Devlog - Worldbuilding Effects on Game Design

I spent the last two weeks going down a rabbit hole of historical medieval technology and ways it impacts society.

Why?

The world is a medieval fantasy setting, has no magic but contains lots of 'magical' looking creatures with biologically evolved abilities that seem supernatural.

When I designed the girl to be able to wear relatively modern looking fashion

But then I got to thinking... Do they even have zippers in medieval times? Or mechanical locks on backpacks?

I think that's too advanced for them. How far can technology be pushed and what kind of creatures and beasts would need to be created to provide resources for making such things, if it is even possible.

I could make a zipper bug that has holes in it's body that can open up like a zipper, or something, but would people be able to even mold it onto clothes?

There was a lot of questions I lacked answers to before I could decide on characters, locations and monsters inhabiting the world.

Sure, I could just slap on the usual fantasy and magic fare (I did plan on elves, orcs and goblins), but that's not the direction I wanted to take with this project. I needed to understand the medieval world better.

How?

I have been binge watching YouTube videos on the topic, digging through wikis and searching for various specific questions online.

It has been very educational, making me realize medieval people were actually quite advanced in their understanding of ways the world operates. Even if they didn't always know why things happen, they knew how to make them happen.

I have been taking notes on the types of processes as a graph, listing professions, types of processes and materials made and used. Here is the organized graph so far that may not be super useful to you, but will illustrate how much this has enthralled me xD

What I am seeing as the next step is to parse this graph into a list of all the common patterns. It should allow me to add/remove materials and see what kinds of items are commonly available to the population. It would also show which are the popular jobs that characters would take and the kind of monsters that would/wouldn't fit in with such a society.

Yea, but what about the game?

I have decided to focus the events on reoccurring characters whenever possible, so I need to design a bunch of them, potentially as representatives of various professions one would run into. They will need a sort of a character arc they can potentially reach, but the main character would rarely see it all through, but you as the player should be able to piece it together when replaying the game..

Locations I decided on in the previous devlog also allow for some specialization with event types, but I need to figure out the single core event as the representative in the first draft.

Types of gameplay expected from areas so far is:

• Forest - Filled with dangerous plants and animals, but teaches survival skills.
• Paved road - Relatively safe area to meet civilized travelers, both good and bad.
• House -  Most probably occupied by people that may have some work for travelers.
• Ruins -  May contain mystery and surprises, rarely pleasant.
• Body of Water -  A good place to cleanse oneself of taint and unwanted burden.
• Fields -  A nostalgic place good for gathering your thoughts and reminiscing about the past.
• Cave -  Darkness of the depths hides dangers and treasure.
• Market -  Sometimes you may need to work for a good bargain.

Conclusion

I need to design characters to introduce in different events, thus I need to understand the world they come from better. Once I do that, I will surely share the progress around.

I will need to also design generic fallback events that don't involve any characters, so I may look into that first, for gameplay testing purposes.