As the festivities at the end of the year draw ever closer, I decided I’d be posting a few lines about the vision I have going for the game. As mentioned in the post prior, I’m looking to bring a mixture of an older art style of the SNES / PSX -era RPGs mixed with the modern influences of visual novels of The Far East, which never seemed to gather much of a commotion in The West,  despite having a solid, albeit small fanbase.

The game itself will be split into several smaller countries taking to different cultures, from which I’ll try to draw up artistic influence. A good example is that I’ll try to have most of the countries inspired by The West in the game, consisting of Baroque architecture mixed with the fashion from around the turn of the Victorian -era, in an attempt to create a sort of stretched perversion of the timeline in Central Europe, and Britain, through the middle-ages, and past the renaissance. As for the Northern countries, which will be housing the dwarves and other primitive tribes, I’m attempting to take to Scandinavian, Finnish, and Russian mythology, and traditions; Meanwhile the main Eastern continent of the game will take its mythological, clothing,  and architectural influences from the Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures, hopefully with plenty to spare.

Nae’hri’s side-view battle sprite preview.

The game world itself will revolve around old pixel graphic tiles, which are most likely familiar to anyone who has tried an RPG on the SNES or PSX -system. The characters will consist of 4-way sprites for movement on the overworld, and side-view oriented during the combat. The art-style will try to stay faithful to the original, while trying to overcome the limit of what had been possible to  make prior today. The game dialogues outside the storyline will be handled with dialogue boxes familiar from all the older RPGs, while most of the storyline and important NPC conversations will be handled with a visual novel style interpretation, where the character artwork is placed against a back-drop and the conversation is handled outside the normal game world.

As for the development of the game so far, the artists are currently focusing on the character artwork, concept art, pixel artwork, and music. Hopefully the time for backgrounds and other core artwork will come soon, but I’ll leave your mouths hopefully watering for more with the inclusion of the lineart for three future boss monsters. I’ll hope that the next few months will bring something interesting to throw at you. Until then, I hope you’ve liked what you’ve seen so far!

Boss monster lineart, click to open in full screen.