Production Post 9 : Inspiration Outside of Games

I have a snake. Her name is Mona. She is a sweet babe and I love her. Here is a picture of her on my head.

As it turns out, she moves a lot like how our dragon moves! Watching her move actually inspired a lot of how the dragon moves.

This isn't her, I don't have a gif of her slithering around, so I found this other snake that looks like her on the internet! But notice how a turn will start with her head, and propagate down through the tail. In code, this ended up being the node system of motion I implemented. A turn starts with the head, and the nodes follow, but not directly, the motion of the head. It kind of smooths out down the tail:

In the past, the nodes would follow the path of the head exactly. It didn't feel right, it felt more like controlling a train than a dragon. It's hard to put into words the tiny details of how a snake moves, but as the turn propagates down the tail it tends to sort of straighten out.

When making games, I think most of the best inspirations come from anything that isn't a game. Observing the world around, and other forms of media, you makes great, original material for systems, functionalities, and games in general.

I haven't ever seen a game entirely made out of shadows, which means at the very least it's a relatively unique style of game. It also gave way to a series of really interesting effects and mechanics that work well with a game made of shadows. We got the idea to do this through a series of thoughts, the major breakthrough being shadow puppetry.

Self-sacrifice and protection are themes rarely seen in games: to arrive at these we thought a lot about motherhood. Given that none of us are mothers, this was a difficult thing to do accurately. But we keep this idea in mind as we develop the game, and I think it shows through.

But I think what we've done here has been important in shaping how I look at games: it's easy to think that all the good game ideas are already taken, but to create an original, interesting game I think you have to step outside of the gaming world and draw inspiration from anything else.