In my post on design philosophy I somewhat discourage developers from spending too much time creating concept artwork or narrative elements. A game’s content development, especially on hobby or small team projects, should only begin once a flexible framework of gameplay mechanics, pipeline tools and user interfaces have been developed. However, having some concept art, and exploring theme, style and narrative elements can be vitally important to a game’s early and ongoing development. Attractive art and narrative concepts are key to private, business, crowdsourced and venture capital investment in the traditional and indy games industry. Strong creative concepts are necessary to build a player base, and maintain hype and interest. Finally, developing concept material will allow us to visualize our pipelines, design features and interfaces, explore and mature our models, and otherwise help develop the game and the tools needed to realize our vision. Now that we have a satellite’s view of the design and mechanics of OpenEVA on paper, I feel we can take some time to explore thematic, stylistic and narrative possibilities and develop some concept artwork and other material.
I have a fairly clear vision for the theme, setting, art and narrative style I would like to express in OpenEVA. However want to design OpenEVA in a way that allows content creators to portray any number of themes, styles or narratives they choose. I envision the player choosing form a number of modular scenarios or campaigns each with their own narratives, settings, artwork and content. I do not want to limit content designers to a sci-fi or futurist theme, if they choose they may develop content appropriate to any theme, setting, or artistic style they can imagine. Configurable Equipment, Event, interface artwork and defined content will allow designers to craft OpenEVA theme and gameplay into a high fantasy RPG adventure, business tycoon sim, Oregon Trail conversion and more.
Style and Theme
I envision OpenEVA’s main game or vanilla scenario as a lighthearted, humorous and deep sci-fi adventure set in the year 2120. Heavily influenced by tycoon and trader sims, sci-fi movies and games, the OpenEVA elevator pitch may read something along the lines of: “OpenEVA is an extravehicular maintenance and resource management sim; It’s what would happen if Jebediah Kerman cash landed on the Oregon Trail.” This is as concise, descriptive and intriguing summary of the game, it gives the audience some reference on what to expect from gameplay, and builds hype and excitement.
I would like to keep a lighthearted tone to OpenEVA’s writing and style. Cheesy sci-fi humor, existential futurist concepts and cultural Easter eggs highly appeal to my tastes. Event descriptions should be concise, easy to read and maintain a light, non-offensive and humorous tone. The art direction of OpenEVA will be heavily inspired by high quality games of the SNES and Genesis era, such as Metroid and Sonic the Hedgehog. Artwork should be colorful, high-quality and not artificially reduce quality or resolution unless it serves a specific stylistic purpose. Music and sound design will draw heavy inspiration from classic and contemporary games, sci-fi movies and electronic music. OpenEVA should evoke a feeling of lighthearted sci-fi tycoonism and adventure.
Equipment will be assigned a set of simple sprites which will provide a visual representation of the object. When Parts are selected in the hierarchy a cutaway view of the Equipment may be displayed, giving the player a view of the Equipment’s internal structure and Part locations.
Event stages may be accompanied by a static image to provide immersion and visual impact. Event images should be high quality artwork conforming to the scenario’s theme and artistic style. For the core OpenEVA game scenario these will likely take the form of hand-drawn digital paintings, high resolution artistic style transfer, and other high quality artwork. Content designers will select Event artwork as part of the Event’s JSON definition.
Finally, in-game interfaces should be developed in a modular and customizable way; Designers should be free to define the look and feel of the user interface per their vision. The underlying system should be extensible, allowing for mods and customisation. The user interface will likely be the most complex and high risk feature of OpenEVA. Clean, flexible and user friendly interface design will be absolutely essential to OpenEVA’s success. I expect interface design and development to require a majority of OpenEVA’s development schedule.
Concept Design
Good conceptual artistic design is vitally important to the success of any game project. I plan to develop high quality concept artwork and materials throughout the pre and core development of OpenEVA. I hope to build up my artistic content generation environments and pipelines. OpenEVA’s development will help refine my artistic technique and style, as well as improve my creative, professional and technical writing skills. Over the course of development I will produce a strong artistic and thematic concept for OpenEVA, while constructing a flexible system which will foster future creativity.