Game Development: Picking A Direction

As always seems to be the case, the biggest blessing of working on your own projects can also be one of the biggest hurdles: Creative freedom; do what you want, make it how you want, after all; it's your project. Many projects come grinding to a halt because they don't gain any direction early on.

I've recently started working on my own game, it's always been something I've wanted to do, and one of the main things I'm trying to do is set a direction for the art / style early on. I've played around with ideas of course but if I'm going to progress anywhere I need to work towards an end product, not just brainstorming endless ideas.

Initial sketches for some background assets.

Another reason many games don't get finished. Is they have an unrealistic scope, coming up with hundreds of ideas the game simply becomes unfinishable, I'm one guy; I'm not even going to attempt to make something as big as Witcher or World of Warcraft, much as I love those games...

Playing with new ideas for background art.

A visual style quickly coming together. 

As you can see, the art has changed direction for what initially I intended to be a Rayman-esque colourful, quirky, diverse art style, to a more simple, silhouette based style.

I feel like this direction gives the game a great sense of depth, especially coupled with the parallaxing effect that was giving me headaches until 3am last night. 

More game development news as it happens. You can also follow me on Twitter.