Game Spaces & World Building

This week was all about world building and the elements that go into making a rich gameworld. During the lectures, we identified environments, events, and characters as some of the few aspects that go into making a good gameworld. We also distinguished the difference between what makes a gameworld a place vs a space. And a space only becomes a place when it has been filled with human connections.

On Monday, we were given a task about world building in which we had to create a world profile using prompts. I paired up with my classmate, Esi and we used the pre-written sentences to make a world inspired by Greek mythology. During this process, I found that as we picked from the prompts, they followed a theme so the exercise had it’s intended purpose of helping us make a world where the elements worked together and were meaningful to the players.

We were introduced to a guest speaker during our next lecture and we were told of the importance of context when creating realistic worlds and biomes. The key takeaways from this lecture were: use references, stick to biomes, and breakdown the environment to understand its specific characteristics.

gameworld breakdown