World Building - Making Deeper Worlds

 

One of the key ideas I have learned over the last few years of trying to make games is that a good game needs depth.  I learned this by looking at the differences between what I have been creating and what I would like to be able to create.  I'm still learning as I go so the ideas and principles I'll be discussing are almost entirely my own perspectives, but I hope that the things I'll be sharing through this series can help at least one person in their own creative pursuits.

A well crafted game can have a lot of interconnected systems and mechanics that allow players to engage with the game, and the world it is set in is just as important as what the game is and how it plays.  When I think back to the games I have enjoyed playing, the ones that come to mind are always very well put together, and normally have a setting in a world that feels established.  Every character has a place, everything in the world has a reason or a purpose.  So, if I want to be able to make the sort of game I enjoy playing, and to a standard that I feel confident in putting a price tag on it, I need to be able to make a game that is set in a world that equally feels established.

How I got to my own approach (or scroll past it for the actual approach)

In the past, when I've made games for game jams on Itch.io, every single one of them, to me at least, has been a small throw away project.  The games were specifically made for the jams and, as a solo developer making my own art, assets, sounds and music is time consuming and severely limits the scope of what I can achieve in a game jam.  That's not to suggest that my games perform poorly in the jams (I'm normally in the top 20%), or that I simply refuse to put effort into the projects because they're for a jam, but with a limited timeframe available in a jam to get the work done for a game, I am never able to really create the worlds and settings I want, or to the standard I would like.

As an aspiring game developer without any hope of academically studying how to make games, I do a lot of my learning and procrastinating watching YouTube videos about how to make games, including the development challenges by some YouTube groups where developers create games in jam like conditions with twists and turns along the way.  One day last year, I was watching a BlackThornProd challenge about making a game like Hollow Knight: Silksong, and I realised something specific about the visuals of both Silksong and the game being made in the challenge.  The games in question made heavy use of layering to create a visual depth that enhanced both the visuals on the screen and the gameplay.  While this likely makes sense to anyone who has more experience than me, or learned this on a course, the idea was new to me.  At the time, the realisation of the need for depth in a game was mostly limited to the game visuals.  I hadn't yet made the connection between the need for depth in the visuals and the need for depth in a game overall.

More recently, and to the point, when I game up with the idea of wanting to create a game in a setting similar to floating castle in the first season of the Sword Art Online anime, I realised that if wanted to make that setting my own, the flying castle would need to have a history and a purpose.  It would need to exist in a world that followed its own set of rules and that the world it existed in would need to have its own history and rules.  So I started answering these questions, which created more questions that needed answers.  Before I knew it I had multiple pages of bits and pieces of a whole world, its history, and what was happening in that world.  During a recent moment of reflection, I then realised what I was doing, I was working to create depth in my game setting by "world building", much like how the developers of Silksong and the BlackThornProd challenge were using layers to create visual depth, I was layering hypothetical things to add depth to the world I was creating.  I also realised how powerful a well built world and background is when it comes to creating games.  By building and creating this world, I now have a setting that can be used for any number of projects; if I want to make another game, I can pick a different point in its history; if I want to write a story, I can create characters that live in that world and follow their story through it.  The options that are now available to me in setting stories and media in that world are almost limitless.

While I was thinking about what to talk about in this post, I found myself remembering authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Pratchet.  Both are authors that have written multiple stories set in their own fictional worlds.  I know for example with Tolkien, that he wrote many stories and essays about the world he set his stories in, some of these were published in the Silmarillion which describes the history of Middle Earth long before the ages of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.  On top of this, he also wrote, or drafted, smaller stories set in Middle Earth that, while not a part of his biggest stories, were still set in his fictional world.

So how would you go about creating your own fictional world?

