The story, tentatively titled "Dive into the Sky," is sort of inspired by things like the Ace Combat series. So, it's got a lot of jets. The actual premise also involves cute girls, because of various influences. Oddly enough, it's vaguely justified by the setting. The actual plot, such as it is, will focus on a squadron testing new aircraft and technology, and the various things that happen to them.
I'm planning to publish this thing as a bunch of illustrated stories (a chapter at a time, if you will). Other ideas such as comics have been bounced around, but this seems simplest. I'm also collaborating with a few friends on this already.
As for art, I'm working mostly on character design sheets for the story characters at the moment. If I'll be drawing them repeatedly, I might as well have their looks down. Same with any common outfits (military uniforms, flightsuits, etc). Of course, I'm woefully slow at it. Must somehow force myself to draw faster.
My current ideas for the setting are as follows:
The setting is futuristic science fiction. The world map isn't our own with the borders redrawn, I'll make a completely new one, instead. There will be several factions populating the place, and each will provide some influence on characters who live there. One faction will probably be a fanatical group who are very opposed to creating cyborgs or whatever player characters are assumed to be, and see them at best as a necessary evil. Another will be the opposite extreme, who has embraced the technology to the point that almost everyone has at least a little bit of cybernetics. most places will be somewhere in the middle, in terms of how the view the new technology, although cybernetics and the like lost the culture wars, so its the unaltered human body which is the ideal. These places may well be analogues to actual countries, at least in terms of general culture. The last faction that isn't directly antagonistic will likely be one or more megacorporations with resources and influence to rival those of nations and thus have global clout.
Every game needs its antagonists, and this one will be no different. Factional infighting is common enough that it can work as the entire basis of a game, but there will be other more unified threats as well. One will likely be a global terrorist or criminal organization. Another will definitely be alien invaders, although I am not sure of their exact nature yet. They might be from another dimension, or from another planet. They might be horrible monstrosities who show up and are hard to figure out. Or maybe they're much more human-like. Regardless of what they are, it's quite possible they are subtly manipulating at least some things behind the scenes, and their apparently sudden appearance on the global stage is not what it seems.
