I dare say that in many places our game looks better than some productions of a company making AAAA games. A bold statement, but justified. While traversing our world, I often find myself stopping for a moment to admire what I have on the screen.
However, let's recall how our world looked a little over a year ago.
We were not satisfied with that. We decided to make the whole game world from scratch. We asked ourselves at the beginning: what should our world look like?
We all unanimously answered that it should be nice and cowboyish.
However, nothing is as simple as one would like. We do not have a lot of resources that would allow us to put a large amount of detail in each location. For this reason, we decided to focus on landscapes. We try to keep our levels clean, not cluttering them with unnecessary detail where it could distract the player's eye from a nice view. This is facilitated by the light styling of our graphics.
When working on a level, we constantly think about the fact that there has to be "something" in a place and it has to be about "something." We collect a variety of images for inspiration and turn the coolest ones into something you'll see in our game.
In the end, what did we come up with?
So we decided to divide our map into 3 main regions, which you can see below.
Step
This is the area we spent the most time on and went through the most iterations. This is where the player will spend the most time, because this is where they will build their farm.
Trappers' grounds
Here we built a factory where trappers trade in various goods. It is mainly mountains and forests.
Desert
The player gains access to this area only in the third act of the game. Somewhere here there is a mine that is very worth visiting.
Something we are particularly proud of is how the look of our game changes from hour to hour. Every morning and evening, it's a moment where I stop and wonder why I'm just sitting in front of a computer making games, instead of being a cowboy and being able to look at such things live.
But what does it look like from the level designer's side?
It just looks like CHAOS. With the red poles, we mark for ourselves things that look bad or something needs to be improved. The blue ones are pastures, and the green ones are some other important locations.
And in the screenshot below you can see something you can't see in the game. Various types of triggers, splines and such.
There are also some interesting slip-ups. The following screen shot was taken by our art director after someone added fish swimming in a pond. Something was messed up with the scale.
