One of the big challenges on the project, was to create an art style that was original, catchy, pleasing, and satirical, all at the same time. We were going to use real life people and include them in the game, but not with realistic visuals, and it had to work well.
The only direction given to our art director, Stéphane Chung, was to try to create his own version of the satirical cartoonists you can find in newspapers, like Eric Allie for instance. It was only a guideline : the objectives of originality and catchiness were paramount.
Searching for an art style out of the blue is like a shot in the dark, I wasn't sure we would end up somewhere good. But it went incredibly fast. The research process was done in about a month.
Research had been done initially by concept artist Gilbert Han. This was very useful to cover all across the map and have an idea of the general direction.
Stéphane then started with some scribbling to establish his style. He drew a few characters in a more or less realistic fashion.
We quickly set up to small characters with disformed heads - the goal was to recognize each person, while having them relatively small on the screen. So the head had to account for a third to half of the total height (a lesser challenge in the case of the former french president).
Once the satirical drawing was established, and size ratio validated, only half of the way had been covered. There could be any number of rendering of the style. We could go for shaded, videogame-like art.
Of we could try to stick to newspaper cartoon style, or pixel art, or anything! As long as you don't try, you can't be sure what will work out.
Of the last five tests, the middle one (Khameiny) was the most promising. What was left to do at this stage? Creating the initial characters, detail them and tweak them. For instance here, Hillary could appear more or less old, more or less hippy...
And once everyone agrees on an image, it has to be detailed in great lengths on a character sheet, to get to the next step, 3D rendering.
Here you can see Stéphane working on yet another character :)
Upcoming
Here are some news on what we are working on right now.
Besides the obvious debug and optimization, we are adding more polish on the game screens, adding more directions ingame and localizing, and also expanding the AI capacities and gameplay variety. All of this will come within the next few weeks.
The game should be quite stable already at this stage. We have a few known bugs with some special actions not working, some texts to correct... Nothing too big, nothing that should keep you from playing well through the game at this stage. Still, the priority is to fix all of this :)
We are also optimizing the code so that the game is more fluid, and works on a larger range of computers. We haven't done a lot in this area up to now. You don't really get to optimize before the code is completed or close to completed, so now's the time to do it, and then keep at it!
Some of the main game screens, namely character selection and mission selection, are already quite good, but miss some info. We will be updating them. For instance, when you select a character, you also select a preferred social class. This is not really clear at this stage. Any character can also go with any political party - a real freedom compared with the real world! It changes the order and importance of the states in the primary campaign. It will be made more obvious. The mission selection will get more details and be made more readable, especially when many states have been played.
The most visible change will be on adding another screen, which will serve inside a mission as well : the mission map. Yes, it's missing dearly right now! You will be presented with the state map, with all cities and their current state (sleeping, open...), and it will help a lot on understanding where to go. I can't wait. Right now, pressing tab gives directions to the open towns, which serves a similar purpose. This screen will be really helpful :)
Localizing is the simple, yet gruesome process of making sure all texts and content, whenever possible, are translated into another language. For now we have english, and that's it. We'll add french pretty soon, and then other major languages, when the system is working correctly (so, they should come along later).
A critical element is the AI capacity to be competitive and interactive with you. Right now, it doesn't use the attraction techniques, nor the action cards. It will receive these capacities along the way, trading them against some temporary bonuses it has in the current version. So it will play more like you, using the same elements. And in the process, it should be more difficult to beat :)
Finally, and that is certainly the most important, we will expand the gameplay variety. A strategy game is a basic game loop, tortured and twisted with various parameters along missions in a campaign. Right now, some parameters are modified, but we plan to go much deeper. The game rules will change from map to map. We will also add objectives for each map, and a deck system for the special action cards. This is mostly designed. We will also add more action cards, going from 20 to around 40.
Making of (concept)
Here is a tidbit of history on this project.
I started working in a major french video game company, name starting with U and ending with soft, almost twenty years ago. I was hired as a game designer - at the time there was no official training or degree in game design, so they were hiring any soul found on the block. I was playing a lot of warcraft II at the time, and so was the guy who conducted the interview. Might have helped.
Anyway, I joined a team of other fresh recruits, and we were given the task of developing a strategy game. We spent months writing dozens of concepts, and needless to say, most of them were crap. But a few ideas were actually good. We settled on a political conquest of a sim-city like game, where you had to manage, build and expand. It was awfully complex. But when you're inexperienced as we were, complex always seems better.
The concept got approved, and the project manager got sent to the chinese office to develop it (then it got canned six months later, as "election" really was an alien concept there). The rest of the team was scattered around, dismantled like a body in soylent green (or cloud atlas). I left the company a couple of years later (only to return some time later, but that's another story). I was left restless by this concept research, that we never quite tackled correctly. I was feeling bothered that it could have been a lot simpler.
As I was still thinking about political conquest, I thought it should be reduced to influence. You gather influence and then you use it, much like money. But it was still complex to modelize : conquer some guy or organization (how?), and then use to do something else (how and what for?).
Reducing the idea even further, as it's when you can't substract anything that you've arrived (that's from Saint Exupery), I built a small prototype where you simply moved a character around, got close to people, convinced them by standing next to them, with a delay depending on your social distance to them, and conquered districts one after another. I coded that in 2002, that's almost 14 years ago. You can see a screen here :
That's the very basic mechanism you find in Megalo Polis. The idea was taken out of the freezer about a year ago, and a team put together to develop it. They did an amazing job, and now we have a first version here on steam (which didnt even exist when I coded the prototype).
So if you feel like you have an idea worth exploring, keep it in your brain and play with it until you can flesh it out :)
