Our first foray into stage 3 has been centered on our art style and the theming of our game. It's going to be crucial to contextualize a lot of our complicated mechanics (the drafting system, especially) in order to make the game feel very cohesive to the player. With a strong enough theme it would also offer us a lot of affordances to make the different attacks more readable, which will be an increasing concern as we implement more later in the project. We're all in agreement that this is very important stuff, but we haven't found a style that the whole team is behind just yet.
In terms of design, what I want most out of our art style is something the players can really latch on to, something that can engage the players immediately and hold their attention long enough for them to get a good sample of the gameplay. I feel pretty confident about how well our game will play, but I realize that it will take a few matches before players can really get the full idea. The biggest contributors to a player's first experience will be the most immediately gratifying parts, like big impressive set-pieces in the levels, flashy attacks, and a good thematic grounding for why the player is here, why they are fighting each other, and how they are doing it. I think our focus will be finding some themes and ideas that excite the kind of people in our target demographic and bringing out something cool and new.
Updates and some concrete examples to come.
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