Before I go further, you should check out Liz's Blog, because she goes over this all in much more detail, and has a much better perspective.
Our gameplay can be flavored as basically anything. This is a blessing and a curse. We have basically total creative freedom, but there's a very limited amount our gameplay can do for our art and vice versa. None of our mechanics mandate anything about our art, this isn't a game "about" anything, and as such nearly any theme or art style we choose is going to on some level feel arbitrary.
There's a reason most fighting games have stories that basically revolve around "There are people. They fight because reasons." The simple fact of the gameplay is that it isn't really simulating anything except in the most abstract sense, and if you're not going to take the obvious "Martial arts + some gimmick" theme, you're sort of at the end of what makes sense, and it's best not to shine too much of a spotlight on that fact.
One of our first theme ideas was also our longest-lived. We considered a game about chefs, having a food fight on some sort of demented parody of a cooking show. It was a lot of fun, kind of zany, and more reliant on comedy than I personally felt comfortable with. Comedy is risky. I think I'm a fairly funny person, and my team are definitely funny people, but things go wrong with projects like this all the time. The fact is that we're an inexperienced, undermanned, underfunded team under a lot of time pressure, and a fair amount of other external pressure. Lots of things under these circumstances end up being pretty-good-but-not-great, and nothing fails less gracefully under those conditions than humor. If you try to be beautiful and don't quite make it you wind up interesting-looking. If you try to be exciting and don't quite make it, you end up campy. If you try to be funny and don't quite make it, you end up making people cringe, and we really didn't want to do that.
We went through a dozen other art styles. Surreal monsters, levels based on different historical art styles, weird little crystal robot birds (which I never understood but I really really miss,) wizards, origami people... This was an elaborate process.
The last iteration of it is the one I have the clearest memories of. We were down to two concepts. One of them was the chef one, and the other one was less defined. The less defined one was an aesthetic design involving ghostly figures in old clothing, wearing masks and fighting in a theater. Nobody was certain what they were, but we all thought it was very cool and very compelling.
So we spent a week trying to figure out what they could be. We constructed this elaborate narrative about spirits fighting their way out of purgatory, wearing masks and wielding powers symbolic of the things they did in life. We justified a whole lot of things under it, and sort of made it work.
Then we decided that was dumb and we were going to do a game about ghosts, and I literally couldn't be happier about that decision. It was a last-minute decision (literally; we set a deadline to pin down our art style and the specifics of the ghost theme weren't brought up until the day of that meeting) and I think it was a perfect decision. We've finally found a compelling artistic direction that the whole team likes. It's not too silly, it's not too pretentious, it's not too boring, it's not too dumb, it's not too difficult, it's not too restrictive, and it provides some inspiration in the form of two new mechanics that I'll talk about in my next post. Plus, we all really like ghosts. I'm all about ghosts. Remy, one of our designers, actually is a ghost. We're all looking forward to working with ghost story and horror tropes for the next few weeks while we get our art built, in-game, and ready to go. Personally, I really want a move that makes you throw your own head, and until you pick your head back up your body can move normally, but all your attacks originate from where your head landed.
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