Building the world of Lake: Terrain

Published September 9, 2021 · Updated January 14, 2022

The landscape makes up the foundations of the game world. Hence it was the starting point for developing the environment. Building a terrain that was tailored to gameplay and level design, and should evolve alongside them, was a first for me.

Design

Lay of the land

At the start of the project there were still many unknowns: How large was the world going to be? What’s going to be in it? How will everything be laid out? This made it difficult to determine where exactly to start. I figured the first logical step was to simply create a 8x8km landscape, with a lake at its center, using plain color textures and a road around it. This also provided a playground for other aspects of development and could be iterated upon.

The fact that the player will be delivering mail to locations was a solid given. In the context of world building, I felt moving forward I should at least have some notion of how these locations were distributed. Sketching this out on a world map proved to be a straightforward way to conceptualize this. The initial whiteboard scribble was lost to a game of hangman, though I had already taken direction by digitizing it:

We had gathered ideas and suggestions for locations and points of interest in a document, next to streets names. Which provided a good conceptual starting point. Each red dot here represents a potential mail adres. The next step was validating this in context, by laying out the road network to scale, and adjusting the terrain around it.

After this made its way into the game’s prototype, 2 mail addresses were fleshed out, and the first demo build was a success. Now having a better idea about the extent of work that goes into refining locations, it became apparent we wouldn’t be able to build and polish a world at this scale. With a smaller world, focus and quality could be concentrated, rather being thinned out.

The hard choice was made to halve the size of the terrain as a whole to 4x4km. Which translated to cropping and bulldozing the terrain and recreate the road network. The amount of mail address were reduced, and will the help of Konstantinos Dimopoulos we were able to land on a well thought out infrastructure for roads and streets.

Unfortunately, one of the most interesting features of the landscape was lost: elevation changes.

Seeing as steep slopes decreased the speed of the (not so powerful) mail van, they ended up creating noticeable resistance, which went against the grain of the otherwise smooth driving experience we were aiming for. As a result, the terrain around the edge of the lake is relatively flat. In the current iteration of the terrain, it gradually ramps up only towards the south-west corner of the lake.

A few iterations of the map design are seen here. The roads were initially authored through curves in Photoshop, as well as the shape for water bodies, these were exported to be used as a mask in World Creator. This offered a useful reference point to work with. Eventually this design evolved into a map that’s also being used in the game, since it closely lines up with the actual game world.