Keys of Naand - An isometric 2D RPG

"x tappoi perheeni ja olen kostoretkellä" (just some inside legend from our D&D times back in the day)

But, to the point.

Edwinem, you are right on the money. I'm not familiar with the Litmus test and I don't want to comment whether or not it has some fundamental flaws, since I'm not really a game developer like the rest of you guys. But one thing I know about is business, or at least its theories.

In the bizz side people like to talk about vision, mission and a mantra. Vision and mission are something for us and we don't have to go there unless we really decide to take this thing "seriously". But a mantra is something for the customers. In this case, the customers are the players. Mantra sums up the one most important thing that sells the actual product or service. Mantra is something that every developer in the team should know and keep in mind when developing.

Mantra is the essence of the product, and it should be expressed with one sentence. If possible, with two or three words.

Now I might be totally wrong here, and I've known to be a little megalomaniac when it comes to things like this but IMO you both are way off base with your results. The basic idea is right but the game's idea doesn't sound epic enough. "You are a fallen commander. Save your honor!" sounds like a horrible cliché, I've seen at least 10 movies with the same tagline and played way too many games. Yet it is much better than "Be a hero and save the world", because that sums up about half of the movies that have come out from Hollywood and I don't even have to go the games on this.

And Jarno went too far with his tagline, I fell asleep halfway the sentence.

Good case example would be the Wreck A Movie service, which in a sense is the exact same thing that we are doing, they are just doing movies.

Their tagline is "Space Nazis attack!" and they sum up the movie with two sentence: "In 1945 the Nazis went to the moon. In 2018 they are coming back." If that's not epic, I don't know what is.

And why we need an epic sum up or tagline? Because of memetics.

ps. Edwinem, don't be offended if my opinions are a bit "harsh". Jarno knows me and he also knows that I tend to smack people around and go extremities to get the best out of people in performance wise. Regardless of what it may seem by my writings, I truly believe that the right answer is somewhere between what you guys have suggested and my idea.

The test itself is rather crippled as it doesn't consider gameplay aspects for example at all, and obviously it's not that simple if a game is fun to play or not. Anyway, a sentence like that clears out the turn of events of a game and especially in RPGs it definately helps the game to be fun if the core of the events are interesting. Thus I wouldn't say the sentence must sound fun, but it must sound interesting.

"Be a hero and save the world" definately doesn't sound too interesting, as it is, like you said, a very outworn idea. I'd suggest something like "Be a former now broadly rejected army commander and regain your honor" Which is pretty much exactly what you suggested too. This is not ment to be facade of our project, but the guideline of our story development and the atmosphere we should aim for.