Week 5: Change in setting!

Problem: Feedback informs us that our classic D&D-inspired fantasy setting is very generic and lacks any eye-catchingness. Consideration shows that this is true, and causes me to acknowledge my bias.

This was a big issue that needed to be solved ASAP so that we could continue to move forward with our design work in time for next week's presentation. It took us three meetings in the space of three days to come to a conclusion! Some of the hardest work we've had to do so far.


Step one: brainstorming! Two potential new settings were thought up:

• A steampunk/neo-victorian era world. 
• "Retro-futurism," an 80's style take on sci-fi. 

These very new ideas would certainly bring some uniqueness to our game. Our artists were encouraged to create some art as a demonstration of how these settings would work for PartyQuest:

After an intense group discussion, it was largely agreed that the main unique feature of the game would still work best in a fantasy setting- the party of heroes undertaking a quest. We were able to come up with three new fantasy settings:

• A world set in Scandinavian mythology, 
• A dark mysterious magical forest, 
• A world of floating islands prominently featuring skyships. 

While these are still fantasy settings, they are no longer generic- they posses a unique flair of their own. This is exactly what PartyQuest needs.

Following is some concept art grabbed from the net:

Dark and magical forest

Vikings and gods!

Sky islands

It took a lot of refining before we were able to decide that the Scandinavian/Viking setting would work best for us.

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Bonus edit:
In our discussions, the idea of combining settings was discussed. A very novel idea arose from this: A Scandinavian viking + 80's sci fi mashup. The idea of gangs of vikings wandering the streets wearing varsity jackets really appealed to me :P

Drawn by me.

This idea was actually taken seriously! However in the end we determined that it was too abstract of a concept to communicate in our game- we wanted the focus to be on gameplay and how that worked with the world, not on storytelling.