Inspired by leafo trying to get people using this..what inspires you to post here develop games? Or if you're here as a player..I guess what makes you come to Itch.io for games? :P

Myself? It started with me being angry at Pokemon games for not giving you any choice in the story (say no to anyone involved in the plot, and it puts you in an infinite loop of them asking again, until you give up and agree, I lost hours to this after rage-quiting when someone asked me to do something I didn't want to).

As time has gone on, I found a love for simulation (based off of a lot of playing of Kerbal Space Program) and .. that's about it. xD

I guess I've always really wanted to create places and spaces you can explore. A lot of my games are just walking around places and exploring. As a kid my favourite games were ones with level editors. I used to spend hours attempting to make mazes or mountains or whatever I saw in my head in games like Tony Hawks, Age of the Empires, Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc...

I'm also interested in story but I'm not great at it so I like to try evoke feelings through the composition of spaces.

Some day I want to make a game with a meaningful story. But until that day I'm happy to experiment and try different ideas.

Metroid Prime and other great Gamecube games were big inspirations for me. I love well crafted worlds and really just wanted to make my own. I was also really inspired by a lot of great old Game Maker games on the Yoyogames sandbox such as Seiklus, Grey and Green, Wrapple, Dubloon, and a ton of others. Pretty much jumped right into Game Maker 7 and learned (very slowly) from tutorials. It's been a wild ride and I'm pretty proud of my growth since then.

Now I'm inspired by a ton of different things. I have the terrible problem of wanting to make every game my own and you can definitely tell what games I was playing at the time based on my unfinished prototypes.

My inspiration comes from the days of the ZX Spectrum (yeah, a long time ago!) and typing in games from magazines. One day I just starting changing things and then it carried on from there. This carried on into the 16-bit era with the Atari ST and using a development tool called STOS - I started with simple ideas and added extras to them. What inspires me now, is that games are a brilliant creative outlet where I can pull together visual, audio and gameplay into projects.

My inspirations comes mainly from games, music and stories that I grew up on, they still haunt me to no end! I love Zelda 1, Castlevania 2 and the Ultima series. Game development is the perfect outlet for that, and personally I find the process quite compelling (and really tough). I guess I just want to make worlds. Make-believe places to inhabit and interact in, trying to figure out system and logic behind it, solving problems, things like that.

The general need to create. To make something that will exist when I'm gone. This desire quickly went away once my son was born, but I still enjoy tinkering with games dev and making/playing with systems.

There's something special about interactivity. I can't binge watch TV shows, and movies feel like a lengthy investment -- but somehow I can gawk at a screen for eternity if I just get some choice and some knobs to twiddle.

I joined AAA development to be a part of an industry that made fun -- it sounded cool, and it is! But AAA has many constraints, so I jumped ship to indie to take more creative risks.

I want to (hopefully!) be a part of this new indie wave that's pushing games forward, with old ideas and new. Minecraft, FTL, Hacknet, and others. I love seeing where our medium can go, and teetering on the bleeding edge sounds like a fun place to be.

When I was young, I was one of those kids who doodled Mario and Mega man levels (bosses too), though the real catalysts were Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger and Lucas Arts point and click adventures. As trivial stories are in video games, people never merit the interactivity of story TELLING in video games. That paved the way for me developing story-focused games.

I especially like stories about limited parameters, a small number of locations, a small group of people. These are the kind of stories I like telling, I like telling them through a narrative that leads reader/player where their decisions have varied results. I also like occult and "forbidden knowledge" themes that can lead to horror and/or insanity.

I've been playing games since I was around four years old, and started writing my own not long after. This was on the BBC Micro -- I played a lot of Elite, and loved it for the sense that you never quite discovered everything.

