To touch up on your questions in order:
1 SETTING/WORLD
Setting is overall based on the type of fantasy the Final Fantasy series is, where you can see knights fighting goblins and mechs fighting aliens like two chapters apart. That said as far as world building is concerned, it technically takes place in a sort of “heaven” like dimension, inhabited by two archetypes of people, which as placeholders I’ll call: originals, and rebons.
Both are immortals, but originals are spawned into the realm by the realm itself, I will not spoil why. Reborns are people who were generous in life but were about have it “cut short” and are taken before the worst case scenario can happen to them. In this “better world” they’re free to indulge in it’s endless bounty to their heart’s content without limit, as for why this is a thing, I won’t spoil in case I do get around to story mode. All I’ll say for now is the good guys are themed around stars and the concept of infinity, as well as having iconography of dining/cooking-ware somewhere on them to keep it consistent with the villains.
As for the conflict if everyone’s immortal, the opposite of the realm the game takes place in is a realm of non-existence where, naturally, there’s nothing but the immortals that inhabit it. I’ll call these guys voids as a placeholder, but their whole deal is they want to consume, like a void, and as such managed to find their way to the Originals and Reborns’ realm, where they take on the properties of what they consume, hence the food theming, but also naturally they can consume people, hence the conflict, and some of the boss designs. They’re themed around “you are what you eat”, blackholes, and food in general.
2 CHARACTER SYSTEM
As for characters, it’s inspired by DIsgaea in the sense that for your standard units, you can hire an infinite number (probably going to be a limit actually) of different palette swap “blank slates” that will take the appearance of their primary class (i.e Human Warriors will have the appearance of the character I linked, but with selectable colors). I did this as 1, it’s less work than fully customizable characters, 2 ease of unit recognition in the heat of battle, and 3 with how big characters can get the finer details of hairstyle, face, etc. will be impossible to see past a certain point anyway.
Character classes will be unlocked via a sort of “achievement” system, you start with:
Warrior (damage class, passive makes him fatter for each enemy he KOs)
Cleric (magic heal/grow circle, and can reward all units on the field with growth for good deeds)
Mage (regens MP fast and can place zones to shrink or grow people in it)
and Thief (size theft ensues, also less likely to be targeted), and from there
From there, consider it like a board-game with “checkpoints” you need to clear a condition for to proceed to the next tile, like to unlock Berserker you’d need to, say, KO 3 enemies in less than 10 seconds with a Warrior. From there all characters, new or preexisting, can access the Berseker (at level 1, but still) and train it as their main or subclass, and even clear it’s condition to unlock the classes locked behind it. As well, some classes will require an achievement from multiple connected nodes, like for Paladin to be unlocked, a Warrior could need to use a subclass to heal a certain amount of total health to another unit, and a Cleric could need to defeat several enemies himself (what fun…).
That said, if I get to that story mode, also like Disgaea, you will have “story characters”, who are specific characters with distinct personalities and rolls in the narrative. Story characters are more predefined in their rolls, and will unlock their secondary classes at pivotal story moments, or by completing their character quests. Also to clarify more: you can only change subclass and main class out of combat, but I might experiment with spending SP and MP to swap in battle.
3 OTHER FETISHES
As for other fetishes, depends on what people think, what people want, and what I’m okay with. Some stuff that’s probably going to be included are kinks that’d make good status effects, and a class associated that said condition either passively or can afflict it, and has an immunity to it’s detriments.
An example of one is inflation (as I’m fairly indifferent, and it’d make a good gameplay addition), it could increase the size of units and cause them to float off the ground, making melee and medium ranged attacks ineffective at the cost of lowered durability and mobility. For a player class who’s focus is this status, he could be a wind mage who can balloon himself and allies and manipulate the wind to provide full mobility while airborne, as well as provide a wind aura that has a chance to block shots, the one thing that could “pop” a ballooned unit. But that’s just the first example to come to mind, probably tons of stuff I’m okay with but not huge (ha) on could be fun, like blueberryfication, transformation (that alone is probably the biggest opportunity for status), and probably stuff I haven’t even considered or heard of
4 WIN CONDITIONS
It will depend largely on how fun the basic win condition of “destroy all enemies” ends up being, and how much room I have to work other objectives into the randomly generated format. I’m a big advocate for ways to win besides just “kill x number of things”, as it makes class variety matter more to the meta than just the strongest with the bare minimum defense. Although, thanks to squashing, healers and supports should theoretically have merit since they can just… Squash everything by getting really big
Currently planned level structure for Buffet mode is 10 rooms of enemies followed by a boss, and the bosses are planned to be somewhat brutal, but after a boss you can get a passive upgrade for the rest of your run, and you see how long you can keep it going. This differs from the endgame I plan for story mode, which I plan on using a different system I cooked up in which there are NO objects naturally in the area, and enemy density is doubled. Upon clearing a wave you get a passive like you would from a boss, leading you to probably ask “what do bosses give?”, the answer being a buff for the rest of the run that you must select from a prize pool… For all future enemies. That’s going to be the source of the difficulty spike to balance out the inevitable perfect party comps you’ll have by then. As with buffet mode though, continue as long as you can is the name of the game.
With all that said, I could see defensive objectives being a thing in story mode for certain points of the game, but my big concern is that the shear amount of support/utility options I had planned to allow for a minimal offense party to take advantage of squashing mechanics to still win might be a bit too busted for that, but we’ll see what I can do.
Also not really important unless I do story mode, but I do have plans for a bounty/quest system to make up for the lack of rogue-like passives in story mode content. For example: since your main quests will be an objective on a certain floor of a dungeon, you could take a quest to beat a certain number of a specific enemy type before you exit a dungeon, or you could take a contract to reach a certain floor without using a certain type of spell, and so and and so forth.
5 WOMEN
As for female or androgynous, I’m bisexual and am okay with women, and have no problems with androgynous characters either. I do have a vastly different class tree in mind for female variants, but this would only be for the “blank slate” characters. Enemies and story characters would still be 90% male, and I fear that it’d create a divide in community interest that I’m just not going to be able to account for (on account of really really wanting a WG game that doesn’t skimp on the hot men), since that’s pretty much the opposite of what I believe to be the popular opinion in game preference here.
However, if I did include female characters, there is a pitch I have for at least one story party member and a few enemies (sandwitch, and gorgonzola, and ice queen) that I could throw in, but they’d be few and far between.
And to cap it off, the only thing I fear is that this willl take a while to get playable, not that I won’t be able to do it. If we disregard a story mode, with the way I code after the base-work is figured out it’s mostly the visuals that’ll be a time sink, since modeling is something I have experience with, but modeling with absurdly massive shapekeys that look good at both the smallest and biggest ain’t a skill they teach in a lot of places
Last time I did wg stuff it was 2D with a topdown camera that just let me scale parts, properly taking a 3D model and accounting for it’s largest size will be all new to me, and I’ll probably have to ask the people on this forum when I hit a wall
??? THE GIF
Also don’t know where to put this, but I’m addressing this before I hit the sack, those bright sci–fi blue colors and laser lights on the gif are a mix of visible enemy pathing presets from Godot (the red lines), and placeholder assets that are reused textures from the high-tech city area I made for my first attempt at a wg game (the bright blue and white everything), with a skybox reused from a testbuild of one of my sfw projects that was, at the time, also sci-fi
