Speaker 1: Whether it's movies, TV shows, games, books or anything in between, world building is prevalent in all of these mediums and plays an essential role to the creation and development of said mediums. There are many elements to world building that have to be found in order for the world to feel alive and real. Before the video gets started, I just want to introduce myself. I'm Alex. I'm an indie game developer working on my dream game titled Project Dagger, which can now be wishlisted on Steam. It is an open-world RPG set in the land of Perpetua in a world where day and night are stuck. A continent is trapped in the dark while another one is trapped in the light, and the King of Time needs your help. So you, as the player, have to go and collect fragments from the Dagger of Time, which are scattered around the world, and then return them to the King of Time to bring balance back to the world. So please, if you're interested, consider wishlisting the game on Steam as it helps me have my game rank higher. Thanks, and now on to the video. World building tip number one is that the world needs to live outside of the player's actions. By this, I mean that NPCs and people need to have established roles that they do, or seemingly do, regardless of player intervention. An example of this would be the townsfolk from Stardew Valley. Every day, they have a set schedule that they carry out, whether it's manning a counter at the general store, sifting through trash cans, or working at a bar. These NPCs all live their independent lives, independent of the player's decisions. The town holds festivals and events, the birthdays of townsfolk are displayed on the calendar in front of the general store, and seasons change as time goes on. Having the world living outside of what the player does helps with immersion and engagement. The player feels like they are living within the world, as well as in a way that's familiar and comparable to real life. While the depth at which NPCs in your game live their own lives do not need to match that of Stardew Valley, it is still important that you have your game world exist and move through time as well. The next tip is show, do not tell. This is a really big feature of creative writing and fictional writing, but it's also necessary in video games. Simply telling the player that, for example, X, Y, and Z exist is not good enough for the player to commit it to memory. It needs to be seen and experienced within the game world. Immerse the player in whatever it is that you want them to know, whether that's a cinematic, a quest, a mission, or the very environment that the game takes place in. Showing the player how cultures, people, mythical races, or groups are different is more engaging than simply telling them about it. You want people to enjoy playing your game so that they tell their friends about it and more people want to buy and play your game. And the best way of that is to have authentic ways of creating interest in your world. Show the player that they need a special axe to chop down a tree, do not tell them that they need it. Have an animation that plays that's different from a regular chop animation so that the player knows that something is wrong. This adds so much detail and polish to a game and leads to a much more professional image. The third tip is to make the characters real. They need to have wants, desires, needs, personality traits, and they should be found in their attire, their facial expressions, dialogue, quests, and or their combat styles. For example, if you have a character that is arrogant and prideful who does not listen to outside opinions, then they'll likely lay themselves in a spot where they are in need of help, but do not seek it from those who told them that they were foolish. Therefore, they'll be happy when the player stumbles across them in their time of need. The player in this instance being a complete stranger to the other townsfolk and someone who won't tell the prideful character, I told you so. This way, this opens up a opportunity to the player to do a quest or a mission to gain money, experience, attribute points, or anything. This also adds another layer of depth to the quests and to the goal that you're pursuing. It is no longer a boring task from a soulless NPC from a character with, well, character. They feel unique, they have warmth, and this is otherwise lost in games like World of Warcraft where quests and dialogues are very much surface level without a whole lot of personality. The fourth tip is have mechanics reflect the game world. A great example of this would be a shop system. Say you're in an area where farming is sparse. It would make sense that the cost of produce would be much higher than it is in a place dominated by farms. On the other hand, sparse farmland likely indicates that hunting is much more prevalent, leading to the cost of clothes and meat to be cheaper than in places dominated by farmland. A more toxic environment like a volcanic region would likely have less NPCs, leading to less quests and interactions with characters, making the players travels more difficult than that of a nice vibrant forest or grasslands. Having harder enemies in areas that look and feel deadly leads the player to trust their instinct and to move about in a much more reserved way. If Dark Souls 3 had brightly colored vegetation and beautiful blue