This game needs more (visual) variety!

[Greifenstein]

To begin with, please excuse my awkward use of language, as I’m not a native English speaker.

So I have been playing Bionic Dues for a solid 20 hours now and so far having a great time. The gameplay feels polished and the variety of enemies/ how different bot combos affect the challenge of combat seems perfect. The metagame decisions (which mission to pick now, how to set up your exos) are also good fun, even though the customization screen is not very intuitive and could use some polish.

However, I find myself quitting the game roughly every 2 missions because it’s just hard to look at. That’s not saying the graphics are bad. I know they received some criticism, but I actually like the general art style and especially the exo design.

My problem is variety – with every level having the same, dark background and the same dark floor tiles, it quickly becomes monotonous. What this game needs (in my opinion) is a bigger set of floor tiles for different levels, like some brighter colors in civil buildings and clinical white in science stations, neon colored cables in the floor in data centers (hacking), flashing red lights in outrun-scenarios and so on.

More variety in design would help in setting the missions apart visually and make it easier to play the game for longer periods of time.
I’m not a game designer, so I really don’t know how much work new color/texture sets actually mean, but if it’s all possibly I think that this would make the game much more enjoyable to look at.
Maybe there would even be some members of the community willing to help / mod the game if that’s all possible.

I’m interested to hear what you guys think about this and if other players have the same thoughts about graphical variety in Bionic Dues.

[Misery]

Unfortunately, there's definitely a fairly sizable amount of money and time generally necessary to do something of that nature.

Still, I would like to see more color changes in the tiles from one mission to the next.

[nas1m]

Unfortunately, there's definitely a fairly sizable amount of money and time generally necessary to do something of that nature.

Still, I would like to see more color changes in the tiles from one mission to the next.

Maybe adding a recolored variant of each existing tile set would be a convenient and cost effective way to provide some variety? This way existing tiles might be recycled instead of having to create completely new assets. A simple change in tint/hue might be able to achieve much in this regard!

Although this approach might fall apart as soon as we start to look at flavor objects (which might no longer look match the floor tiles suitably). Not sure here...

[x4000]

Yes, we tried this, and it looked bad. You can't see the mechs or enemies properly when not on a dark background. You can't do flavor objects consistently. Everything in the foreground starts looking washed out instead of popping out. It was something I really wanted to do, but in the end I felt like one thing hat looks great is preferable to a lot of things that look meh. We've, uh, been down that latter road before.

Players are welcome to take shots at creating colored ones if they like, though, and you can either replace the existing ones for yourself, post to share with others, or if we think they for enough with the main game and they are original work, we can consider adding them to the main game itself.

[Breach]

There's a lot of talk about varying the tiles, but how about creating some visual effects when events happen? This could be some simple things like when carrying out a hack on a terminal, creating some green trails that travel along the tiles from the terminal in random directions. Crude mockup here: http://i.imgur.com/4Qqn4i2.png

Basically think about the various events that happen in the game and think about what feedback, be it audio or visual, could be attached to these.

Things like that would add a little spice and visual feedback to the game, which I hope quite a few people would appreciate!

[x4000]

Possibly at some point, yes, that could happen.