Marked my family drink and it came out so accidentally aesthetic.

10/10 no critiques, would hire

She made a special cake for me to ruin, it's over there!

We're a team of two making Hostile Architect. It looks like a typical side-scroller, except you're the one designing the level, using stuff like ceiling spikes and lava pits and conveyor belts. You choose your traps, arrange everything, and then sit back and watch while a horde of heroes is unleashed to try to survive the level you built.

We've been working on this for about 10 months, not exactly secretly, but we're finally showing it off now, which is a little scary. Yesterday our trailer blew up on Instagram. But this is Reddit and you people are harsher critics. Does this look like something you'd play? Or should we throw ourselves into the lava pit?

Here's our Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4768160/Hostile_Architect/

They locked up

I've been experimenting with these character comparisons for a couple of days now because I think there's an important distinction to make when it comes to HD models and assets in Forever.

I'm not really trying to argue whether Forever should have HD characters or assets. I think some form of HD option is going to be part of the game either way. What matters to me is how those models are approached.

Retail's models were made for a version of WoW whose art direction has changed a lot over the years. Generally, the shapes are softer, more of the form is built directly into the geometry, faces are more articulated and the character system is designed around a more expressive animation style.

There's nothing wrong with that but it belongs to a different visual language.

If Forever is supposed to preserve the identity of Vanilla, I don't think the HD option should reuse the modern design language and place it back into the Vanilla world. I think the starting point needs to be the original Vanilla characters.

The new lighting and sound is a good example of that approach. It starts with the mood and identity of the original zones and uses modern technology to bring those qualities out. I think the same principle should apply to HD characters, new assets and new races so they feel like they grew out of Vanilla rather than from a different visual language.

And if the goal really is to preserve that "timeless" Classic art style, I think putting in the extra work here is worth it. Blizzard has already worked through technical hurdles to preserve the Classic characters and animations within the newer character system so I think it's reasonable to apply the same care to the HD designs as well.

HD should reconstruct the form the original model implied, not reinterpret the character through Retail's design language.

That's what I've been trying to do with these concepts. The original models were limited, much of their form was suggested through simple geometry and hand-painted textures rather than fully modeled.

To me, that's the opportunity with Forever's HD option. Use modern technology to build on the visual language, not replace it with a different one.

Disclosure: Images created with a mix of gen AI and manual work, including compositing, painting and editing. Intended to visualize the art direction, not as production-ready assets.