Look, sound and voice
What is fixed about how the game looks today, and the principles proposed for how it should look, sound and read.
Art in progressIsometric 3D, dark caves, and models light enough that thousands fit on screen. Measured on the target machine, monsters near the party can carry about 4,000 vertices and the distant horde a few hundred: the main pass doesn't notice up to ~4,000 vertices each at 2,000 monsters, and shadows are what grow with detail. Each kind shares one mesh, with one material per rarity, so a horde draws in a handful of batches. See Built for hordes.
How it should look
Proposal
- Silhouettes first. In a horde you read shapes, not textures. Every family needs an outline you know at a glance from the isometric camera.
- The party carries the light. The deep is dark; your character's ember is what you see by. The climb gives daylight back act by act, and at the top, in heaven, the light is white and has no colour, so the ember is the only colour left. See the visual identity.
- White is the enemy's. Heaven is white, and so is everything an angel plays in the world (decided). A white mask, chain or banner on a monster says whose it is.
- Colour is information. Each damage type has one colour everywhere: hits, ailments, item text and the HUD. Warm means fire, pale blue means cold. Effects stay out of the way of telegraphs.
- Telegraphs are sacred. Anything that can hurt you badly shows its area before it lands, and nothing else on screen looks like a telegraph.
The colours the game already uses: its monsters, then its crafting currencies, then its damage types.
- Hollow Ghoul
- Bone Archer
- Cavern Brute
- Cinder Imp
- Gloom Spider
- Rime Wraith
- Shard of Kindling
- Ember of Growth
- Shifting Ash
- Gilded Ember
- Crowning Flame
- Wildfire Orb
- Sovereign Spark
- Quenching Water
- Physical
- Fire
- Cold
- Lightning
How it should sound
Proposal
Close and physical. Footsteps on stone, the crackle of whatever is burning nearby, and hits that you feel more than hear. Music stays low and drops out in big fights so the fight is the soundtrack. A horde should sound like a crowd, so sounds of one kind get mixed together rather than stacked one per monster.
Heaven is quiet the way the deep is dark. No choirs and no music in the courts: wind over the cloud sea, footsteps that echo too long, the still angels making no sound at all, and the crackle of the fallen's embers the one warm sound. A faction's troops sound like their making: Warden puppets creak and their chains drag, Heir crusades come with a murmur of many voices reading, and Apostate ground is loud with hammers.
How it should read
Short, a little grim, never winking. The flavour text on the uniques sets the voice, and Writing the world has the rules for anyone adding to it:
The ground remembers every fire.
It was never full. It never will be.
He ruled the tide until the tide ruled him.
Hold it to your ear and hear the sky break.
One flame for the living, one for the dead.
Still warm, long after the fire went out.
Woven from the shrouds of those who came before.