Something I have been getting stuck with for a while is what my overall theme is, over the past week I have taken time to look into what already exists as a product and found that there seem to be a number of clichés when it comes to asset design etc; when looking at the them I found that the main go to themes are:
Sci-fi/space.
Medieval/Fantasy
Modern day
But after a breif discussion with Jon and James I thought it’d be important to reflect on what has to come before all of these themes. There has to be some way to build up structures and so on. Instead of looking ahead to what might be it’s worth looking at what was and still is around, for this I’m looking into an Industrial theme as this in many ways is a sort of precursor to both Modern and Future themes. However I’m going to put a bit of a spin on the theme. If I look into more Victorian styled work why not expand this into Steampunk? I know that there is a steampunk festival that takes place most years here in Lincoln, however I have possibly come to this idea a little late as the festival was over a month ago. OR what if I looked into steampunk’s “cousin” genre Dieselpunk? Both are based on ‘what if’ ideas.
Steampunk from my understanding is Victorian Futurism, or the result of an alternate history that may have happened if steam power was still common and widely used with both basic and highly advanced machinery. However there a few other sub-genre’s of steampunk, however they all share the theme of an alternate history revolving around what would be considered ‘the future’ but if it had happened much sooner that it had in our timeline. The other theme I have noticed is that Steampunk seems to hold more optimism, as if to embrace technology of this alternate time.
Then we have Dieselpunk which seems to be similar to steampunk but brought into more recent history based between World War I and World War II but before the Cold War era as that falls under another genre. The main difference immediately is that the more common power source is Diesel or similar methods of internal combustion. Like steampunk there is a slight optimism toward technology but it is as if it’s the both the creation and victim of what technology would have been used for. However the first games I think of are the Wolfenstein series.
http://geektyrant.com/news/2013/2/16/check-out-these-great-dieselpunk-concept-designs.html
After looking through numerous pintrest boards I’ve found that both these themes borrow elements of each other in appearance unfortunately this may in fact mean I will end up with a hybrid of themes.
(NOTE: LINK IMAGES AND INSPIRATION)