Behind the Scenes: The Amber Woods and World Design!

It's time once again for another behind the scenes post about the development of Super Lesbian Animal RPG! This time, I'll be walking through the process of creating an area by looking at one of the largest in the game: the Amber Woods!

Believe it or not, the Amber Woods wasn't an area that was originally planned to exist in the game at all. To explain why it was added, I need to back up a little and talk about how the game's world evolved from my initial plans. Along the way we'll also be talking about game structure, some inspirations, worldbuilding, cut gameplay mechanics, and more!

(As usual, this post will contain spoilers for SLARPG.)

Some background on SLARPG's world structure

In SLARPG's 2013 predecessor, the Amber Woods didn't exist in any form. Instead, the Uncanny Valley served the role of the central forest area that contained the paths to both the desert and the final dungeon. In the original game, it was a straightforward green pine forest, with only the enemy roster and music playing into its eerie theming. SLARPG's predecessor was the first game I ever made, so at the time just making a forest area or a desert area was inherently novel to me. Early in SLARPG's development, I decided to completely overhaul the Valley's palette to lean into its nature as a haunted forest, something beautiful yet unnatural.

Also, the entire world of the 2013 game was set on a series of floating islands, just because as a lifelong Sonic fan I think floating islands are cool.

For SLARPG, I decided that it would be better if Greenridge was on a normal island, allowing me to explore seaside scenery and making the setting feel more grounded. (Pun not intended.) A floating island setting would have raised a lot of additional worldbuilding questions, for one, but I was also trying to make the early areas of the game prior to the first glitch segment less strange and surreal so that the glitch stuff would be more shocking. Areas past that first glitch segment, though, could be as fantastical as I wanted.

The plan, for a while, was to have the Uncanny Valley, the Celestial Wasteland, and Mt. Sappho all be on one big floating island. (Like the Amber Woods, areas like Polychrome Cavern and the Flurry Mountains didn't exist yet in my plans.) From a spot on the main overworld map, the Novas would take a magical elevator platform up through the sky and arrive somewhere in the middle of the Uncanny Valley, roughly at the center of the landmass, and their adventure would truly begin. After playing Breath of the Wild, I wanted the floating island to be set up so that players could go in any direction from this central starting point and find something interesting, similar to setting out from BotW's Great Plateau. I also looked to the intricately designed top-down maps of Link's Awakening, and idolized the fact that Symphony of the Night makes exploration feel rewarding by making a majority of its map optional and filling it with fun secrets.

Of course, the problem here was that SLARPG is a game built around a linear main story, so there would still be one "correct" way to go to continue the plot. It's also just hard to create a big, nonlinear world filled with bespoke content as a solo dev. So SLARPG ended up having a much more structured, deliberately paced game world, which then opens up towards the end for players who feel like seeing the side stories. I ended up making something structured much more like Chrono Trigger than my other structural inspirations. Which is funny, considering the initial inspiration for the Uncanny Valley in 2013 was to make a small forest area you'd have to pass through multiple times in the same vein as Chrono Trigger's Guardia Forest!

Anyway, this was supposed to be a post about the Amber Woods!

Conceiving the Amber Woods

The ideas for the area that would become the Amber Woods were formulated around the time we were working on SLARPG's demo in late 2017/early 2018. By that point, I had already decided that only the Celestial Wasteland would be set on a floating island. It was the only area deliberately built around that aesthetic, and it needed to be cut off from the rest of the world for story purposes. The rest of the outdoor areas would be down on the ground, all directly connecting to each other and to Greenridge without the use of an overworld map. But getting rid of the overworld meant that the different areas would have to flow into each other more logically.

Basically, the thought I had was this: the Uncanny Valley couldn't be right next door to Greenridge. That just wouldn't make sense from a worldbuilding perspective, to have no buffer between the cheery little hometown and this irradiated, haunted forest with no potable water. I also felt that the game could really use a more "normal" forest area with some low level monsters to ease players in. An area with a more lighthearted vibe that kind of sets the bar for what an average day of adventuring is supposed to be like for the Novas. This would be a nice palate cleanser after the weirdness of the Basement Dungeon.

