Some ideas with assets and icons. I’m going to try to leverage Flash 8 as much as is possible, by utilizing filters, color transforms, rotations and scales. I think by using these we can maintain a level of customizability and width to our assets without having to spend as many hours in photoshop. That said I’m trying to slowly build up a list of assets that we MUST do.

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Ok, don’t really want to make this post, but I have to and it’s been at least well thought out now.

We need to consider reconciling all of the old game mechanics and world design with the new Transitional Game.

There are certain things I think need the axe/revise until we can better find a way to work them in:

• Race - This is paramount I think.  The original game concept calls for many races and for races to be a fuzzy gradient process of race sliders in an intermingled state.  Natural faction benefits, racial abilities, and sympathy benefits as an output.  For the most part this isn’t too terribly difficult.  However, doing anything visually with the races AT ALL I think nighs on impossible for this release.  There is no way to do anything morphically, for sure, and I think the ability to handle more than overlay graphics over the standard body shape in 2D is also very difficult (no way we can do 2 genders per races as body types and then have each item done per body type).  There are some possibilities in doing overlay (elves get the ears and slanty eyes maybe, but their build retains the same), but by doing so you lose other customizations as they are not typically meldable.  This would mean all elves would look mostly the same.  In addition, I think there is enough story that needs to avoid being complicated by more factors.  Race is truly one of my favorite Gemini game mechanics and I’m loathe to remove it but I’m not sure I see any other way, other than keeping it as a purely stastical manifest with optional face reconfiguration/overlay.
• The two-sided war - I think the Empire vs Guild / Magic vs Tech is a fine premise, but I think we need to focus more on multiple empires that are not directly involved or have their own issues as more fodder for story and politics.  Two monoliths in a system where players can make their own kingdoms is hardly helpful.  That being said we can still have those two as the biggest kingdoms out there.
• The flipside - I think this is something we can still do but we need to refine it more based on the final solution for Race.  I have been actually toying with the idea of multi-dimensions and shards as another add on dynamic in the future, sparked by the idea of the MSOG.  I think that the flipside can be an ‘expansion pack’ type material.
• Icons galore - As much as I absolutely adore icons and iconography, some 500+ for skills (crafting an non), couple hundred to a thousand more for items, a hundred more for effects, 30ish for classes, etc is more than we could do asset wise in a huge span of time.  I’m suggesting cutting it down to be as informationally relevant as possible but no more:  30ish classes, skills only text (think final fantasy menus), items have icons based on parent type (a couple different swords, a couple items for potions etc) or possibly snapshots from the actual asset image (like the hilt center), maybe 20 for interface stuff, another 20 for informational things, effects without icons (we’ll find a way to display them usefully).  I think this 150ish or so icons will be doable.
• Art galore - Same for character / equip art.  I’m looking at what Flash 8 abilities we can utilize to make variations (color hue shift, etc) on a smaller set of graphics.  As far as weapons and such I would very much like them to be piecemeal (hilt + blade + gem images, each piece shifted/edited).  This way we can get hundreds of thousands of variations with only hundreds of original images.  I’d also like some of it to possibly be analog (like some of the color dye customization abilities, just enter in numbers into the flash hue filter algo).
• Background/world graphics - This one is tricky as fuck.  We need some seriosly good background graphics, but to do so in a decent sized world would require obscenities.  Some possible options to consider:   We need some sort of world-builder.  We need placeable flash structure items.  There may be a way to do a world builder painting with textures using random noise brushes in flash.  If not, we have a lot of photoshop shit to do.  We can also possibly do something heinous like stealing from Google Earth in uninhabited areas of the earth and use those as texture fodder.  I see background generation any way we do it as a major pain point.

Let me know what your counter-point is on any of these.

Next up I’m building a list of needed art assets so I can get artists to start work on them.