Asking Questions

We just finished making the entire clock tower area for Sunfluffs! It's near the start of the game, and is the first major "dungeon". It took way, way longer than we thought, with a lot of that time being spent decorating it. This is the first time I've had to decorate a full 3D level, so I learned a lot, and it'll be some good article material!

For this specific topic, I had a bunch of examples prepared, but explaining just one of them already took a lot of space, so I might make a followup later.

So, I'll be talking about the room near the start of the gif, with the bridge and the spider. Here's what it looked like in the "block-out" (the version of the level that only has functional bits, and no extra graphic detail, to make it easier to iterate on it).

The pool of water on the right side acts as a soft penalty for failing the jump, since it's a bit inconvenient to jump out of water, so you won't be able to make it past the gate before it closes. (This is where a normal game would probably put spikes, but this is friendlier!) The water's important to the gameplay, but... why is it there, flavor-wise?

Well, there's a big pool of water on the next floor below, so that part lined up pretty well! It can be a trough with water that's flowing to the right, with a waterfall spilling out the end into the lower pool. But now the trough's water needs to be coming from somewhere, so I added another pool of water to the left of it, with a wooden bridge to keep it being solid gameplay-wise. All of these are assets that were already made, so it's just a matter of figuring out which tiles to use where.

This already looks much, much more interesting, even before any background elements are added. This already feels natural enough that I could add a regular background here and it'd be fine, but I asked "where is the water coming from?" one more time, just to see if it'd lead to any more ideas... and it did! Here's the finished version of the room, with a trough in the background that's the source of this whole flow:

So... does it really matter if every pool of water can be traced back to a source? Of course not! If this was decorated "normally", there wouldn't be any players who see the contextless pool of water below the gear platform and say "this looks out of place, where's it coming from?" But if the designer asks that question, it can lead to WAY cooler solutions than if they didn't! This goes for everything, including graphics, gameplay mechanics, or story. Take a bit of time to ask those questions and see if it leads you anywhere cool!

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