The plan was to work on boss fights and cutscenes for the next little while, but scheduling issues forced us to pivot to try to hammer out the last of the biome aesthetics by the end of the month. We, like all games in the action-exploration/Metroidvania style, draw a lot of inspiration from Super Metroid, which is still the gold standard for the genre (sorry, Metroid Dread). Super Metroid did one normal thing and one clever thing relevant to our discussion. The game has about 6 biomes, and each biome has an overall aesthetic style. This is the normal thing they did. They also have subthemes within each biome that differentiate different areas within a biome as well, and that is the clever part. For example, Brinstar is the second biome the player explores, and it has a theme of vegetation. It is further subdivided into four or five subthemes. These subthemes still preserve the same idea of vegetation and life in general – water is often present in small quantities, egg sacks dangle, and plants grow, but one subtheme is very green, another is very red, one is pink, and one is blue. This matters in a game about exploration, getting lost, and backtracking because the game can give you hints that you are heading back to familiar territory even while you are still exploring the unknown. Imagine you start exploring a green area with trees. Everything is all good. You keep exploring and you enter a pink area with mushrooms. We’re still all good. Now imagine you go through a door and enter a room you have never been in before. If that room has magma and no evidence of vegetation you will assume you are in a totally new area of the game, if it is green with trees you will assume that you have somehow reconnected with the first area you started in, and if it is pink with mushrooms you will assume you are continuing on an established path and have not deviated onto a side path. All of this can be communicated with just the aesthetic of a room that you, as we stated, have never seen before. So back to Reina and Jericho… hopefully I have communicated the importance of having subthemes within each biome as a navigational aid, so now we get to deal with the problem of designing them all. Our level design process has several phases, and aesthetics are generally implemented towards the end of that process. We have reference, ideas, and color maps for each area, but the aesthetic development still needs to be done. Once a room within a level has been built it looks something like this: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38964587/ee7e428e6a95e673a55705e00cd2d23ac6650670.jpg[/img] The bones of the room are there – a zoom level for the camera, the geometry of the room itself, and the entrances are placed, but nothing more. There are no enemies (yet), no décor, no light fixtures or light sources of any kind. If we wanted concrete brutalism we’d actually be off to a good start, but even then more is required. Reina & Jericho has seven or eight biomes depending on how you count, and roughly three subthemes within each biome, so we need a lot of different aesthetics. After applying some materials, placing some basic decorations, adding support structures (blocks don’t normally float in midair in Reina & Jericho, so a lot of time goes into adding metal cables for things to hang from), and adjusting the post-processing effects we end up with something like this: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38964587/4a623e0e724ca184acd2183702f4f32224f6b743.jpg[/img] There is still work to be done – none of the lighting has been baked in yet, we have some shadow issues, and some of the geometry might need a little sprucing up or cleaning up, but what matters is that we have given the room a different feel, and we’ve created an aesthetic that can assist the player with pathfinding their way throughout a game designed for them to get lost in. There is zero chance a player will confuse a room in that style with this place: [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/38964587/70f9721a288fe61c181eaf39146b329fae06d301.jpg[/img] And now we can gently give the player hints about whether they are going forward or back, away from the critical path or towards it, all without being too forceful. Lastly, I want to mention one other consideration we have: Simplicity. We don’t want a ton of complicated intersecting lines, shapes, noise, or distractions in the background (or foreground for that matter). There are some, but they are usually placed very intentionally. Our shapes tend to be big, simple, and readable. When they aren’t we try to make them repeat so the player can parse them as a pattern. The game takes place on the path Reina walks along in the middle of the room, and we don’t want the player’s eye to be drawn out of that zone. It makes for worse screenshots, but a better game, and our priority is the latter (and not to point fingers, but not all games have that order of priorities).