Hey everyone!
Last week was mostly spent on world building and animations, so I want to talk to you a little bit more about what goes into our new world building. I will start by talking about the considerations that go into world building generically today, and maybe I will take another post in the coming weeks to show some specific aspects of what I’m doing with the new island.
When we designed our first island, Spike Ridge, we designed it to be viable as a competitive map for up to four players. Each player started in a different corner of the island, and particularly valuable resources could be found in the middle. However, this also meant that all players needed equal access to resources, and we had to distribute all resources across each quarter of the map, which meant that we had major constraints in designing what we wanted the world to look like. Thanks to our new coop and PvE focus, however, we do not have these constraints for the new map. The map is approximately 3 km long and 1 km wide, with both players starting next to each other on the short end, giving us plenty of room to design for progression and strategy.
As I have talked about before (and is prominently displayed on our roadmap), we like to think of the game in 3 pillars: A “survival/adventure” pillar, focused mostly around the FPS experience of the commander and exploration, a “village building” pillar, focused around placing buildings, creating supply chains, etc., and a “strategy” pillar, focused on military and competition. When designing the world, we obviously need to take all three into account and figure out how to best support each pillar with the way the world works.
Considering I have previously mentioned this as well, let’s start with the considerations of the village building pillar, which are closely linked to progression through the game: since your access to resources is largely responsible for what you can build and sell, we have decided to distribute the various mining resources across the world. Each needed resource will be found in a distinct biome, which players need to expand into in order to secure their access to it. Thanks to the new island form, advanced building materials should be found further across the island. Biomes will also be separated by mountains and rivers that will be impassable to armies and villagers (though an enthusiastic commander may manage to bunny-hop over one), making expansion more difficult to plan for.
Building on the mountains and rivers, we are also designing for strategic considerations. Early on, it will be possible to get from one biome to the other along multiple paths (mountain passes and river fords), meaning players have to secure a number of possible approaches the pirates could take. Likewise, securing any one of them should be easy, making expansion a little more pleasant to start with. As you progress through the island, biomes will be less connected, allowing you to secure your advance against the increasingly powerful pirate armies, but also forcing you to figure out how to advance when faced with their attacks along a narrow pathway.
Finally, we have to constantly consider the experience of the player in first-person view. Where a traditional RTS game doesn’t really need to build much detail into their worlds, we have much more of a need to make it interesting for our commanders to be engaged with the world. Our solution has been to create many small paths, leading up or down the mountains and cliffs and which are impassable to the villagers. At the end of each path, the player may find a reward (food, coin, seeds etc), which will make exploration interesting. As we add a tech tree to the next update (0.9), we are also planning on having some random techs as possible rewards, making exploration more important for the fate of your people (all rewards are random per game, of course).
(One of the hidden paths leading to a chest on a cliffside)
In more practical terms, we have been testing the new map and coop for quite some time. During our play, we have come to various conclusions about where we think things should be placed, where passes and barriers should be placed, and how we would like the progression to work. As a result, we have already adapted the terrain accordingly, put down mountains, decided on the layout of the rivers, and laid out the biome borders. As our next step, we have to populate the sheer mountain sides with the new rocks mentioned in previous posts. This work takes a relatively long time, but I have almost finished the mountains of the first 2 (of 6) biomes. Once this is done, we can add plants and unique elements to the biomes, finalise the paths for the commander, and add the hundreds of positions in which unique elements may spawn (chests, ore veins, pirates, etc).
As I finish some of the biomes in the coming weeks, I will provide some pictures to show what we have come up with.
Until next week!