Little bit on art Part1..

So I'm the art lead in this project. My role is to manage the time of the art team as well as look at cohesive design and style for the games visuals.

With the pitch document around the corner and the setting and theme still partially undecided, I thought I'd just quickly run through the considerations the group is taking to get something fresh in the department of game visuals.

• Has it been done? The last thing anyone wants to do is recreate the visuals of another game. Of course this doesn't mean disregard the stylistic choices of previous developments have made to get successful visuals. In terms of this decision making Team Fortress 2 (and Valves documentation of their visual design process) have been referenced by the team.
• What elements make up the visuals we're looking for? Taking into consideration the main game themes (defence, survival, interactivity) and the so far decided gameplay (interacting with the environment to defend your position). The group has looked at tactile, solid, square environments to place emphasis on the strength and utility of the game world. On top of this the cohesive reasoning for our game situation is war. War is depressed, hectic and reeks of desperate people. How we represent this will be crucial to a successful mood in-game.
• What do the characters look like? Where the elements of our environments are geometric, sharp, crisp and squared. Our inhabitants will be organic, smooth and quite abstracted - a complete contrast. In making this decision we had a focus on the silhouettes of the characters and how easily identifiable they will be within the environment.
• Where does the architecture come from? This really breaks off from the previous question. What we have described is tactile, solid square environments; however this could be represented by a series of cubes - which isn't that interesting. The team has looked through several time periods looking at buildings that show strength of structure and diverse design - built with purpose but viewed with interest (by the general public and us).
• Why will people like how this looks? This is the toughest question to answer... Using previously successful visuals (games, movies, illustration and concept art) as references and points of learning, gives us an understanding of what aesthetics people like to see. However it's the feedback through the development cycle (from anyone who play tests our game or anyone who sees our work) that truly decides whether people like our visuals and what we need to change or tweak to make it what people like.
  

Anyway, that's a quick look at our considerations for the visuals of our game.

Thanks for reading.