Hey everyone! This week, while most of Team Stonehearth investigates various performance optimizations, Allie takes the lead on answering a key question which touches many of our end-game features: What does the Edge of the World look like? We’re a long way away from even beginning to implement this in game, but for this Desktop Tuesday, let’s take a closer look at her initial concepts, and how she got them.
The Edge of the World
Recap from the video:
- During Stream 200, I mentioned that the team is taking some time to answer some high level artistic questions that affect multiple features. One of these questions, which touches on Titans, the Geomancer, and the Magmasmith is “What does the edge of the world look like?”
- We’ve decided that the world WILL have an edge: terrain (and all the stuff that goes on it) is expensive, from a CPU/Memory POV. Since Stonehearth has evolved to be a game that is more about building towns than about small parties exploring the map, we don’t want to invite you to explore, expand the map a lot, and then have to spend precious resources on remembering stuff you’ll only be interacting with for a fraction of your time. We would rather dedicate your computer’s resources to making your town more complex (more inventory, more hearthlings, more monsters, more interesting things visiting and appearing near your settlement) and make that game really good, than also try to optimize for outward exploration.
- If/when you do head over to alternate biomes/planes, we’ll do that via some mechanism that does not involve an infinitely scrolling map.
- Given that the world will be bounded, Allie took it upon herself to do some paintings of what the edge of the bounded world COULD look like.
- THESE ARE JUST CONCEPTS–should we choose to implement any of them, there’s a long way to go still: more concepts, rendering tech, game design, etc–before anything you see here could even begin to make it into the game.
- First, Allie examined how other games handle the edge of the world. Link to the Past has clouds, and Monument Valley has mist and waterfalls. She also looked at real-world examples of landscape representation, like maps and book sculptures.
Allie then made a bunch of concept paintings, which fell into three categories.
Direct Representation
Inspired by Link to the Past’s clouds, what if we just obscured the edge of our universe with clouds too? Does this work? The answer is: kind of! This looks beautiful, but unlike LTTP, we can see our hearthlings from any angle, which means that the clouds could look really weird if the viewing angle tips up from below.
In the example above, Allie addressed the problem by making the clouds look like cliffs, but they felt too solid, and not true to the existing metaphor of the game, in which you pick a part of the world with the full expectation that the rest of the world still be out there somehow.
Another solution was to keep the ground at the edge of the world going, but make it hazy instead. The problem with this is that a hearthling could get right up to the edge, and it might not be sufficiently clear that they can’t/shouldn’t go farther.
Abstraction
Her second category of solutions involved answering the problem with a new abstraction, inspired by the book sculptures. We’ve talked about how Stonehearth is a story you create, so what if we transformed the pizza box into a storybook?
Another way to go here might be to continue with the theme of the map from the screen where a player chooses their settlement’s location. Once picked out, the player would see said location as an actual map, which could fill with color and life as their hearthlings explore it:
Or maybe even as an actual drawn map, that pops to life as the hearthlings explore it:
Personally, this section really speaks to me, because Stonehearth is a world where each item has weight: logs fall from trees and are carried one by one to stockpiles. Stuff doesn’t stack. Buildings are built block by block. The world is a tangible world. The map concept gives the game a place in my world–in the player’s world. It gives the land you see a relationship to you that’s as clear as the block of wood’s relationship to the hearthlings that carry it.
Lore++
But to be complete, Allie did also do a third set of paintings, these asking what the game would be like if the edge of the world contributed to the lore of Hearth. For example, what if, after you select a place to travel, you get there and it turns out that place was actually set adrift from the rest of the land and turned into an island?
Or got thrown up into the sky?
These are really provocative ideas, and they have massive gameplay implications. Who could see those crystals without wanting to mine them out and use them for things? If this is where we as a team eventually want to go, these concepts are too powerful to be just artifacts of the end of the world; if we include them in the game, they should be part of the whole world, and its gameplay.
Next Steps!
So now that Allie’s made these high level concepts, where do we go from here? Well, get feedback, for starters!
- As a team, our first step was to all give her feedback about how the concepts made us feel, and what implications each would have from a technical, design, and gameplay perspective.
- We all really liked the book and map concepts.
- Allie will probably explore those abstract themes further, perhaps seeing if they could be merged, like in a book of maps, or exploring what they’d look like from various camera angles, or what the game would actively look like as the player moved through it.
- If that works out, we’ll investigate what tech we’d need from a rendering perspective to make this happen, and from a gameplay and UI perspective to bring it fully into the game experience.
This is going to be a long process, but as always, we’re happy to share it with you and hear what you think about it!
Other Announcements
Streams should happen at the usual times this week. Woo!
We will also be going to PAX West, in Seattle, the weekend of September 2nd. If you’re in the area, please drop by! We’d love to catch up in person. 