To toon or not to toon

A very early decision for the game was this:  Do I make it cartoon style silliness, in the vein of the Munchkin card game, or do I opt for a more traditional, semi-realistic fantasy setting?

I’m sure a lot of people would immediately answer that question with “cartoon silliness!”.  The obvious thought is that you can do anything in cartoons, plus it looks more interesting.  Originally, this was my thought too.  However, as I dwelled on the idea more, I started to realize that cartoon styling is actually quite limiting.  Realism won out because, bizarrely enough, it allowed me more freedom than a cartoon world.

A cartoon world would be limited to toon-friendly characters, as any creatures that are particularly horrific or vile or creepy would lose that edge in toon form.  Realism thus allows me to let my dark and twisted mind run wild and not worry about making it work in a toon style.

There is also one other big advantage to realism over cartoons – the mind’s eye.  It’s quite amazing  just how much a person’s mind will fill in missing details when they are looking at something semi-familiar.  It’s the reason why horror movies that don’t show the bad guy / monster are much scarier than those that splatter blood across the screen every five minutes.  The mind and its imagination work wonders in filling in the gaps whilst keeping in line with the mood of the scene.  This same mind’s eye trickery works in games too, where character models are not as detailed as real life, and things work differently than you might expect.  It’s okay because your mind will ease you through it, ultimately creating a more interesting and detailed world than any one game could.  If I opted for cartoon silliness, the mind’s eye factor would be gone completely.  It only works when viewing things that have a familiarity to the viewer, which mostly comes from their experiences in the real world.

So I have opted for realism over cartoons.  It’s certainly a lot more work to make realistic models and scenery, but hopefully the end result will be a more engaging world.