Hey everyone, Whimsical Violence is back with more behind-the-scenes updates. This time we’re taking a look at the assets used to create our forest arena and some of the process that went into making the models.
Trees
To start off, we decided early on that we wanted not only huge trees to occupy the space of our forest area, but we also wanted to give the player the ability to run and climb on the trunk and branches of the trees within the arena as one method of traversing the game space.
For trees, using vertical ones weren’t ruled out, but we considered exploring winding branches and long roots that spanned from the upper area of the arena to the ground as a method of traversing the level. Using the forests from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as reference, we did some research online for tree formations that had bending and twisting trunks. The “Wistman Woods” in Dartmoor, Devon, England, became one of our main resources for inspiration when it came to the shape and form of the trees we wanted for our level. In addition, they lend themselves to be traversable instead of heavily relying on vertical trees with branches at odd angles for the players to able to platform on to.
Mushrooms
In addition to trees, we also decided on having mushrooms in the level, some that would act as bouncing platforms while another would be a basic platform for getting to higher areas of the level. Both would act as another method to get around the arena. This led to exploring various mushroom forms and how we could incorporate them into the environment. With this in mind, and after a week of exploring different mushroom growths, we landed on using bolete mushrooms as the inspiration for our “bouncy” fungi platforms.
Along with the bolete mushrooms, we went with shelf mushrooms, which led to additional platforms for traversing trees, and adding another variation to having multiple paths.
It’s a Goal, not a portal!
The last major asset we decided on for Bugby was to implement goals for scoring points. Taking inspiration that we wanted a whimsical, fantasy forest; we pulled inspiration from other fantasy references and went with stone arch structures for the goal model. Keeping in mind that our player character(s) are goblins, we added fun and quirky carvings into the stones of the goal to keep with theme of whimsical, chaotic, fun.
We decided to have multiple goals in our level to help in keeping gameplay active and reduce downtime. To help with this, we added 2 variations to the appearance of the goals: when a goal is active, it will illuminate with a blue emissive glow to telegraph to the player that it is active and that it should be one that players aim for to score points during the round. After a goal is scored, the goal will “shut off” for a short duration while another one becomes active within the level, helping to keep play time up and reduce unnecessary downtime. Too bad it’s at the detriment of our poor little bug buddy, Rolland Polland! (sorry buddy!!)
Hope you all enjoyed getting a behind-the-scenes look at our process of building and creating our world of Bugby. We’ll be back later with another update soon!