Typically I like to start with sort of a single source of inspiration. It's almost never a game. As an example, I was brought onto a project some years ago (now cancelled) as the sole artist. This meant I was also the "art director". It was a pretty typical dungeon crawler/hack and slash thing. It didn't have a name. It was a project someone started on gamedev.net, and I figured I'd join something just to get some experience. Well, I had taken an interest in fashion design at the time, and I thought that the typical dark, gothic vibe was overplayed.
So I started developing this sort of idea that this would be a "high fashion" dungeon crawler. The game kinda fell through when the rest of the guys stopped showing up. So I kind of took the concept and ran with it a bit in another direction and started working on fleshing out what a whole world of Music Videos and Fashion Design would look and feel like. I had a really cool idea for a main character I wanted to use, and she changed a few times before being mostly finalized.
The project used to be called "Mai Justice" and I thought that was a cute name. But, since I had to shelve it in 2011, I changed the name to something better and cooler for 2014, "Gunpop". You can find my personal mood-board for it here:
http://blog.wolfgame.com/tagged/mai
I haven't been able to work on it in some time, but I wanted to talk about it in a design sense. My interest in Fashion Design and Dungeon Crawlers gave way to this sort of twin-stick-esque adventure game.
"Ok so she has a gun in this pseudo-dungeon environment, how does that control?"
"Ok so we want to treat guns with respect and severity. We need a good melee combat system. Our main character doesn't want to cold-blood murder fools."
It's really design in service of the character and world. Those two things come first for me. This is also reflected in what we're doing with SilverQuest Gaiden. Everything I'm working on for that right now is world-building stuff while Xot works on retooling our UI system.
I hope that answers your question! Please let me know if there's anything I wasn't clear on!!
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