Honours Project: World-Building and Development of 'The Wild Moon Isles'
- Ella-May Wallace
- Oct 21, 2022
- 5 min read
For my final year project, I decided to look back at my previous projects and education and look for knowledge/experience gaps. I came to the conclusion I required further experience in foundational narrative development, also known as world-building or sub-creation. It's a concept that is invaluable to modern video games and unfortunately was missing from my education. Lastly, looking back at my previous work I feel it would have benefitted if I had a better pool of knowledge on this topic.
I began the development of my own high fantasy setting inspired by traditional media world-builders such as Tolkien, Pratchett and Le Guin and video game world-building such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Ark: Survival Evolved and Skyrim. From all these examples I found specific features, methods or styles that I liked to mirror forward into my own development - 'The Wild Moon Isles'.
'The Wild Moon Isles' is a medieval high fantasy setting inspired by Scotland, its culture and its language.
When tackling any project, especially that requiring new skills, I spend the first week or so researching, specifically in this case looking for authoritative sources and taking note of how they tackled their world-building. What I found interesting was that many world-builders and narrative developers seemed to say that you should either do the map-making for your setting at the beginning or at the end and that both approaches had merit. I chose to develop my map at the beginning and go back at the end of the project to make any adjustments I desired because at the beginning of development I didn't have a clear picture in mind of any specifics of my settling and therefore developing the map first would give me at least some direction in how the setting might work geographically.
Map development was perhaps the hardest part because it was difficult to make a map that looked realistic but could be taken forward into a video game setting. Using the online software 'Inkarnate', I was able to develop the map below.
I desired that when taken forward into a video game setting, the different environments and character designs could be developed to look visually different to the player such as seen in games such as 'Aveyond: Rhens Quest' or 'Horizon Zero Dawn' (specifically inspired by the talk Daniel Calvert gave at GDC titled 'Repopulating the Earth: Character Production on Horizon Zero Dawn', available on Youtube). To achieve this potential goal I had to think of what physical barriers could be used to help the player acknowledge the transition between different areas. Mountain ranges were my original thought but I went back to looking at what my inspiration material was and decided that instead, I would break the map up into Islands, allowing me to create those physical barriers and better mirror the west coast of Scotland. I also did some paper prototyping to give me an idea of shapes and sizes, ripping up paper, giving myself rough shapes to work with so I could better design islands that looked natural (e.g. not designed)
This map allowed me to begin thinking about who or what must live in this setting and how the culture(s) might be. I decided to develop island clans as the culture of my setting with clear colourings and sigils to denote to which clan characters belong along with fleshing out specifics of the islands and how that would affect the clan. For example, Isle 'Rìoghail' is rich in gold and therefore the Aristocracy wear very fine clothes and jewellery in bold, strong purples, showing their wealth and position. Also, the temples are far bigger and more decorative than in other Isles, with wealthy Aristocrats trying to hide their greed and wealth through charity and patronage.
Writing out the concepts of the Clans took the most time and required the most thought and creativity. The final stage (originally a stretch goal that I managed to achieve) was to get some sort of concept art of the characters or NPCs. While I have training in art, I am not specially a character artist and did not have enough time to begin tackling developing character art so I came up with an idea that originally I feared seemed juvenile but in retrospect was very beneficial to the project.
When I was younger I came across a games developer who produced under the name 'Azalea Dolls'. She developed dress-up games targeted at early teen girls which were inspired by 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Game of Thrones' and later some original designs and concepts. When trying to think about how to show my characters or what I was imagining NPCs may look like, I was reminded of her games and how many options her games provided the player in her art style which I always regarded highly, not being as 'childish' or 'outlandish' as other games in the same genre. I decided to make some character concepts using her software.
While limited, this proved to be helpful in communicating details about the characters, designs, and concepts. For example, I wrote about the religious order of the Isles (The Order of Ban-Dia) and wrote about how the sisters of the order (known as 'Piuthar') wore a brooch with the symbol of The Goddess, similar to a clan sigil but without clan iconography, denoting that they were no longer of a specific clan but were instead devout in their faith. I also wrote how in training the sisters of Ban-Dia (known in the setting as 'Òg-Piuthar') would were white gowns that they would be expected to keep clean at all times and that lacking in their duties to keep their clothes pure would bring shame as it suggests that they are not truly invested in their faith and The Order but that after their training they would wear a black dress over their white gowns, they devotion to their faith now proven and no longer to be questioned.
Also using 'Azalea Dolls' games, I was able to preemptively make clear that this setting had no limitations on racial identity, that regardless of it being inspired by Scotland, the setting did not require that all the characters look stereotypically Scottish (e.g. there was no need for wild ginger hair or mockingly obese or any other joking ideas of what a Scottish person is).
I wrote out my ideas with the concept images, mood boards, and interactive maps on 'World Anvil' software, allowing me to create an encyclopedia of information and link different pages together fluidly making it easier for my marker to read everything, but also because throughout this project I built with a theoretical development team in mind and if this work were to ever be developed into a video game setting, this way of presenting narrative information provides the information required in an interactive and easily manageable manner from which multiple editors can work.
Overall this work has provided me with far more insight and understanding into how foundational narrative development in video games works. Frustratingly, having now completed this project I can see errors and mistakes I have made in previous work which would have benefitted from this experience but I know that my next project will be better for this learning.
I cannot say for sure at this point if I will take this project forward into personal development but I am sorely tempted, where I left this project had the beginnings of a narrative from which a playable experience could be developed and a setting heavily inspired by my own culture is very pleasing to me. So in the moment of writing about this work while developing this further isn't something I'm immediately doing, I can't deny that this project is too meaningful to me to fully put aside.
This full work can be found at www.worldanvil.com/w/the-wild-moon-isles-tinyblades.
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