Forteresse d'Encre

[bluehazed]

Edit: This'll be a slowly updated thread, as I'm currently camping. I'm just throwing random ideas to polish of the story right now, I have no scanner to put up my sketches :P

Welcome to my fancy french idea brewing château.

Main Idea
While browsing reddit (r/forts subreddit), I stumbled upon this blog: Hidden Fortress. It depicts a bunch of fort drawings the author has done.

When I think back on it, I used to make drawings like this ALL of the time in classes, and end up with entire notebooks like this. My idea is to create some sort of platformer (perhaps an rppg?) with the entirety of the maps being hand drawn, hand inked images.

What Shall I Make the Subject?
Should I bother with a timeframe? Or should all of the fortress maps/landscapes be purely what comes to mind, or perhaps pure imagination?

Sprites
I'm thinking I will use ether visibly pixelated sprites that contrast, but still compliment the background, or hand drawn sprites that I "cut apart" and rig as moving objects.

EDIT: Going with drawn sprites, I guess.

Plot
It'll have a main character, certainly, but should there be much dialog, or should the game be almost pure adventure?
Little bits of ideas leads to a name: Maple Short.

What'll the character be striving to succeed at? Perhaps escaping some sort of fantasy world (alice in wonderland kind of deal)?
Let's go with a sort of 'fix what's broke' deal, the character is trying to return colour to a world without, I'll come up with some reason he has such a passion to venture to do so, maybe some sort of hobby.

System
I'm not too worried about the engine, I'm sure I can use flash if I REALLY need to, but I'd like to try to use pygame or GOSU to write it.

Should I support multiple resolutions? I suppose I could have ultra high resolution maps that scale to smaller resolutions, and have the sprites either do the same (in the case of hand drawn sprites), or scale without interpolation (pixel sprites)

Ideas, people?

EDIT: If it's alright, I'll be posting my concept sketches here as well, seeing as they won't be the finished project. I'll see when I can get them up, I'm out of town right now.

 

[moxie]

It's an awesome idea - I've seen it done before in an indie platformer that I wish I could remember the name of, but it was entirely in black and white. It's very striking, and I can only imagine how great it would look with color.

Sprites
I'm thinking I will use ether visibly pixelated sprites that contrast, but still compliment the background, or hand drawn sprites that I "cut apart" and rig as moving objects.

I suggest you go with hand-drawn sprites. Might as well go all-out and run with the hand drawn thing.

Plot
It'll have a main character, certainly, but should there be much dialog, or should the game be almost pure adventure?

I wouldn't have much storyline or dialogue, or any at all, really. Seems like it would cheapen the effect. Instead you could use it as an excuse to inject some wonderful, surreal imagery and tell a story through symbolism in the environments - meaning there's as much or as little story as the player wants.

 

[bluehazed]

I guess I'll go the whole 8.2296 meters with the sprites. Might look cool, anyway

Maybe I'll have a short introduction, and then leave the strange landscapes to do the storytelling, I guess that seems alright, leaving it to the eye of the beholder.