Today I wanted to talk about our Hub world, and a little bit about the design philosophy that made us want to have one in the first place.
A lot of games do the whole “home base” thing, where you can go back to some castle or settlement after every mission and buy upgrades, talk to party members, or otherwise interact with your surroundings. Strawhart is an action-puzzler, and the puzzle genre makes use of Hubs quite frequently. This allows players to select from a myriad of puzzles to attempt at any time, rather than just proceeding through the game linearly. Hubs in this way are handy for allowing your players a soft workaround for when they get stuck on a challenging puzzle; the player can just go back to the Hub and try a different one.
While that is a nice failsafe for a game to have, it isn’t why we chose to include a Hub world in Strawhart. We really wanted to make a game where the player felt like they were in a living world and that their presence (or lack thereof) changed things. We also wanted the player to feel the weight of time when they came back from a long quest. To quote our lead artist, “we want the player to return home from some distant land and then be taken aback at how things have changed in their absence.” We also really wanted to avoid the “uncanny eternal summer” effect, where no matter how long a player takes questing elsewhere, or how far they progress, areas they previously encountered remain completely static, therefore breaking immersion. You can see examples of this effect in a lot of RPG’s where even after the main story tells the player that they’re a hero who just saved the kingdom, they don’t believe it because the game world itself doesn’t act like they did.
With these things in mind, we decided on a Hub world that would function as the beating heart of our game.
We dynamically alter things like time of day, weather, and the seasons, so that every time the player returns to the Hub, it seems like they are encountering the area for the first time. We do this in addition to more classic Hub changes like unlocking additional areas as the player grows stronger, and adding or subtracting assets based on story happenings. It’s a simple thing, but we also make sure that every time the player re-enters the hub, they do it from a new angle, ensuring that they get a different view of things.
What makes this feasible for us, aside from UE4’s awesome lighting tools, was the scope of the Hub level. We wanted the level to be quite compact, set in a location where seasonal changes would be immediately recognizable without having to individually model a million different assets. To that end we chose a farmstead nestled within a forest. The changing of the seasons is clearly communicated by foliage and crops, all of which are assets that can be re-used scores of times throughout the level.
The end result is a Hub that players are eager to return to so that they can see what new twist has occurred in their absence. The hub is given a sense of life, and hopefully, the “uncanny eternal summer” effect is thwarted.
Thanks for reading!