Wanna know the BEST feeling as a game designer? When you realize you accidentally wrote the story in such a way that you can't take the easy way out!

Yup, that's what happened to me just now, I realized the story of the game forces me to actually be far more creative with the art design than I expected.

Now I know what you're thinking, why is this the best feeling? Because it does the exact things in the title of this update! It increases the games development scope, while increasing the focus!

A bit of the games story

To fully understand this dev update, you've gotta know part of the story. This isn't a spoiler, it's in the games description, so this is just gonna provide a bit more information.

Basically, the world the game takes place in was taken over by a robotic virus, transforming most living things into robots.

This has lead to a bit of a design challenge on the art side, and is actually why it's most living things, and not all living things. What would a planet look like if nature itself, was robotic? How would I even show that to the player?

I simply side stepped the issue, but I realized earlier that the story gives me so much more freedom to explore and such!

Freedom to Explore

It might seem weird, how does making everything robotic give me more freedom? Well, it's simple!

Zenand Garden is meant to have a natural feeling to it in a sense. Like, in a forest, or meadow.

This means, I have to combine 2 OPPOSITES to make the world! Everything from the grass, to the trees, has to natural, yet robotic.

This gives me immense forced freedom to work on the art design. Usually, natural things tend to be kinda limiting, since we all know what nature looks like, so we stick to that same formula time and time again.

With this game, it's still gonna follow a similar formula, no doubt, but I can't follow it exactly, and that's likely gonna lead to a much more memorable game appearance, and it'll likely have drastic consequences in most every aspect of the game.

Already, it's already having a major impact on the game. My original plan was for the game to be 2D, but now, I want to lean more into this art style, and concept of a mechanical nature, so I'm gonna move development into the Third Dimension!

Into the 3rd Dimension!

Luckily, the game is still early enough into development that a major change like this won't require drastic changes to existing code.

Honestly, this is likely the best time for a change like this to happen, since even if I had to redo all the code, I only have a few files I'd need to rewrite. Most of development so far has been figuring out how to write code that does what I want, but I've already done most of that work now, so I don't have to redo it.

This does mean however that development is essentially restarting, and since it's in 3D, it will take quite a bit longer. However, I plan to remedy this by gathering a team!

I'll be the director of the game, and likely the only programmer, but I have some friends who have experience in modeling, and who're more creative than me, so I can say with confidence, that this'll help out development quite a bit.