Dev Blog #1 – The Setting
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Hello everyone! This week I wanted to talk about the setting of the game and the general feeling we are trying to evoke. The aesthetic goal of Aetherial is overcoming challenge -barely, and this is the core feeling upon which the mechanics are based. Team Devourer sought to expand upon this feeling however, so we modified the setting while still attempting to keep the aesthetic goal intact. While we followed the designs of the original concept rather closely, we did put our own twist on the game and designed it to be about sky pirates chasing a giant, flying whale because it ate the treasure of another ship that they were hunting. The setting became a bit more lighthearted and whimsical this way, while still presenting challenge. We developed the idea of sky pirates rather naturally I’d say, during one of the early design meetings. It was suggested by one of the members and the others liked the idea. This idea was inspired by the fact that the design of the original concept portrayed the player vehicle as a ship and the enemies as various sea creatures, altered to fit into their new home in the sky. This setting made sense to us, and it also helped in making the game our own. This happened during the first sprint we had, which was important since the following sprint then could focus on the features. Because we had laid the groundwork so early, the overall feature development became more efficient since we knew what we were trying to accomplish and what feeling we were going for. The reason for this new setting mainly was to put our own twist on the game and its narrative, and to hopefully help our version of Aetherial stand out among the other games based on the same game concept. We also felt this setting meshed well with the aesthetic goal of the game, and it contributed to narrowing down the targeted audience of the game, which in turn helped establish a starting point for all the features we designed based on this. I think this has helped us design the mechanics of the game, as we always had a guideline to follow. To really convey the setting we decided we would try to add an introductory sequence to the beginning of the game, which while demonstrating the controls would also set the stage for the setting and story of the game. In addition to this, the introduction also foreshadows the upcoming boss fight.
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