Where do I get some Inspiration?

[simulacra]

"It's a bored game developer."

[Kweepa]

My experience is that it is much harder to do if you want to have serious responses, rather than jokey ones.

I think that depends.
It's easy to write jokey responses, but hard to make them consistently funny.
It's easy to write serious responses, but hard to make them fit a style and convey a mood.

It's particularly difficult, I would imagine, to write serious responses to ridiculous player actions.
I think that's why a lot of serious games rely on default responses to random item combination, etc.

[Play_Pretend]

My brain's never short on ridiculous ideas. . .it's all I can do sometimes not to blurt out all the unusual things frothing from my imagination.  The way I've ended up finding/structuring my inspiration for my current game project. . .I built a mountain of post-it notes on my computer desk that I'd jotted down at work, in the bathroom, wherever (I do my best thinking on the toilet, screw the countryside, tain't no mosquitoes in my throne room!) and then I slowly entered them all into a Word document and a storyboarding program just to get rid of the fire hazard.  After I had the general shape of it, I wrote a detailed plotline of everything my main character would go through, all the main plot points and things he would have to do.  I figured out an items list to make sure I didn't lose track of inventory and where it was supposed to be.  And now with each background graphic I finish, I go through the picture and try to think of humorous, original responses for almost everything the player could click on the screen. . .I keep all those in a separate Word file.  When I finally go to script, I'll copy and paste them all, making up more or tweaking as I go.  It's time consuming, no doubt, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. . .I want the player to stop back by the game after playing it the first time, and think, "Hmm, what did I miss?" and to think holy carp, that was funny, I'm glad I clicked there.  I'm even doing that randomized response thing for clicks on the main character himself, so each time you click look, interact, etc., it'll randomly pop up one of 5 to 10 responses for each cursor.

Ah. . .35 room backgrounds done. . .45+ to go.  Then I can start the real work.