I've always had this urge in me to build things. Besides the computer, Lego was my favourite toy. As a result, construction games like SimCity and RollerCoaster Tycoon were, and still are, the ones I love the most. And I guess this urge extends to building games themselves, rather than just building inside the games. My dream is to create a proper construction/engineering game of my own some time :)

The inspiration for the games I make often comes from daily life around me. Rocket Mail was inspired by long-haul air travel, when I noticed how maps deceive us about where places really are. The construction game I'm thinking about was inspired by a construction site across the street. And so on.

I want to tell a story in a way that no story has been told before.

Got inspired at first when i saw minecraft and start modding it later i stoped developing games for a while then i started Archerblade and started a attempt on Unreal wich i did not like so i siwtced back to unity

Nothing fancy here. I'm just inspired by the opportunity to be doing something fun and interesting with my life. Making games suits my mentality and lifestyle very well, I just wish it would be easier to make a small living out of this, so I could be less stressed about real life things and start adding more variety to said lifestyle before I get old & rusty. It's not an ideal plan, I know. I'm working on it.

I also do like create things, get feedback & validation for them and have some sort of self-expression medium.

Everyone else. Their work, their projects, their hobbies. Games developers are a fascinating lot, especially at the indie level. Positive encouragement is a must and I'm glad to have (virtually) met so many folks who give so much of their time to positive feedback (heck, look at itch.io!).

Well, that and a bunch of stubbornness and curiousity. I program in Java (and web stuff) for a living (awkward mix of backend service developer and front UI / UX developer) so sticking with Java is at this point more of a conscious stubborn reliance on something I know more than anything else :)

I have a basic understanding of C# and even though C++ moderately terrifies me, I could learn it (time permitting). That said, I've sank so many hours into understanding Java it seems a shame to throw it away now (especially since I don't have the luxury of going full-times with games stuff at the moment). I kinda actually like working in it at this point.

Back when i was younger i would cheat in almost every game i played, ( using game shark , Action Replay, etc). But it was dumb because i would cheat but not cheat all the way (xD) just enough to make the game play different, set written rules that adapted to the cheats. That inspired me to make a game, so i started learning game development.

I can't remember the game i originally set out to make though =( , so now i just make games in the hopes of stumbling across that one original game i though of. That inspires me.

I am inspired by everything but other games, Films and music are my greatest influences. Most of the games I have made are only a few minutes long and are meant to convey one idea. Well the multiplayer game I made for a job interview at a Tea Shop but most of the time I want to say one thing with a game and then I obsess over that idea as I am making the game. It's probably not healthy but what can you do.

My inspirations are based on what's happening with me at that moment in time. My current four games were mostly just done on a whim I guess or at least, that's how I can best describe it.

I can remember one day in the back end of 2013 having this idea for a vertical scrolling shooter games, I was literally able to visualise the gameplay of it and everything. I thought one day "you know what, I'm gonna put this into practice" and my first indie game was born. My strong interest in the mobile world also inspired me to make a mobile version of that game with horrendous results.

My third project draws inspiration from things that are going in real life including a few things from current events (like in the news) while my fourth project... well... is just something I made quickly a pre-order bonus although that heavily influenced by the classic retro game Asteroids (very heavily influenced.)

I also like to use games as a way of expressing myself and in some cases, venting any frustrations so I may end up adding something to a game that may re-enact something similar to what I'm frustrated about and how a certain character gets round it, or I might reference either in a character's dialogue or in some sort of metaphorical way.

Other than that I tend to be inspired by other peoples' games, or even other forms of art or entertainment such as films, music, or pictures. I also like to incorporate various personal interests into my games and I often end up seeing these interests being merged together which can produce either something great, or something awful like the aforementioned mobile game I released. It's kind of interesting really just seeing how everything comes together throughout the development process.

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.

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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 want to see how games can cause us to think about our lives, specifically how we live with ourselves, other people, and how we perceive and approach life.

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.

I'm usual y inspired by people close to me that valorates my work and likes very much what i do, or by people that play my games and sopay me that i'm good at this and that i should make moré, this words aren't much for them, but for me are the reason of continue makinggames.