skies, you would probably think to just steamroll everything. You wouldn't expect such a beautiful place to have such difficult bosses and enemies, so conditioning the player to connect mechanics to the lore and level design is key to making the world reflect said mechanics. The fifth tip is to have the level design reflect the world that you're trying to build. An example of this would be my game, where day and night is stuck in place and there is a continent in the daytime and a continent stuck in nighttime. The continent stuck in nighttime will likely be a colder place, a place that is devoid of many living leafed trees, and where farmers are restricted to growing plants that require little to no sunlight. However, maybe giant bioluminescent mushrooms exist and help light farms and forests where trees used to exist. The decaying matter from the trees led to an explosion of mushrooms, leading to the giant mushroom void. Or, like in the daytime continent, zones are turning more arid and desertification is taking place due to the continent being stuck in summer. So irrigation systems and other methods of stopping desertification may be seen with the placing of structures and models in the game world. Locations of towns and points of interest are going to be built around what I call active elements, or elements that are referenced by NPCs in quests that you have to help people deal with. So not only are these problems talked about in quests and in dialogue, but they are visible from your players point of view. You likely do not have to tell your player that a problem exists in dialogue and in quests if they see the issues for themselves in the game world. They will likely go to the town or zone or whatever area that this is happening in and already know what to expect from said quests. This next tip is to define the philosophy of groups, especially those a part of conflicts. This is a pretty straightforward one when you look at conflicts. For example, you have two groups at war. Group A believes that taking over the world and having everyone be a part of one nation will cease all conflict and allow humanity to overcome its primal urges, while Group B believes that nobody should be forced to submit to the rule of any leader. So these two philosophies are clearly laid out, but the philosophy in video games needs to go deeper than what was just laid out. Towns, cultures, any groups of people, and even individuals need to have their own philosophies that can be read without again telling the player. The game needs to show the player that the philosophy of one of these things. For example, a character may speak with a heightened vocabulary, they dress nicely, and have many creations in their workshop or a scholar at a library. This would be reflective of someone who's following a more Socratic philosophy. Now, not to be too constricting that all of these philosophies don't have to come from Greek philosophers themselves, but could be basically just made up. A philosophy, after all, is just a rationale behind their existence, reality, and why they seek or do not seek knowledge. A really good example of this would be Fallout New Vegas, where you have the NCR and the Legion, and how they're both warring against each other and have completely different visions as to what life in the Mojave Desert should look like. This next tip is a bit more straightforward, but basically levels, characters, and music need to define the mood. Whether the game is split into zones, small levels, or one giant world, the terrain, colors, details, and characters need to reflect the mood that you want the player to feel. If you're making a light-hearted fantasy RPG, then bright colors with characters beaming with happiness will help reflect that, along with the soundtrack and the major key with lots of flutes and plucked instruments. This will pass the mood onto the player. The game's mood and its changes should condition the player to know what to expect from a foreign place. A dark decrepit dungeon will always be a dark decrepit dungeon, whether you're stumbling into a brand new one you've never seen, or whether or not you've seen the same one a hundred times. The change in the music, the darker colors, the change of atmosphere, lack of characters would signify to most people that enemy encounters are likely guaranteed in this dungeon. Just like in real life, if one minute you're in a bustling city and then turned out a dark quiet alleyway in a bad part of town, your mood and demeanor is going to change. You're going to be much more observant and cautious to your surroundings because of that change in atmosphere, colors, light, and location. This next tip is that the world should have personality and feel like a character of its own. And by this statement, this is pertaining more towards level design and development of levels. A great example of this would be comparing games like World of Warcraft and its stylized nature to something like Battlefield or Dark Souls. You have three different games with three very different art styles and environmental props. What may be exaggerated in one of these titles could be more on the side of realism in another. In addition, we also have the elements of scale and shape. Scale can also affect the personality of a world in a level, how big trees are, how big objects like houses appear, how spread out props are in the