The Hub World and Initial Exploration

Author: Salireths

Since the previous post, I've worked more on the story, realizing that "you're being sent away to build a world" is a weak premise - we can do better. After talking to friends and patrons, new ideas arisen which will, while not completely changing the direction, definitely improve overall worldbuilding and setting.

I'm not sure if I should be talking about it now, because it still might change many times, and even if it doesn't - wouldn't you want to learn about the world in game? It is spoilers, after all :}.

The plan is to let the player uncover the story by themselves: reading text logs, looking at the environmental clues, various holograms and statues - all completely optional. At this point it's just history of the place, why things came to be this way. Having a solid foundation of "what happened before the game took place" will help us create a richer, connected world.

If you remember my previous post, you can see how some details changed, and will likely continue to be changed as we shift things around to settle them in place.

Introduction

After choosing a starting body, it gets conceived and grown until adulthood inside an automated organic vault. Then, the player's "egg" capsule emerges onto the surface of the platform, rising from a hole in ground that looks suspiciously like an organic sphincter (more about why is that further down the post).

If you take a look at the map, the player starts close to the Gateway, on the eastern side of it, next to the lake.

While the area is covered in grass, full of trees, rocks, waterfalls - it becomes apparent that it's of artificial origin, designed by an advanced civilization long time ago. The overgrown ruins leave the sense of emptiness and mystery to the place, "Where is everyone?" - the question that will be answered in time as player continues to explore.

Adding to that, the sky dome is made out of multiple panels, shining bright light onto the platform, however some of the unmaintained panels occasionally glitch, revealing dark void of space, creating an intrigue for the player to learn about the world.

Center

The center of the map is the hub-place that has crucial significance on the gameplay, as I described before. Alongside the Gateway, it has four different stations situated in four different directions from the center. These stations provide the necessary utilities throughout the game, and at the very beginning, a short tutorial will introduce them:

1. South: Fusion Station introduces to crafting, using basic augments as an example - craft and equip them to enable the inventory system (basic augments don't require any resources to make).
2. West: Aura Station is used to attune to combat and utility abilities, giving player an ability to defend themselves against elementals.
3. East: Restoration Station, the player doesn't start with full Aura charge (which represents health-points), so it simply shows how standing near health station heals you up.
4. North: Knowledge Station, which is helpful to get information on what to do and where to progress next. It is also useful to analyze various objects and artifacts.

The Gateway is already built - no need to harvest resources to construct it, like I thought at the time of writing the previous post. However, it is still deactivated and unusable at the start, as it needs more power. Enabling it is the first big task, which encourages exploration of the starting level and teaches basic gameplay. The stations around the Gateway can still be upgraded as the game progresses, revealing new possibilities for the players.

Surroundings

Areas around the Gateway have similar themes as these stations, as I plan to connect the design themes in the story, gameplay, progression, locations, and even characters.

1. In the desert on the south you can find technology and crafting materials.
2. The forest on the west is all about hunting and survival aspects, offering some combat opportunities.
3. In the life-related area on the east you can expect a lot of relaxing open spaces, gardens with tasty fruits, pleasant and even lewd activities.
4. And the snowy cliffs on the north offer some knowledge of different realities and more information about this place.

Of course types of activities within areas will still be mixed to create more variety. Every gameplay aspect/station/area is also associated with a unique Dragon character. Each Dragon has a set of things that they like, they are like gods in this world, so, each Dragon is a "god" of something: some special ability, race, technology; they all have a few of their favorite fetishes as well.

East direction (the photo references are only for inspiration)

For example, the Dragoness of life, whom I already talked about in the previous post, has a sexual theme around her, and she creates life by laying eggs. Imagine how the locations themed to her are going to be like.

I also said that the dragoness of Life will lay an egg for the player character's body to hatch from at the beginning of the game... However I didn't quite realize that it creates a lot of awkwardness - I want her to be a "waifu" character for the players to romance, but that one little thing can make her appear as a mother? That's why I'm scrapping that idea, instead, the player's body is created by an automated system in an organic vault, which was constructed by her. Later player just meets her in some other reality.

North direction

Soon I'm going to be designing the layout of the "dungeons" for this level.

For the genetic vault, which player's character emerges from at the beginning (but can only explore it after a certain point), I would love to make something organic, yet not exactly "fleshy". If you think of organic technology, some kind of alien, slimy, tumorous, repulsive places come to mind.

However in this case I'd want to create something pleasant, relaxing and sexually-suggestive with lots of wet, slimy and smooth egg-like shapes. I don't want to make it look like you're inside a creature, as that is reserved for actual vore-related stuff, so it needs to have a different visual language. I take inspiration from sea corals, anemones, and Avatar movie with its bioluminescence, with a bluish cool color scheme. Ah and yes! You can expect tentacles there and weird vegetation with special "interface" sphincters.

South direction

Aside from various slimy organic things, I also love big technological underground facilities with huge reactor rooms and bottomless pits, weird gravity fields, so I really want to experiment with those as well. To get the Gateway working the player needs to activate the power flow, no other area is more suitable for that than the desert. The journey there should be very expositional and reveal a lot of information about the place.

Aside from those two big dungeons (which will take a lot of time to make still) the map is going to feature a few small caves and other interiors with various exploration rewards. With the platform being of artificial origin, akin to a space ship, there is a lot of opportunity to put something interesting even in simple caves: you never know where you can find some control panel or a hidden environment-supporting system.

West direction

Graphical work

Old hub layout from previous concept art is being redone. Though I'm going to keep parts of it, like the patreon reward statues.

Aside from planning, I have been working on textures and 3d assets for the level. Trees, leaves, bark, rocks, mud, gravel, grass, sand... I know its not all that exciting as looking some new sexy Dragons, but the game needs some good environment art just as much. After all, it provides nice backgrounds for those Dragons :}.

These textures have a monochrome appearance, that's because they are made in black-and-white for our game's shader system. It colorizes them dynamically, where the same texture can have completely different colors in another place, that's why I'm working with shape and depth and not color just yet.

The way I make 2d textures is procedural, instead of painting it by hand. It is much faster (and much more fun) to put a bunch of procedures together that generate the texture, and it can even create random variations.

Making trees like that, unfortunately, takes more time than I'd like. Unlike textures, here I have to hand-craft different variations of one tree species so it wouldn't get repetitive - it's a lot of manual labor, placing polygons by hand, unwrapping them, editing normals.

Various yet untextured rock models highlighted in white

Blender isn't yet capable of procedural modelling. While there are procedural tree-modelling solutions, like Speed Tree, there is only one 3D program that can do everything, including rocks, buildings, terrain. It's called Houdini, and I'm drooling at it, it looks so tasty! But aside from that it's pricey I'll also have to spend some time learning it - so I'm not even sure if I should be doing that now, while I want to focus on finishing the build as soon as possible.