The Village - Old Version + New Version

The village is a playground area made full of narrative moments, puzzles and exploration. On this moment the player already knew all the powers that he can be using to navigate the world. Its was the biggest area of the Mushroom Forest and it was right between the Bath house and the Temple of Mother.

The narrative around it was polished and kept, but it had a lot of exploration on how we would be navigating. From the narrative department we got some specifications:

• The village should be split on 3 sections: father side, underground, mother side.
• The father side and the underground area should flooded.
• The mother area its thriving, being not flooded by the water.
• The next area after the village is the Temple of Mother(Exterior Area) - New Version which is inside a pit.

Original Version

What I’m calling here as the original version, is actually a lie. From what I know, this was the third iteration, and I was the third level designer on this gigantic of area. Its just this is the version that I’m was assumed.

Procedural Generation

On this old version we had a combination of various ideas, and I made some crazy explorations trying to fulfill all the requirements gave by narrative and others departments. We stretched some Procedural Content Generation Tools that our team develop for this project through the maximum limit.

• The stilts are PCG generated. They can attach to any surface that has specifics tags

• The houses also are completely generated by manipulating splines and adding some volumes to define where the doors and the windows are being placed. Even the roofs of the houses can have some holes open by using volumes. The art team is not happy on how the roofs generated look like, so we are testing others solutions.

• The stairs, bridges and railings also a generated by manipulating splines:

• Noticed those little vines hanging on the mushroom caps, railing and houses? Also positioned by procedural generation algorithms

On the new version of the village I want to bring all of this tools back, but now that we have more definitions on some other areas on the map like the Temple of Father and the Temple of Mother architectural definitions, I want to bring more influences from those areas into our map.

What are the major problems with this old version?

• Its so gigantic, but still didn’t had a “home” for each NPC that the player could encounter
• The exit of the village would be very high on the map, forcing us to make some teleport trick with the player
• Because the structure is so high, we could see very far, having almost all the others areas visible, which would require a bunch of optimization to run this area smooth. On the next screenshot you can see both the bath house as the temple of the father.
• I really don’t like the idea of having a gigantic mushroom right after a Japanese building, some people don’t see the shape being a problem, still.. I wasn’t comfortable with it, and that’s the main reason we are switching from this village built on a gigantic mushroom to a more traditional in ground structure.
• We have this massive fog wall which the player need to turn off by passing the bath house arc and behind it we have a big lake. This was very hard on optimization since we have transparency and water on the same pixels

Old puzzles left on the past…

Inside the gigantic stem we had some puzzles rooms, this was the place where we would introduce a new mechanic that was abandoned: gravity spore. When the player walk into a gravity spore, the green ones on the bottom of the screen, he would levitate as anything that he was holding with him for some seconds or until he touched water.

This mechanics created some interesting situations for the player to play, but it was too close with some other jump mechanics inside the game, so we are scrapping it for now. Meaning that my favorite child puzzle on the whole game probably will be abandoned, at least for now. The puzzle is being shown bellow. The player should cross this big gap using the gravity mushroom while holding the box, when he released, the box would float and hit the gigantic button (the others developers laughed when they saw the gigantic buttons), opening the small door which was hidden other cube that should be placed on the platform bellow, opening the door and completing the puzzle.

On the similar fashion the next puzzle room had water on the celling so when a floating cube hit it, it would be fall, so the player could use it to activate another button. This second puzzle also would teach that mushrooms could be combined.

New version of the Village

The newer is being developed as I wrote this text and still consist on the same division: father side, interior/underground and mother side. Right now, on the bottom of the image its the only area that is more or less done, the father side area that wasn’t flooded yet.

Like I already mentioned, one of the problems that I’m trying to convey is to be more tight with the architecture chose for the temples of the father and mother. The art team and the level design team made a long study on what architecture we should be leaning on both temples. For the Temple of Father was chose a more primitive japanese architecture in a isle detached from the rest of the map. The isle should be sinking like the correspondent village area. For the Temple of the Mother, since we wanted to represent visually more of her controlling side we chose to use more a High Gothic architecture.

Since we are coming from a japanese bath house I took some time to study how they built their gardens. I knew from my previous experience building aquariums that they have some rules they follow during the planning phase. On the past I experienced and study how they position stones on Iwagumi builds and reading a around the Wabi Sabi Principles gave me some new perspectives that I embraced on this small area and that will be brought on the others areas. I’m using some spheres just so we can start to discuss around the vegetation in each area too.

Did you noticed that the art team is already testing and substituting some of the mushrooms? The smaller and yellow ones were made by me just to test the composition, while the bigger purple ones are already finalized. I will be updating this page with some frequency while I built this area.