We’re currently in a steady phase of Garrison’s development – Leon is busy coding and Sophie is cooking up more concept art – so I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about how I come up with things to put into the game.
That’s right – we’re worldbuilding, baby!
Where do monsters live?
I mentioned in the first devblog that I’d been dreaming up this world since I was a kid. That definitely served as a great jumping-off point – lots of cool monsters and exciting stories – but not much in terms of actual structure.
Over the years I’ve started many projects for this world – origins of religion and noble houses, creature taxonomies, magic systems – but never finished them. My notes were an ungodly mess. It took months to sift through and organise everything.
When that was finally done, I slowly started the process of filling in all the gaps. One of the biggest was the world in a geographic sense – where are the rivers? What habitats do they create? Should I have a volcano?
After experimenting with a lot of different strategies, I’ve found myself looking at a lot of maps. Very simple. Be warned – there are some really interesting places across the UK that can very easily send you down a search engine rabbit hole spiral.
My favourite one, though, is to simply go out and explore. Earlier this year, my partner and I went to a place called Hardcastle Crags in West Yorkshire. That alone is an awesome fantasy name and, if I’d seen it on a map, I probably would’ve taken the name and left it at that.
Being there was something else entirely, because I came across this:
I can’t explain why, as I had absolutely no evidence, but I immediately became convinced that this particular rock was hollow. I was (and remain still) convinced that something – or someone – was inside.
Which gave me an idea.
There’s no way someone would get inside that thing willingly, right? So it had to be a prison. You’d need magic to manipulate matter to that degree, so some kind of magic user had to be involved. Maybe even two. Perhaps they were duelling?
That whole sequence came in a cascade of thoughts which I immediately started waffling into a WhatsApp voice note sent to myself. It’s actually really handy and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Back on track, all I needed to do now was give this place a name. I’m using Old and Middle English words as the foundation for inventing new words and phrases, so the words ‘duelle’ (duel) and ‘mymerian’ (remember) become a geographic point of interest called ‘Dull Meran’.
Cue a little magic from Sophie (artist) and we can now see how it’ll look in this world:
That’s not the only process, obviously. For one, there are countless films, games and books to sift through – some rigidly stick to default fantasy tropes while others get, let’s be honest, kinda weird.
I’m not immune to that, though. One of my favourite invented monsters came from a crazy dream I had about being slowly chased by a blobfish (true story). Sometimes weird is good.
Community Q & A
After a few months of lurking in the shadows, the spotlight turns to my amazing partner who, confusingly, is also called Sophie.
At this point she knows almost as much about Garrison as I do because it’s pretty much all I talk about. Despite this, she still asks questions and listens to me waffle on – which means more to me than just about anything else in this world.
“If this devblog is about inspiration, I think you should explain why you wanted to make your game in the first place!“
Although this is clearly more of a command than it is a question, I like telling this story so I’ll allow it.
Cast your minds back to February 2005, which I’m realising is now over 20 years ago. Ouch. Anyway, a game was released to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of a popular RTS franchise. That game was World of Warcraft.
At a time when I should’ve been studying for my GCSEs (exams for any non-British readers), I was instead spending pretty much all of my time playing this game.
That’s not an understatement. The first time I saw a sunrise was because I’d stayed up all night running Dire Maul to try and get a guild mate Quel’Serrar. If you know, you know.
I was deep into that game for a couple of years, with my addiction finally being broken when the first expansion arrived. The thought of basically starting over from scratch held very little appeal to me.
Still, wanting to stay in touch with my friends I’d log in from time to time and run the odd dungeon. That is until the Warlords of Draenor expansion hit in 2014. It introduced player housing (called garrisons no less) to, as far as I remember, an almost entirely negative response.
This surprised me because I couldn’t get enough. Once again, I was hooked – though not on the game itself, just one tiny little feature: collecting followers and sending them out on missions. Almost a decade later (ouch again), all my spare time was going into getting the best followers so I’d do better on these missions.
I know this feature isn’t new or even revolutionary – I’ve played a few games before and after with the same mechanic – Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood immediately comes to mind – though none were quite able to capture that same lightning in a bottle.
There’s been enough dancing around the topic of our ‘journal aesthetic’ so that’ll be covered in next month’s devblog.
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Cheers, Andrew