Pre-production episode 2
As mentioned in the last blog post, we invested some time to get a clearer understanding of where we are headed in terms of art direction and narrative. Let's get into the narrative.
We want the game to be about a journey with finite resources, thus, the narrative must align with this concept. Additionally, part of the (yet undisclosed) gameplay is going to involve modifying abilities through (yet undecided) gems/stones/runes. At the same time, our budget is limited, ideally, we aim to have a common theme to facilitate asset reuse.
Considering this, we decided to go for a desert-themed game where the heroes mistakenly free an imprisoned djinn and must reach him before it recovers its full power. Water will make the finite resource that will force the player to move forward, or better, disallow the player to clean entire levels when he's too strong.
This gargantuan desert will be comprised of different biomes, e.g. scorching dunes, red canyons, and so on, to allow us to have some variety while being not too bad in terms of asset reuse.
The desert will be inhabited by savage orcs, various animals and monsters, nomadic humans and an ancient and almost extinct faction which is a low calories mix-up of Sumerians, Persians, Akkadian and similar cultures. Orcs will be eager to serve the djinn and become its disciples. We're especially excited about the Sumerian/Persian/Akkadian mixup, which will add a distinctive flavor to the game.
Look at those eyes!
When it comes to art direction, in the last blog post we mentioned that we were toying with the idea of going with 2.5d for the world and battle scenes, we decided not to do that for the world scene for already mentioned reasons, however, we plan to implement the 2.5D style in the battle scenes.
We are aiming for a pixel art that is bright enough to transmit the scorching heat and dryness of the desert, without being too cartoony. We have a candidate palette and some initial experiments, but we haven't fully committed to a particular look.
Here's a preview of the potential world scene. We aren't too sure about the size of the characters, might bump that budget to 16x16 pixels.
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J&K