environment, and how terrain is designed, and how big geographical features appear. As for shape, the way objects are defined and we're having an object shaped like something recognizable to the player. For example, Super Mario Galaxy does this very well. The interesting planets and structures you find, sometimes you'll have an asteroid that's shaped like Yoshi's egg, or you'll have a very small planet with trees and a house on it. This is all connected to the whimsical nature of Super Mario Galaxy. My next tip is it's okay to leave elements to the imagination. Not everything needs to be explained or even shown. Say the players in the middle of an ocean and a giant turtle rises from the water below, leaving shortly again. This sort of action and sequence really locks in the players immersion and imagination, and makes the world feel much more vivid and alive. There are things in the game and story that no character can explain, or that if many if not all the characters you come across may even know about. You as the player now have knowledge independent of any other character in the game world. This adds completely made-up depth to the story into the game world, creating an experience that leaves the player wanting to know and understand more, while there's not more to understand. This allows the game to blossom in a way that many games leave out. This could really be as simple as an icon on a map to a place the player cannot visit yet, or will never have the option to visit. An example of this is going to be the Maelstrom in World of Warcraft before the Cataclysm expansion, where anytime you open the map you saw this big swirling whirlpool in the middle of the world, but there was no way for you to get to it. Another example though of a more in-game world feature is this giant door in Shadow of Colossus that the player is never able to see behind. This next tip is about pacing and information dumps. Information dumps are a step above just straight-up telling the player what they need to know, however this is usually disguised in dialogue and is due to poor game pacing. If you have to rely on lengthy dialogue that bores the player, it is likely due to your game being too fast for the player to learn each element that you're explaining, or that you just want to dump all the information on a player due to laziness. I'm guilty of this with my game's old tutorial. For the longest time my game Project Dagger had a tutorial where you talked to one NPC who told you everything you needed to know about how to play the game. Instead, I put all the controls on the pause menu and left things like random items placed around the tutorial, a weapon on the ground, and had a trigger for giving the player a quest automatically. What this did was it told the player, hey when I picked a flower my herbalism skill increased, or oh I got a quest how to open up my quest log, oh I got a weapon how do I use it. Even though all of these questions are asked by the player within the span of a minute, it is better that the player experienced it rather than having all the information dumped onto them through text. The player in this case can set their own pace by exploring the tutorial area as they wish. Sure they may miss some things but they're guaranteed to experience each of those questions again further along within the game. Lastly we have hard and soft world building. Hard world building systems often have their own logic, alphabets, and a deep list of small defined details that make the world around the player. While the soft world building approach leaves many of those decisions and details up to the player. For example in a hard system you may have a narrator telling you what to do, while in a soft system that choice is completely led up to you. Great examples of these is going to be the Halo series with Master Chief as that's the character that's picked for you, you can't do anything about that, you have to play that character and that's who the story is then built around. That's a great example of hard world building. As for a soft example it would be the Elder Scrolls series where you can create a character and be either a helpful hero who solves everyone's problems or you can join the thieves guild or dark brotherhood and steal and kill everywhere you go. The main reason why you should differentiate is that not every game will work with the hard world building system or vice versa. More atmospheric games like Terraria or Minecraft benefit from a lack of hard defined narrative elements. While they do have progression points the player can hit in mostly any order that they wish, hard world building works best in games that are linear or with well-defined progression paths. Games like Grand Theft Auto 5 or the campaign of a Call of Duty game. The biggest downside though to hard world building is avoiding information dumps and pacing. That just because you play the game at a certain pace doesn't mean that every player will and this may lead to people getting frustrated. That's going to conclude this video on world building and video games. If you want more videos like these be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. Do not forget to wishlist Project Dagger on Steam as it helps me out tremendously and consider joining my discord server where I show updates to Project Dagger. Thank you all so much and I'll see you all in the next one.