Aug 25 2008
Inspiration for Area and Instance Design
“I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else; hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”
– Lucille Ball
People often ask me how I get my inspiration for my writings. Sometimes things come to me as I’m driving around, taking a shower, or cooking. More often than not, I am inspired by other artists: authors, painters, sculptors, musicians, film makers, and architects. The key for receiving inspiration is to constantly receptive to input with the game or area I’m designing in mind.
Books serve as one of my favorite sources of inspiration. My job is to paint vivid pictures in people’s head and give them enough to create something of their own via role-playing. An author’s job is to draw people into their world and characters in order to ignite our imaginations. We’ve got very similar tasks. When I read a book, I always have the nuggets of future areas or instances in mind, and sooner or later, I’ll run into something – a turn of phrase, a vivid scene – that sparks my imagination for an instance.
In Threshold RPG, I was working on a forest scene while I was reading Mercedes Lackey’s The Black Swan. While my area has nothing to do with swans, curses, or crazy wizards, the characters in the book traveled through a dark pine forest that was similar to what I was writing. A single paragraph in Lackey’s description inspired me to rewrite my entire forest and add a lake in the middle. Her words simply brought a very clear picture to my mind.
As I move through life, I always have our games in the back of my mind. Whether I’m cooking, reading, or even bathing my kids, various systems and area ideas run through my head, and so I’m always open to inspiration. It really can come from the oddest places, so I’ve got to be ready to recognize it.
I think I have solved more coding conundrums in the shower than I have sitting at the computer. There is a psychological term for this, and sadly I’ve forgotten it, but basically it is the ability of your brain to solve problems “in the background” through a different type of thinking. This type of thinking tends to be highly creative, which is why it is so effective at solving complex problems.
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Sometimes I think I really should consider carrying around a notepad or a voice recorder to record cool ideas that come up while driving around or doing random stuff. I hate to think about the neat ideas I’ve forgotten simply because I had no way to record them at the time they popped into my head.
I have heard artists (book writer and muscisian) interviewed who mention having to have a notepad or other way to record ideas with them all the time… like next to the bed.
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I myself have tried solving things like this when coding and in games. Trying to solve something in an old fashion adventure game where you could actually get stuck and then the next day having a few new ideas that actually work.