Planning out the hub area- The Testing Fields
In the first devlog I briefly mentioned that the action in this game is supposed to take place in The Testing Fields – an area where all four major factions in this world with very different approaches to technology collide. The idea here is that, for example, while one of the factions is very fantasy-like, that’s actually just their approach to make advanced technology no single person understands more intuitive. So while the Robot Faction might have devices similar to smartphones, the Fantasy Faction would instead have the same functionality in special moving tattoos they control using speech resembling magic words. Everyone knows it’s not actually magic, but more like a coding language made more approachable.
This is the sketch of Testing Fields so far, I’ve been slowly planning it out for a while now. Everything to the North East of the center monument is the Horror area, South East is the Robot area, South West is Fantasy and North West the Cartoon. I haven’t sketched that much for that last one yet.
Even more precisely you start the game just next to the monument in the very center of Testing Fields marked by a small statue and a tree from each faction. The trees ( from left to right ) are to mark the Fantasy Faction, Cartoon Faction, Horror Faction, Robot Faction.
Also the Center monument is where all the monsters you capture in the caves will be located. Each tree can be raised to reveal your collection of the monsters matching the tree and you can see more info about the monster here- its tags, name, how many you captured, some descriptions, maybe gameplay hints and such.
I have mostly horror monsters now, so I started with that tree. At a push of a button it raises enough to show all the monsters you captured and you can then raise the tree more if you want( I want to add slots here when I make the finalized version to show how many monsters remain and also to give some sort of indication which monsters have evolution lines).
The way this works is that I have all the monsters, even the locked ones in there already and before raising the tree, the code checks which ones are unlocked and shows only those. Then it raises until it passes the lowest unlocked monster by a little bit. I will probably make the center statue turn transparent when the trees are raised later on, I think it gets in the way too much. Also if I coded all that correctly then it should be fairly easy to make the other 3 trees work the same way too, but I might be jinxing myself there a bit, haha.
Anyway, there is a lot to plan out here and to make it as cool as I can, but here are a few other details:
You will be able to talk to the first NPC here, right bellow the center monument, giving you the basic rules of the game:
This will serve as the entrance to the first cave where you can send the drone and capture monsters. Also there will be another NPC here to explain the cave/monster capture situation:
In the horror area I have these digging monsters which can’t be captured, but serve as a little bit of world building. They are connected to a giant artery/intestines to quickly get rid of the dug up materials they chew up. I want to add a little animation to have their teeth spin like some living tunneling machine and also I will be adding little optional notes to explain that. I want to add a lot of little things like this, because it’s fun for me and because I think it will help to make the mismatched and strange area feel a little more believable
