The Set Up - A Lesson in Foreshadowing

For this project, we were asked to create a Set-Up.

This is the task of giving players an overview of the path they'll need to follow to proceed through the next section of gameplay.



For mine, I spent a lot of time researching. I wanted to develop an interesting and natural-looking environment with something fascinating at the end that will draw the player's attention.



I first started developing a mountain top village with rope bridges between the peaks to break up the overall look, I wanted to end of this path to be interesting so began using a giant statue to use as a plateau, I added a pathway heading up the statue body and a large platform at the top. This turned out to look terrible though so I quickly moved on to the next idea.



Looking back at my research, I liked the idea of a floating island with only a few access points (a ropebridge, a cablecar, etc.), but felt that just an island on its own would not be particularly attention-grabbing. This is when I thought up the idea of having a huge castle/fortress on the island. This stood out as interesting to me, and I felt as if the island had been ripped out of the ground many years ago and that the people around it had just learned to live with it.

For the town surrounding it, I wanted to give an initial "closed off" feeling so that the approach to the open-aired and floating castle would add more of a sense of wonder and awe. I decided that this town could be set into a valley between two large cliffsides. This would give the player the chance to start at a vantage point and see the village, but also provide context for a "natural" path down to the town. It would also give me the feeling of "closed off" that I was trying to achieve.



As I built the first section of the town, I thought about separating the "classes" of the town, as may have been done in days gone by. I did this by reusing the idea I'd had in my initial build of using different planes and separating them with stairways. This added more elements of verticality, as well as making it so I could break up the overall layout of the built-up areas, adding natural features as I saw fit.



I wanted to add elements that make the environment look overgrown and as though the village had been built around a lot of nature. I did this by adding trees along with a few vine looking elements hanging from the nearby cliffs.

I tried to add a few little pieces throughout the area that a player could spot from afar to encourage exploration. One of such elements is a wooden beam going from one rooftop to another. This could catch the player's eye as the colouration of it is stark in comparison to the colour of the roofs.



Towards the end of the map I noticed that the player had been outside for the majority of the path so wanted to create an additional element for the area, for this, I created a tunnel of sorts that when inside feels like it could be made into an indoor market. This could add a few things for the player to explore, maybe some stalls to buy items from or a few NPCs that could give quests to the player, depending on the context of the game.



Overall, I enjoyed this project and liked the use of scale throughout. I felt like I had made a compelling environment for players to explore with a clear path for them to follow. Some aspects could draw the players' eyes but it didn't feel forced.