The beginning 

The Guest List is an idea I've been throwing around for a while now, pretty much since I heard Weird Al's "Party in the CIA". The idea of taking something traditionally played by grim-faced people with short haircuts and making a (hopefully) (semi-)humorous game, with more than a nod toward Julian Gollop's games from yesteryear.

As I've more of a developer than artist, it needed to be something that wasn't going to cost me a fortune to hire designers for, and would run not only on PC, but preferably also tablet as well. As such I'm leaning toward an orthographic, top-down view as only 1 dimension to design, but would allow me to still use a 3d engine to calculate everything. This would also fit quite well with the spy theme as the entire game could be viewed as if through a spy satellite.

With the focus on 2 dimensions, I think that relying on shadow to convey depth would give it an interesting feel. To test this, I've mocked up the above building to see how the shadows affect the world around.