Trees and Machines
Introduction
Today we are going to look at two biomes from our game: New Wilderwood and the Power Sector.
These two biomes represent two very contrasting settings found in our game world. New Wilderwood is lush, vibrant, and thriving with different kinds of trees and plants. It is a good representation of how the world of DOOMBLADE used to be. In contrast, the Power Sector is completely devoid of anything natural and is instead filled with machines, which represents the corrupting influence the game’s antagonists have had on the world.
In level design terms, the world of our game consists of small pieces we call “rooms”, connected together into larger cohesive sections we call “biomes”. Each biome has its own strong identity defined by distinct visuals, enemies, NPCS (non-player characters), sound design and atmosphere.
New Wilderwood
The idea of having a forest in our game was one of our earliest ideas, and the level and enemy design in New Wilderwood ended up growing as organically as the forests themselves. There was no high level plan of how the forest’s levels should be shaped. Instead the process was very iterative and the nooks and crannies of New Wilderwood were then populated by whichever enemies felt right in the moment. Wide open areas were filled with ambushes of enemies that can occupy a lot of aerial space, whereas more cramped areas became hosts to wall crawling creepers. The different areas of the forest were created independently, in different parts of the game world as the ideas came to us. Later, we needed to find ways to connect them with new forest areas. This way, New Wilderwood grew organically to fill the map of the game far and wide.
Power Sector
In contrast, while the Power Sector is also a vast area, the rooms inside it were positioned in the game world much more systematically. Most of the time, when creating rooms for the Power Sector, the rooms had a specific obligation of connecting one place to another or they needed to contain an important event.
The level and enemy design of the Power Sector was first inspired by the environmental visuals Juha, the artist, created for the biome. This is best showcased by the first enemy designed for the Power Sector: the Dread Cannon. It is a cannon moving on rails at high speed. The Power Sector level design is in many places defined by interconnected systems of rails on which these cannons are moving back and forth. These systems form an organized chaos, which might at first seem overwhelming, but work as an efficient way of moving through the levels once the player learns their way around the Power Sector.
Aesthetic Style
The visual styles for the New Wilderwood and the Power Sector were quite different types of processes when compared to each other. The concept phase of the style of the New Wilderwood was pretty straight forward to plan as we wanted to create a forest environment for the game from the very beginning of the project. The color scheme of the biome was first quite heavily based on green. During the process it has become more of a mix between green, blue and yellow. Forestry is always a great theme because it’s rather easy to imagine different types of trees and organic shapes that can easily have some believable movement as well as to make the environment feel more alive and immersive. The lighting of the biome obviously needed some light rays here and there, which gave it a more warm lushy feel.
The Power Sector took more time in the concepting phase. We gathered quite a lot of reference images to get the feel of the biome as we wanted it to be. This environment is built by the antagonists of the game. It was quite important to give the player the idea of how the antagonists see the world even before the player will meet them face to face - and build anticipation for the first meeting. The idea was to have a lot of straight lines with a dark, rusty, and somewhat gilded environment with some chaotic machines and weird petrified creatures here and there. The biggest challenge was making the biome somehow alive in a believable and immersive way. The level design included much faster gameplay than the Wilderwood biome - this helped us realize that all the different machines in this biome should just be constantly moving to give a hectic feeling for the player. We believe the Power Sector did come alive rather nicely with all the moving machines in the environment. Also, the lighting of this biome is quite heavily based on the slowly moving fog all over the place to give it a more ominous feel.
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Stay tuned for next week, where we will dive further into getting to know more about us, the developers!
DOOMBLADE
Iceberg Interactive