Now that the Tower Fall DLC map has been out for a month, let's take a peek at some of the behind-the-scenes stories about a few elements of the map.
With over 30 collectible objects across the existing maps, it's getting increasingly hard to think up new collectibles for new maps. So during our last trip to Yellowstone, we wandered around the Tower Fall General Store in search of ideas. That's where most of the Tower Fall collectibles originated: wolf and bison plushies, the Junior Ranger hat, a game about animal scat, and a Yellowstone-themed wine bottle. The giant plastic ice cream cone was partly inspired by a real (though smaller) display object at the ice cream counter inside the store, as well as by a private beta testers suggestion that was inspired by our devblog video about our visit to Tower Fall area.
The toy guitar, however, has a different origin in my family. Watch the video to find out!
If you've purchased the Tower Fall map, you'll undoubtedly have noticed that the map is rectangular rather than square like all the other game maps. This is due to the particular topography of this area. I really wanted the map to extend from the Tower Fall waterfall in the north to the summit of Mount Washburn in the south. However, that is 11.5 kilometers, which is too big for a game map (due to performance and memory considerations). So...I cheated and moved the mountain north about two kilometers. That still made the map nine kilometers tall, but with the Yellowstone River canyon to the east and another valley to the west, it was natural to crop inwards some, resulting in a map that's 6x9 kilometers, with a total area about halfway between the original game maps and the DLC maps.
Some players have found an icon for Canada Lynx as pup raiders in the game files. That's because we originally planned to have lynx conduct pup raids, based on some information from a wolf biologist. But lynx are small and shy, so we wondered if this really occurred in nature. We asked that biologist to look into it, and after some literature review and talking to other wolf biologists, she could not find any actual evidence of den raids by lynx. (The story is different in Europe, where the substantially-larger Eurasian Lynx has been known to kill wolf pups.)
Watch the video for details on all these bits of trivia, as well as some bugs that amused us during Tower Fall beta testing!