Conception

I've been floundering for a very long time on what to do with this blog, as I've just not had the time I needed to dedicate it to a serious, deep discussion of Games and Art and the Games Industry that I would have absolutely loved to turn it into. That's slowly changing, partly as I've finished my degree, so I'm suddenly spending a lot less time writing serious, deep stuff about metaphysics.

For now, then, I've decided to put it to its initially secondary use of documenting progress on my side-projects. This kind of content will always be interesting to have around, whether the project gets completed or not, and unlike my previous attempts to write posts, hopefully I won't be cringing at the garbage I wrote the day before and immediately tearing it down.

So at the moment I'm in the planning and proof-of-concept stage for a game idea that I've been gestating on for a few months now. The main inspiration for it was a trip to Paris in March, where I visited the Palais Garnier, perhaps more popularly known as the opera house that Phantom of the Opera is set in. The part I liked most about the museum exhibit in its halls, was a display of set-design sketches, which the artists had made small dioramas out of. Each sketch was lit up by itself and paper cut-outs interleaving with each other would describe the layers of scenery for the final opera production.

Here's the photos I took of them:

It struck me that this style would make for a very interesting game aesthetic - certainly for a more traditional adventure game perhaps, where the player character mostly moves around similar static 'screens'. It would also look fantastic on a budget: there are very few polygons to render and very little necessary to be done in terms of shader work, so it could run well and look fantastic on a mobile device without many compromises. Most of the geometry would just need to be alpha-mapped flat planes, after all.

As in the last photo, the character would quite naturally have to be little cardboard cut-outs themselves, and be animated. This might be the biggest problem for me, as I've never (successfully) tried my hand at 2D animation - and it might well be the biggest development bottleneck.

Overall though, I'm pretty excited by the possibilities and my next post deals with exploring the concept and doing some quick and dirty mock-ups.