_Opening Thoughts: Work continues on the style guide. My usual place closes in the afternoon so I had to settle for Starbucks, but it gave me time to write a reflection on my games' art direction. More than anything, I'm stuck on the problem of how to make Twilight of the Dead interesting. It's not that zombie outbreaks are stale, it's just that they've been done so poorly, and ad nauseum mind you. That's what I'm going to mostly talk about in this entry: How to make zombies interesting again plus some miscellanea.
_What is Done Correctly: To stay positive, I'll talk about works of effective zombie fiction. The titles that come to mind are some games, some movies, a book, and a couple of shows but for the sake of brevity, I'll keep it to a few examples:
+World War Z by Max Brooks
+High School of the Dead (anime and manga)
+Dawn of the Dead (1978)
World War Z (the book) stands out in mind because I haven't heard of anything else that goes into as much detail about a zombie apocalypse on a global scale. I don't count Fear the Walking Dead because it's still too much like it's predecessor. Actors stand around arguing w/ each other and sometimes there are zombies. That isn't drama, that's filler. Getting back on track, one of WWZ's strongest themes is cause and effect. With every interview, you understood a new facet of the zombie war, how x affected y and became z or: how the global organ trade spread the infection and that lead to the great panic. How embargoing Cuba turned the island into a safe haven and then into a capitalist superpower.
It was more eerie to learn about the greater mechanics of the Z War than it was listening to the personal survival stories though those are great, too. The book is at its strongest when it's about the bigger picture.
I've watched the whole of the High School of the Dead anime and am still reading the manga. Just as WWZ's strongest theme is cause and effect, HotD's strongest theme is liberation. I say this as someone who has lived his entire life in the American southwest. I do not know anymore about the nuances of post-war Japanese society than I do about how to prepare an unagi roll. Be that as it may, I do understand that Japan is a very conservative nation with a lot of expectations placed on the youth, I assume that is true of every East Asian country.
More so in the manga than the anime, the protagonist Komuro treats the outbreak as his chance to rebel against the order of previous world. He finds a gun, boosts a motorcycle, and smashes a register. When the high schoolers reach the Takagi Estate, it puts forward the idea that adults are less fit to survive than the youth is. It's a morbid take on the passing of the torch between generations. Now that the old rule has broken down, the teens are free to shape this new world to their liking. Also, tits.
Lastly, the granddaddy of zombie media, George Romero. I'll wait for another day to go over his complete filmography but for now I'm sticking to Dawn of the Dead. There are similar themes of liberation that I see in Dawn almost as much as High School of the Dead. Even more than its critique of consumerism, DotD creates a setting where its fun to ask yourself how you would respond in this scenario. Zombie outbreaks are more thrilling than zombie post-apocalypses by a good margin and that's because the former is set where a great change occurs violently and unexpectedly. The dust hasn't settled yet, everything is still churning as this pandemic spirals out of control over a period of days.
Returning to the theme of liberation, DotD asks you the question, "What would you do if you had an entire shopping mall to reign over?". Down with the social conventions, with responsibility and the troubles of the old world. Everyone is free to survive on their own terms and many make an adventure of it. Headshot classics are the perfect antagonist for this setting because they provide a middle ground between an overwhelming and a feasibly manageable threat.
_Regarding Twilight of the Dead: Player agency should be at the forefront of game design. Actions should have weight to them and I'm talking about Project: Zomboid, not Tell-Tale's TWD. Though PZ leans more on its simulationist mechanics, the player should have a say in how the narrative is driven. I'm not trying to recreate Zomboid, of course, but I want to improve on where TWD is weak and give the player more important choices to make.
_Additional Notes: I'm moving more towards a fun and colorful direction for Lust & Lechery and moving away from a bleak tone that I had originally planned for. What I'm most proud of today is figuring out how to handle the worldbuilding in these planned titles. There will be similarities in concept, especially if it's a slice of life narrative, but all in all they will be distinguished from one another
_Closing Thoughts: If it's fun to design and create, then it will be fun to play. Rigidity is the next best to death so moving forward, I'm going to keep a limber mind about how to handle art direction and game design. It should be fun to come up with these additions to the style guide once I sit down to continue. At the end of the day, I have no one to answer to but myself. My creative input will be final and won't need to lose sleep about what others think. Everyone will be free to feel one way or the other about the finished product but as long as I'm satisfied, all is well.
_Quote of the Day: "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."-Hunter S. Thompson