DAY 4 - DESIGN PHASE
Today I spent some time doing some art, thinking about my characters, creating an asset list, and further expanding on the game story and world details.
The white boxes with exclamation marks, a smiley face or an angry face represent events. Gameplay wise you'd click on them, a dialogue box would come up like above, with a character portrait, and they would say something about that event you clicked on. Maybe it might be a dialogue by itself, or it could be an enemy you'll have to fight. I'm planning for about 5 to 6 different areas in the game. A cave, a city, a forest, a ruin and the overworld you see above. Final area would be an underground fortress. When an event is a combat event, the screen would change to a first person combat view, with your characters visible from behind, and the enemies in front of them.
These are some sketches of my characters, names are below in the next piece. I'm thinking of having two different kinds of portraits for my characters: Battle portraits and normal portraits. The sketches above were done first to get an idea for how my characters might look for the higher quality battle portraits. I used some photo reference so I could speed up the process of ideating, normally I would just sketch, fix, sketch, fix, until I get the look I want. Photo reference helped minimize the amount of time I spent, since I want to use my time as wisely as possible.
These were some concepts I quickly painted up and where I explored what the character's design might look like in-game. I spent maybe about 30 - 40min on each. I'm not too worried about perfecting these, they're just steps to ideating what the characters could be. Once I start working on the battle sprites, then I can go back and iterate.
Now for some story time!
Backstory
Long ago a great darkness enveloped the land. The ancients fought back with all they had and found no way of routing the darkness. It wasn't until they discovered a book of unknown origin and age that they learned the truth about the evil present in their land. They used the instructions from the book to fight back and eventually prevailed.
However, there were those who had sided with this evil, and once their masters were imprisoned, they stole the book. Unable to destroy it, they tore its pages out and scattered them across the land. Today, treasure hunters, explorers, and the brave and courageous seek the pages out for the power they grant and hope to find all the content from the book again.
Now as the dark moon rises, evil stirs in the forgotten realms of the world. Soon the ancient book of lore and its pages will need to be sought out again. For power, not for personal gain, but to bring light and hope which are fading fast...
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This backstory gives the game some history and context upon which I'm going to be placing my characters and game mechanics upon. Want to know how the verse fits in to my proposed game mechanics? Tune in tomorrow!