Suggestions about design: gloomy or cheerful

S

snowstorm

Guest
Need your advice about survival game.
On the one hand, games of this genre usually have gloomy atmosphere and I am fed up with that sometimes.
On the other hand, Fallout Shelter is more cheerful and that is unrealistic.
So I am asking, what design for survival game would you choose: gloomy or cheerful?
 

Niels

Member
I think a "balanced" atmosphere is what you want.
Fallout is very sarcastic, pairing gore and violence with a overly optimistic world view (taken from the 50-60's US instruction movies for nuclear attacks and other devastating disasters).
The witcher 3 does a similair thing, by pairing a despressing and oppresive world with funny sequences and dark humor.
"We happy few" tried to take this concept to the extreme, but mostly failed on the gameplay side of things.

A save way to go is by having a despressing world and write in some funny side-character/dialogue/notes to balance it out.
 

Aajowa

Member
Cheerful! Who doesn't want to smash a smiley cartoon zombie and/or pop a balloon animal with a novelty oversized pin before it can nudge you!

But also personally I like natural GUIs and graphics more than either. I guess that's gloomy, but not doomy gloomy?
 

11clock

Member
I usually gravitate towards cheerful games, like most Nintendo games. I find gloomy to be just overall depressing and uninteresting/boring.
 
You'll definitely stand out a little more if your survival game is more on the cheerful side, I'd personally be a bit more interested if it was done right.
 

WarpDogsVG

Member
How a creative work is received is largely dependent on what's going on around them, and I think these days that means cheerful games tend to stick out more

I would steer away from 'ironic' or 'but with a dark side~~' cheerfulness as that feels pretty overplayed in the survival genre.
 
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