Design discussion: theme, story, art style

[akien-mga]

In our discussions before the hackathon we had the idea of three subsequent themes/eras that we could use to shape the game environment:

• Medieval/Fantasy
• Steampunk (Victorian-era, coal and steam-powered machines and technology)
• Mech/Sci-Fi (big modern robots and turrets, lasers, etc.)

The idea was then that both the turrets and the enemies would have variants in all eras. The turrets would be upgradeable by the player as soon have they have the money (first medieval, then steampunk upgrade, then mech), while the enemies would progressively evolve through the eras based on the duration of the game (and difficulty level probably).

So to keep the game in balance as a player one should try to match the tower upgrade level to the type of monsters that are arriving (medieval turrets vs mechs would not work well :p).

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This idea is still open to discussion of course, since not much of it was implemented yet. It also has a very important influence on the assets, as we would need art assets that are in the same style for each era (i.e. not go from a Zelda-like medieval/fantasy to a Shadowrun-like Steampunk to end up with cartoony sci-fi :p).

So we also need to take into account how much work we want to do on the assets. If we are not ready to create a lot of artistic content, then we should maybe try to rethink the theme(s) so that it's easier to achieve.

[fry-]

Since I would like to do the assets (I already started with them since hackathon 😄 ) I would go with an LPC style. This gives us the possibility to take "some" assets and add up more with the same style + contribute our art to LPC theme. It would be still alot of work but since its fun to make I would slowly add it. in the meantime we can use some LPC characters as dummy-art.

To reduce work, we could agree on the towers having just particle animations or separate sprites moving so we would need no full spritesheet to be drawn.