Keith Stuart recently posted a wide range of answers to the question of where good game ideas come from. Excerpt:
Art has proved a fecund source of game ideas. Tetsuya Mizuguchi was inspired by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky to create Rez; Ken Levine drew on the Art Deco movement for Bioshock; Uncharted co-lead designer Richard Lemarchand looked at the works of Victorian painters such as David Roberts and Caspar David Friedrich for the exotic locations that Nathan Drake discovers. And countless dungeon designers have looked at the complex works of MC Escher and Giovanni Battista Piranesi for their labyrinthine environments.
– Keith Stuart @ The Guardian
Kyle Bean has created a series of “weapons made from harmless materials” for CUT magazine.
The show consisted of a minecraft themed gallery, complete with 2 crafting tables, tools, working LED torches, a creeper costume that greeted you at the door, and a fully interactive grass block world in the center. The wall textures, the crafting tables and the center grass block are all to scale (1 meter cubes), to increase immersion and really make you feel like you’re in Minecraft. Clearly the possibilities for a project like this are endless so it was extremely difficult for us not to pursue other ideas we had (Steve costume, pigs, cows, music, automatic day/night cycle, minecarts etc.). For purposes of time and budget, we had to restrict ourselves from getting too crazy.
