The monster collecting genre in general as well as Chicken Smoothie, early Neopets, and early Subeta.
Monster collecting games, mostly Digimon and Pokemon, got me into species design as a kid. I still have elementary school designs and concepts. From there I found Neopets, CS, Wajas, and Subeta. I was big into in the adoptables scene on CS, but am ultimately glad I didn't release any official adoptables of my species concepts.
I enjoyed the simplistic and cartoony art of older Subeta, and loved the small compact cartoony images of older Neopets art. I grew up on Scooby Doo and other HB ips. I know a lot of people prefer super detailed and realistic vp sites anymore, but I long for cartoony and more "broken" art that focuses on an extreme personality and character idea instead of anatomy or even lighting. I can only pinpoint this feeling to old Subeta pets, and the golden days of Neopets. There's a ton of old, gone, and utterly lost vp sites from the mid to early 2000s that had this same groove that I enjoyed, if anything to look at how creative others could be with what limited tools they had.
When things started focusing on human avatars, and Neopets decided to compete with dressup pets and gave most same pose and same face, I decided I wanted to be serious about game development.
It's been a long time, but I finally have the means to do so with my husband. No coding has been started, as we don't have too much free time due to finances. But in the mean time I'm doing it all wrong and working on art and storyboards first.