In this phase, as you learned from Unit 2, you will work with how to be open for new opportunities and getting inspired to create new ideas. You will be offered some practical approaches to how you can work systematically with inspiration sources. Working systematically and intentionally with inspiration sources in this way reflects the creativity research, which supports that creativity constraints can be identified and framed as inspiration sources which you can use to enable and drive your own creative process.

In this phase you can begin to look for inspiration sources in addition to a game jam theme, and start discovering opportunities and directions for your idea generation. Think back to the section on creativity constraints, where you were presented for a list of game jammers’ reported inspiration sources. This list can be used as part of your own idea generation as well. One of the inspiration sources was “Life Experience”. Try to use your educational background and knowledge from your particular field as inspiration sources. How can you connect these inspiration sources to a game jam theme?

Xavier Ho has studied how game jammers can use idea generation toolkits and online idea generators to evoke inspiration for game jam ideas. You can see a list of the toolkits and generators in his paper via this link: https://jumptoglide.com/s/Evoking-Inspiration-for-Game-Jam-Ideas.

EXERCISE: Pick a couple of the toolkits and generators and try them.

What worked well in the ones you tried?
What worked less well, and why do you think that is?

To get an overview of your inspiration sources you can create a mood board: A mood board is a type of collage consisting of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition. It can be based upon a set topic or can be any material chosen at random. A mood board can be used to convey a general idea or feel about a particular topic (Wikipedia 2020: Mood board).

Create a mood board with your inspiration sources. You can create a physical moodboard, or for example use Pinterest to create a digital moodboard.



References

• Xavier Ho. 2017. Evoking inspiration for game jam ideas. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events (ICGJ ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6–9. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3055116.3055125
• Wikipedia, Mood board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_board