The whole game will blend 3D and 2D together but the main game experience will be in 3D using the DirectX 9 technologies. Menus, buttons, dialogue boxes, HUD etc will be in 2D (using 3D). The rest of this section will mainly look at the ingame graphics.

Game world

The game world will be set in a Fable-world (not the PC-game but the foundational meaning), including all elements that can be found in a fable. First of all there will be animals.

Animals will play the main characters in the game, speak, have feelings and bring the story forward.

Story

The story of the game will probably a subject of many changes during the development but here is a brief single idea of the main story.

Every morning in the forest all animals gather around Owl’s tree to hear him read the headlines in the local newspaper. One day Owl is not there and the animals worries about his whereabouts. It looks like Owl has grown very old and am too tired to keep up this reading in early mornings. After some fuss the animals decide to elect a new newsreader but as no animal do know how to read except Owl, they ask Owl to teach the volunteers to read.

Rest of this you can guess.. Owl sets up the tiles and the animals must clear the missions and spell words right to get to the other side of the pond. This story doesn’t contain anything of worldchanges except that we could have both a night and day theme. Subject of change.

Main Character

At this stage of design we will try different types of main characters. Important elements to consider about the MC is: The game angle will be almost Top-view to assure reading the tiles easily. This means the main character must in some way be interesting to look at in a topview angle. Eg. A character with a big Mexican hat will probably just look strange and make no sense. We rather see something that have an interesting topview profile (eg. A fox with a long tail, mouse, etc)

An owl will be the main tutor which started the whole story. We might even consider a few main characters.

Art Style

The style of the art is crucial and needs to be maintained through out the whole game. Ponder will be glistering and glimmering in colours and will take use of different shader systems, environment maps and vfx to create a colourful, lively almost magic garden surrounding the water. To create this magic feeling of the scene details are very important and will be focused on, such as butterflies, ripples, small bridges, houses, waving grass, streams etc.

The colours must have high saturation and lots of objects will be pretty large in scale.

The artists must think terms of fairies, sparks, forest tales, magic garden, warmth and colourful.

Camera

The camera will be able to zoom in and out automatically due to the size of the wordarea and also scroll sidewise due to movement of GC. This means on bigger maps the camera won’t cover the whole pond but focus on the area which is interesting in a player POV. The player might be able to control the camera to get an overview or look back and forth.