Yggdrasillia Areas

This was probably one of the most defined areas I had going into it. I really wanted to capture the mountainside forest hiking that’s all over New England. And while the mountain part was a bit difficult from a top-down perspective, I’m still really happy how this one came out, complete with flowing streams, waterfalls, and growing tree cover.

Still going off the hiking vibe, here we’ve got the more traditional flat paths through dense woodland thing. Very similar to the Deep Woodland, but this time much earlier, and with much bigger trees. This is also where I introduce a small bit of variance between the classes outside of builds; the tree trunks that block your exploration of the area until you reach the hub and accept the first quest can actually be destroyed by the Barbarian’s Smash skill, allowing them to break progression a tiny bit.

Similar to the town, I originally wanted this area to be a series of wooden platforms strung between trees, but without an easy way to create trees overhead, I had to change it to be on top of the trees.

While other areas coming up would move away from the forest biome, I wanted to inject some of that variance here, so Yggdrasillia wouldn’t just be entirely woodland. So instead, here we have a completely burned down woodland! The landing of a meteorite caused a massive wildfire, and while the rest of the forest recovered, the area around the crash site has never stopped burning. Side quests in the area have you investigating why.

The first real actually maze-like dungeon of the game, the Darkwood has extensive, twisting paths, plenty of dead ends, and actually can take a while to navigate. This was also the section that made me add the option to leave a dungeon to the boss room save crystals; I didn’t want the player to have to navigate the area more than once.

The area beneath the Burnout that contains the secret to its unending fires. I thought it would be interesting to have a lava and fire based dungeon in the middle of the forest area. This is also where I got into decorating the black spaces between traversable areas.