In my earliest plans, I compared this area to an average early game route in a Pokémon game, and wanted it to use the default grass and tree tileset from around Greenridge. Maybe I'd throw some fields of flowers in there and a windmill or something and call it a day. It didn't need to be anything extravagant. Meanwhile, for the music, Bee started repurposing a short, jaunty tune she'd come up with as a potential overworld theme.

But, of course, I knew I wouldn't be happy keeping it that simple. In the wake of the demo's release, I started messing around with alternate palettes that would give this new area its own vibe. (The first palette here is the Greenridge palette, as a reference.)

Yes, the Danger Hole was the easiest place for me to test out changes to this tileset.

As you can see, I really ended up liking the idea of an area that has golden trees year-round. This is where the personality of the area started to really come to me. The scenery and its proximity to Greenridge made me think of it as a big nature preserve where people go sightseeing - and, due to the vibe of the game, this evolved into it being a big tourist spot for couples. The idea for the little heart plaques grew out of the idea that, if it was a nature preserve, you probably wouldn't want people carving their initials in all the trees. As you ventured further from Greenridge and closer to the Uncanny Valley, you'd also start to see less modern amenities and more ancient ruins.

And so, the area began to look like this:

As was often the case throughout development, I felt inspired to really push the vibes of the area further because of Bee's music. Bee went back to the drawing board with an all-new track trying to capture the vibe I'd described - romantic, but also a little mystical, but also not TOO mystical because it's so close to home. She captured it so perfectly that I redoubled my efforts to make sure the area lived up to that vibe.

As part of this, I decided to completely redo the trees, unhappy with how the recolors of the original Greenridge trees looked.

I also tried out these trees as a replacement for Greenridge's trees, but didn't quite like it. While these new tree sprites are definitely much better than the ones I'd done three years earlier for Greenridge, I figured it'd be good to have more tree variety anyway. (I always thought that I might go back and redo the Greenridge trees at the end of development if there was time, but this never happened.)

The layout and the area's story

Of course, for a long time, I was still jumping around from area to area, leaving the Amber Woods mostly incomplete. Eventually I sat down and figured out the overall layout, and how it would connect to its neighboring areas.

My very, very loose map started out like this:

It's beautiful, I know.

I knew that I wanted there to be a diversion of some sort that would block progress through the woods and force the player to explore off to the side before advancing. Eventually, this coalesced into the idea of Beth the Beast and Mary Ena being frozen in a giant ice cube by one of the villains, and Melody needing to unlock a spell that can melt the ice. (Fun fact: I didn't tell Anthony that I would be doing this with his bard characters. I let it be a surprise during Act II playtesting.)

Early in development, I'd brainstormed a lot of different "traversal" abilities for Melody. I really wanted to do the whole Zelda/Metroidvania/etc. thing where you'll see obstacles in the world that you can't do anything about until later, when you finally get the tool or ability you need and get all excited to go explore the places you couldn't previously reach. However, I wanted these mechanics to fit thematically with Melody. She shouldn't be going around bombing walls and cutting down plants in her path. She should be leaving the world a better place than she found it! This is supposed to be a game where you play as a healer!

A lot of my ideas for traversal abilities went unused, and the ice blocks in particular only really show up in this one segment. I figured it would hurt the forward momentum of the story if you were encouraged to go back through the previous areas and melt ice blocks when you finally get the chance to leave the area around Greenridge. Conversely, I didn't think placing ice blocks in future areas would be particularly interesting. Without that element of backtracking, it just becomes an arbitrary object you walk up to and hit the inspect button on. But I think this works out for the story. Melody unlocks an ability that's extremely limited in its use, and then in the next area she gets one-upped by Jodie and her more widely used ability to cover up spike pits, driving home the fact that Melody worries she's not "useful."

