It’s good to look at what other people are doing. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been writing this blog, to keep up with all of the procedural generation projects that are happening. Ideas are something you need to grow and cultivate, not wait until a creative mood strikes. (Though don’t forget you can also get inspiration from elsewhere: at the very least you may get an idea for new unusual inputs to use.)
That certainly includes what other people are saying about procedural generation. Like this article from Gamasutra, which discusses what developers can learn from studying other games. The article talks about several games, some of which I’ve covered here and a couple that I haven’t yet.
Some of the ideas are things I’ve talked about here before, like how procedural generation can push players to understand games on a systemic level rather than just memorization, or how emergent effects can combine to produce a greater whole. There’s a particularly good point about how exposing numbers or connecting the effects to the player’s actions can give the player a greater emotional investment in the result.