Games are too often pinned down by genre buckets, of which there are a cornucopia, so let’s get those out of the way first:
🪣 Isometric (2.5D)
🪣 Roleplaying game (RPG)
🪣 Pixel art
🪣 Narrative-driven
🪣 Turn-based combat
🪣 Cyberpunk-ish
🪣 Near future timeline
But this doesn’t really tell you what it feels like to play the game, nor does it exactly roll off the tongue. So instead we’re marketing it as a pixel art cyberpunk fantasia.
The north stars in our celestial map are oft-cited: Earthbound, a classic RPG with offbeat humor, a present-day timeline, otherworldly characters and turn-based combat. But we also have a gritty narrative, somber characters portrayed in a painterly style, and ever-branching, meandering dialog, so we’d be remiss not to mention Disco Elysium.
While game environments and character sprites use a very low pixel density, all UI elements—from dialogs to inventories to profiles—will be in high resolution, to better convey the world, its characters, and their emotions. This approach has precedents: the legendary Celeste and more recently Hades fight the constraint of low-density characters with large and expressive portraits.
All interfaces are built on a translucent glass primitive
We take a diegetic approach to UI, presenting all interactions as phone apps
We take a diegetic approach to UI, presenting all interactions as phone apps
We are synthesizing hard sci-fi and retrofuturism. While narratively we aim for hard sci-fi—all the tech in the game is feasible in the next 5-10 years—in presentation that gets boring, so we spice it up with hints of 80s tech.
Our metro trains are a good example of the retrofuturistic aesthetic.
Simon Stålenhag’s Tales from the Loop is a foundational reference.
We are taking a unique cinematic approach to pixel art that I haven’t seen many games attempt. While pixel art is extremely popular, most games in this style are tucked away in the Cozy / Cute genre, safe from the mainstream. Gritty, semi-realistic pixel art is less explored territory.