The quest to gain said ability would also end up sending the player to a shrine for one of the gods, as I was figuring out their role in the overarching story at the time. I never planned on including them directly, preferring them to loom over the events of the story from a distance, but I knew they would have to be mentioned here and there. I would've liked to include shrines to other gods to flesh out the pantheon a bit more, but since there was no other point in the story where they felt like a mandatory inclusion they ended up being yet another idea that was cut for the sake of time.

On the subject of cut content, the Amber Woods was also the area in which I started experimenting with how enemy encounters work out in these outdoor areas. I briefly tried out a tall grass mechanic straight from Pokémon, with random battles occurring when you walk through patches of tall grass, and I also considered having battles trigger when you step into a monster's line of site like a Pokémon trainer, but these ideas were dropped. Playing Dragon Quest XI around this time would remind me that being able to walk past monsters you don't feel like fighting is fine, actually, although for good measure there are still some mandatory encounters sprinkled throughout the game. This experimentation did lead to the creation of the Monster Dens for those who decide they need to grind, so it was ultimately a net positive.

Anyway, after figuring out the overall layout of the area, I roughed in a few of the missing maps, just so that everything could finally be connected. For a time, the area south of the Soleil shrine looked like this:

As I filled in the details, I made sure that different regions of the Amber Woods had their own landmarks and vibes, even if they all mostly share the same tileset. It's more interesting to explore this way, but it also makes it harder to get lost. One area might have a big lake, while others might only have a small river, some ponds, or no water at all. Taylor's lookout tower was added as a central landmark to help sell the idea that you're in a national park. The eastern side of the area was made mountainous so that it would be able to connect to Zinnia's areas later in the game, and I thought that a shot of the ocean to show how far you've come would be a perfect end cap to the area.

Speaking of Zinnia, everything about the Amber Woods ended up being perfect as a piece of her and Verena's story. As explained in a previous post, I knew from early in development that I wanted Verena to have secret ties to the game's world, and eventually this morphed into the story of the goddess Fortuna and her and Zinnia's relationship. The Amber Woods ended up being their old garden, magically preserved for all these years, the scenery never changing with the seasons. The area sort of embodies their rose-tinted memories from earlier in their relationship, compared to the darkness and destruction seen in what's now the Uncanny Valley. While I initially chose the name "Amber Woods" mostly because of the color of the trees, the double meaning was simply too perfect not to play around with.

Enemies

Generally, the last thing I do for any area is add the enemies, since the battle system in SLARPG is totally compartmentalized from the exploration. Even still, they're a good way to help give an area character.

The now iconic Frog Ball enemy designed by my friend GJ was a natural fit for the area and its lily pad-filled lakes, so it was moved from the Uncanny Valley to here. I also came up with the flower-covered Bloom Beast as a creature that would fit the scenery of the zone, and for variety I added the Loot Scooter as a "loot goblin" type enemy that you have to beat before it flees to get a big reward.

The Amber Woods is supposed to be a peaceful park, though, so many of the enemies were conceived as invasive species that would be causing problems for the park. The Snowbats are an extension of the ice problem around the park, and are also designed to introduce the Freeze status before Melody gets a way to heal it. For the mountains, I asked Anthony to design a harpy enemy, which resulted in the Harpy Monks as a territorial clan of martial artists who've made that corner of the island their training ground. The Harpy Monks are the first humanoid enemies in the game, and therefore the first sign that the combat is starting to get a bit more serious for the Novas.

I turned to Anthony to figure out more nuisances, and among other things he gave me a group of feral animals that were stealing and wearing clothes to "emulate humanoids," led by the Trash King. Two of them would evolve into the Bushy-Tailed Bandit and the Cool Snake, respectively. While I initially didn't plan on giving the Amber Woods its own boss, the area became such a long chunk of the game that it felt right to cap it off with the Trash King as a boss.

And with that... we had a whole area! The Amber Woods was the first proper outdoor area in the game with monsters and whatnot that was playable from start to finish, and it's still one of the areas I'm most proud of.

As always, thank you for your continued support, and if there's anything y'all are interested in hearing about in future breakdowns like this, let me know!