For myself, after making multiple games for game jams, I realised that whole worlds can be created from simply one or two words that set the theme of a jam.  From that spark of inspiration of sometimes a single word, you can get literally thousands of games submitted to a jam.  Each of these games has a different setting, a different style, a different set if mechanics.  The only time you get two copies of the exact same game is if someone is stealing another's work.  From this experience, I was able to realise that, at its simplest, creating a fictional world is just about asking and answering hypothetical questions that you layer on top of each other until a single idea expands into an infinitely complex system of things with purposes and rules, that hypothetically interact with each other, and leading to even more hypothetical results.

So going back to my idea of a floating castle, or a similar structure and wanting the setting to have a fantastical theme, I started trying to ask and answer hypothetical questions about it, like "Why does it exist?" "How old is it?" and "Who built it?".  The answers to these questions gave me more scope to the world I was creating, and as a result more questions I could ask and answer.  If I really wanted to, I could keep this process going indefinitely, adding more complexity to the world and the relationships between everything contained within it.  For my own project, I've not yet reached the end point of creating the world I want to, but I will consider it to have enough detail when I have enough ideas for it to feel like it is a world and not just an idea.

As for how I actually create worlds, I create them by (roughly) going through the following steps:

1. Figure out a source of inspiration - This could be anything, a word, a character, an event, another fictional world you enjoy, anything that you experience that makes you think you want more of it.  A fictional world doesn't need to make sense, and there are limits on what it can be, so why should the source of inspiration be limited?
2. Start asking yourself questions about your inspiration:
1. What is it?
2. Who is it?
3. Where is it?
4. Why does it exist?
5. When does it exist?
6. How did it start to exist?
7. Where is it going? Or, what is going to happen to it?
3. Answer the questions you asked - They don't need to be realistic, though they can be rooted in reality if you want.  The important thing is to think about the idea and expand on it.
4. Review your answers and think about any further questions you could ask yourself about the answers from point 3 - For example, your answer to "Where is it?" might be that it exists in a particular place or location, you could then ask yourself "What else is in or around that location?" Or, "Is that place part of somewhere else?"
5. Ask yourself, and then try to answer, those new questions.
6. Cycle through points 2 to 5 multiple times, and periodically review the world you're creating to see if you think it makes sense to you for what you want to create, and then decide if you want to change or rethink anything.
7. Keep working through this cycle until you think you've created enough of a world for your purpose.

If you want to do anything with your fictional world other than a thought exercise, I highly recommend you document your thoughts on your fictional world in some way because as it gets bigger and more complex, having a reference to remember what your ideas were on one thing can help inspire you or shape your thoughts on another thing in that world.

If you've followed along so far, and you still don't feel like you know where to start creating your own fictional world, here's a little exercise for you.

I want you to think of a tree, but not just any tree, your tree, in your mind's eye.  Now if you can visualise your tree, look at it.  Think about it, not just of it.  How big is it?  Where is it?  How old is it?  Was it planted by someone, or did it naturally start there?  Is there anything around the tree?  Does anything live on or in it?  Do those things eat the tree or harm it?  How did the tree come into existence? Was there anything there before the tree where the tree is now?

Now look at your tree again, and think if there are any other questions you could ask yourself about it, and how you would answer them.

If you want, I would be happy to see your answers to this exercise, or to know if this helps at all for anyone reading this.

You think you're just thinking about a tree, but actually you're creating a world that the tree exists in, and you can decide to make that world as big or as small as you want.

When I was trying to explain my world building project to a work colleague one day, I explained how I go roughly through the process I describe here while discussing a tree outside my workplace to use as a demonstration of the questions I ask myself and the answers I think of, covering everything from how the tree came to be, through to the organisms living on it today, and what might happen to it in the future.

The next time I spoke to that colleague, they were telling me all about how they were coming up with a hypothetical history of their coffee table.  How it came about, how the tree grew in a forest half way across the world, was cut down by someone, sold and transported to a factory, turned into a coffee table, sold to a shop, transported again, sold in a shop, and eventually came to reside in her living room, where it continues to make its own story to this day.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. - I know it is now technically the 21st and I said I wanted to post it on the 20th, I think I might need to get these posts written in advance and schedule their publishing to aim for a reasonable and consistent time.  Work can really ruin the time you have for a hobby.