Anything and everything really. Sometimes just a simple aesthetic or picture can inspire an entire artstyle. But mainly, definitely music. I guess when I listen to music I start to create imagery in my head to go along with it. So then that usually leads to me thinking "Hey that might work as a game".
What inspired me I guess would be that I wanted to make world that made me feel the same way as I felt playing games I loved. That and in time I would love to make games that can be used in educational settings to help people learn in different ways than just going to class and listening to talking/ reading things.
I would always come up with ideas for games and was making excuses not to start. So, when I was 13, I asked my parents for Blitz 3D for my birthday, then got started with that.
I started out by making a massive kitchen-sink open-world RPG with billions of features, which I worked on for 5 years and never finished, (for some reason. Then I scrapped it and worked on smaller things. I guess it's something I just kept doing since. I enjoy it. I couldn't imagine going back to just playing games and not making them.
I was always interested in making games but I never thought I could actually make them . I started modding Warlords Battlecry III and I really enjoyed making stuff for that game. I worked on my mod for close to 4 years and I just wanted to make something of my own so I started tinkering around with Game Maker. :-)
For me it is mainly a journey to discover what is possible with interactive media. Storytelling is what interests me the most, especially how it combines with game mechanics.
I love the fact that in a game, differently from a film or a book, you are part of the world and not only a point of view. You can interact with the world, change the world and see what the consequences are. You can create living, breathing worlds you can explore. This is the thing that excites me the most about this medium.
It started with playing King's Quest 1 for me: just the idea of creating a world that you could walk around in and interact with... I immediately started making my own games on paper with drawings and paper cut-outs, acting out the game by moving characters around on hand-drawn backgrounds. Via Gamebuilder and Superlogo, and later modding levels and tilesets for Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and 3D animation with trueSpace, I kept making things and I eventually ended up getting into the games industry as an animator, but always kept the urge to create my own games as well. Realized a couple years ago Game Maker could pretty much do everything I wanted for 2D games, and have been using that ever since.
These days I'm inspired by everything... art, museums, travel, history, mythology, books, cinema, and of course other games.
I think often games are for me a way to create spaces I'd like to explore and live in.
Then, as it is with most of my creations in other artforms, games can be a form of communication, can express thoughts and feelings you can't say with words. What I want to say is undergoing a constant change, as I learn new things and new perspectives open up.
But really, to me, the biggest strength of games, you can't find in other artforms, is the possibility to explore and interact with worlds of make-belief and become a part of them for some time.
