Hey everyone, welcome to another Stonehearth Desktop Tuesday!
The End Edge of the World, Part Two
The team is deep in development on Alpha 19 (which is very close to its unstable branch debut!), featuring new treats for Rayya’s Children, but last August we also mentioned that the team is also working on some long term projects which won’t land for a while. So before we draw the curtain on A19, we think you’ll be interested in a peek at some of the long-gestating work. For this week’s Desktop Tuesday, let’s climb up to 10,000 feet and return to a topic we started discussing earlier this year: how to depict the end edge of the world.
You may remember that when we last left off, Allie was looking at three different models: direct representation, like, surrounding the edge of the world with clouds, abstract: like, making it clear that the world was conceptually a storybook or map, or lore-related, like floating islands in the sky or water.
In the end, she decided to pursue this second one, abstraction, because it spoke to the whole team and to many of you: as hearthlings have a very physical, tangible interaction with the world around them: buildings built in reachable pieces, and logs that fall from trees and are turned into chairs, seeing the world of Hearth as a map or a book explains how it relates to us, the player. It is literally a world inside a book on our bookcase, or a group of people on a map sitting on my desk.
Her first exercise was to see if she could solve what she called, the problem of the spine. In this picture, the land rises out of the book, but what happens at the spine of the world? What would it look like in game? She did this mockup, but felt it was very unsatisfying, somehow, like a block, sitting on top of a book. That’s not what she wanted. So she tried experimenting with this model, which breaks the edges of the book up, as if the world were spilling down into the covers. We think it looks pretty amazing. One problem is: what happens when it’s not a gorgeous waterfall edge? What would it mean about all the lands around the section you chose to settle in? These are open questions, and we are still debating them.
We were also, as a team, very excited about the possibility of the the world being depicted inside a map, or perhaps a book of maps. This could neatly solve the spine problem by just keeping the gamespace on one side of the page, and putting other stuff, like the storybook that frames the game, on the other side. Theoretically, we could customize it by kingdom, or based on what’s happened in the game. If it became too distracting, we could instead hide it.
The problem with this abstraction is that it might start to look weird when the player is digging: if the map is a book of maps and you dig down, what does that mean for the maps on the other pages, etc? Also, exactly what should happen if you get to the edge of the world and dig down? Again, more open questions that want further ideation.
One thing Allie did like very much about the map concept was the idea that perhaps the unexplored or recently not-visited parts of the map could return to being flat, with hand drawn elements depicting what we think might be over there, the way old maps have scenes like: here there be dragons. The problem with this, though incredibly evocative, would be that a ton of art would be required every time we added something new to the game: not just it’s model, but also an illustration as to how it might appear on the map. A picture derived from the voxels might work, but would be clearly less evocative. As usual, tradeoffs.
The final exploration Allie did was about answering where exactly, the book ended and the rest of the world began. Like, how far above the book does the sky reach? If you’re inside the book and looking out towards the edge, what would you see? These questions, as you might imagine, are beyond the scope of an illustration: they require mockups with a real camera to pursue.
So that’s where her explorations of this artistic question come to rest for now: with a strong indication as to how we would like the game to look, strong enough to begin in-game, code explorations. These explorations would then show the pros and cons of each approach, and also unveil usability and style issues we haven’t even thought of yet. Stay tuned! To be fair, though ,these explorations probably won’t happen for quite some time, as all our engineers are currently engaged with performance work, more pressing gameplay features, and ongoing bugfixing. In the meantime, Allie will take the work she’s done here and use it as the foundation for other long-term artistic visioning projects.
And that’s it for this week! Being transparent with you about our development process is really important to us, and so I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing how Allie’s edge of the world concepting has evolved. If you have ideas as to how to answer the outstanding questions I’ve mentioned, let us know here in the comments, or on our forum at discourse.stonehearth.net. Oh, one more thing: it may be that an upcoming, technical Desktop Tuesday turns out to be more suitable as a written document than a video. If Tuesday happens and you don’t see a video from us, check out our dev blog at stonehearth.net; it may be there, in text alone, instead. Either way, see you next week!
Oh, also: Twitch streams on their usual days and times this week, but perhaps with different casts! (You’ll just have to tune in to find out…)