project i'm working on and i will post about it sometime this weekend, and also i hope to be more active )

[Callan S.]

Probably table top roleplaying games, like Rifts and such. Double dragon and Golden axe, the arcade games, were also an inspiration.

Sometimes I think it's a bit of a dangerous loop, where it takes a really complicated game to inspire you to program, but you are not going to reach those heights (particularly if you are solo and inspired by a team game (even more so if they were paid to program!)). Were too likely to encounte things which take teams of developers to make - really need to take inspiration to make things which are well within the capacity of a solo developer (who works in their spare time, unpaid).

I think game design is often a quest for meaning - sure, it's easy enough when you play someone elses game to feel it has some sort of meaning. But when your behind the stage and making it, often alot of what you found meaningful in other games was the fact you were ignorant of the true big picture (incidentally this is why I've considered making games who's base values are random in some way I as the programmer can't forsee...to ensure I'm still ignorant of the big picture. Heck, games like nethack use techniques like this as well)

[hallsofvallhalla]

The $10 gift card will be awarded soon so everyone get their posts in!

[SpiritWebb]

My inspiration came from the old Tron game, and Star Trek: TNG for the Sega Genesis and watching the Tron movie...wanting to build a game with a virtual setup like that of Tron with a Star Trek space theme. Where Undiscovered/OuterNet came from...