Planning my dissertation: Planning the Scope of the Art Style Guide

Some game worlds are so expansive, that making a style guide for the entire game world would take an enormous amount of skill and time. Seeing as a dissertation is a solo project, I almost certainly won't have time to make a style guide for a complete game in just one year. 

My teacher mentioned that on large-scale projects, style guides are sometimes created on a per race, or per city/town/level basis. Making an art style guide for a small section of a game would be far more achievable than trying to complete an entire art style guide.

I will need to create a basic storyline and premise for a game, to give the style guide some context. I will then pick a small section of the storyline, and effectively act as the design lead for that segment. So I might pick a specific location in the game that the main character will visit, or pick a 20 minute section of the game. If the main character encounters a new race there, I may also devote a small section of the style guide to that race as well. My style guide will most likely include storyboards, as this is a good way to emphasise some visual aspects, such as camera angles.

My style guide will lean towards being more visual, rather than including pages and pages of text, because I've been told that artists don't much care for reading! Pictures and diagrams are also far easier to comprehend than a wall of text. (See: Nobody Wants to Read Your Design, by Jesse Schell: http://www.slideshare.net/jesseschell/nobody-wants-to-read-your-design).