To allow the world of Those Left Behind to flourish and be a truly believable place on Earth – I need to fill in the gaps as to how this world came to be and what its future holds, regardless of the player’s choices and story.

Franek builds a good picture of the world within his blog, especially with the addition of the contexts section. Which was also a really great excuse to call watching Mad Max “research”.

To reiterate from my world designer role post, effective world building means considering and breaking down the following:

• World layout & geography
• Lore & history of the world
• Environmental storytelling
• Survivor cultures & societies
• Gameplay implications of the world

Personally, I’m a very visual person. I like to see everything in one nicely organised place. I used online tools like miro and milanote as a visual extension of my brain. After careful inspection of the story and character sections of the GDD alongside my big list of world building elements I began to type.

Now that I’ve got everything vaguely outlined and broken down, I will go further by delving into the most important aspects of the world, I plan to do this in the separate posts below. I’ll do this in an order that best suits delivering to my teammates, for example; working on geography first to help the environment artist, then working on history and character profiles to hand off to narrative writer and character artist.