Pre-production episode 1
The last couple of cycles have been really busy, we started on some key areas and are exploring some directions further.
First of all, the turn-based battle system. Such systems are usually not too trivial to implement, and given that our system contains a spin to it it just adds more work. That, along with the fact that we want the entire content of the system to be authorable through json files has led us to an interesting hierarchy when it comes to concepts and types that we'll need to eventually clean up. So far so good, but the long tail of small cuts will inevitably require some time investment.
We've also committed some time to understanding if we could differentiate the game through art style. Being lackluster artists with a limited budget we are aware that the differentiation must likely come from technicalities rather than high art production value. Given that, we explored the so-called 2.5d style for both what we call our "world" and "battle" views. Here are a couple of pictures, of the world and battle scenes respectively. They were assembled by making a soup of free assets, so don't expect much cohesion or production value in there.
World scene
Battle scene
While we like the whole 2.5d thing, we aren't entirely convinced about using it for the world scene, the reason being this is our first game and the unknowns risk getting out of hand. We'll need to reason about real-time lighting vs baking, which in turn leads to other questions given that we might have to have pre-generated chunks for the procedurally generated map, and so on. It might be something difficult to backtrack from. When it comes to the battle scene, we are much more bullish, but we haven't committed yet.
This is pretty much it for this post, the next one might contain some juicy information about art direction and the narrative of the game, so stay tuned and subscribe :).
J&K