![]() ![]() Instead of following a path and having to upgrade certain skills that the player might not even want to acquire, now we allowed you to directly collect those shards within the world to create your own custom loadout. We saw Spirit Shards as the natural evolution to the Ability Tree System that was featured in Ori and the Blind Forest. What does a good Shard ability look like, from the perspective of making them? There's a variety of these, some navigational (like sticking to walls), some protective (decrease damage) and some with weird applications (switching health and energy). One cool aspect of the game is all the collectable Spirit Shards there are, each of which provides a minor power and they can be powered up. on top of that, you have 300+ levels, so you can imagine how much of a challenge it was to build this world. Making a metroidvania game is probably one of the toughest challenges you could look for in terms of game design simply because the entire game basically has to become one huge puzzle: Change an element over here to the right in the world and it might have bad effects on this one spot to the far left of your world. and once again, it's just a matter of tweaking things until the Design Department is happy overall. The world of Niwen feels much more alive than what we were able to deliver back then during Ori and the Blind Forest because of that.Īnd yeah, because we're dealing with physics, there's some sequence breaking that players might be able to do due to physics. Alexey Abramenko, the designer and programmer behind the Intrusion series of games actually did most of that stuff and we're super proud of the work he delivered. In Will of the Wisps, you might have noticed that we had to rig literally hundreds of objects so that they react to Ori's movement. There's a whole pipeline built around just getting a level to be ready to go into the final game. Again, we believe in iterative polish, which means that every inch of our levels gets scrutinized all the time by many different people. Did those items present, along with the non-grid-based map, any gating challenges, to keep players out of regions they may not be prepared for yet? The world in the game has a lot of dynamic objects, like bouncy twigs and swinging ropes, and Ori picks up a skill that allows them to even use projectiles as a movement opportunity. But the point is that we start in the simplest possible way and only move on to art and set dressing when we know that the anatomy of a level is good to go. Repeat that process a few times until everyone loves the blockout level and then it eventually gets the "design approved" stamp, which means that the level is ready to move on to our artists who then start the process of set dressing, which in itself is quite an involved process. Then you do a lot of tweaking and nudging things around while you're constantly playtesting the level you're building.Once all that's done, you need to present your level to other designers to get harsh and honest feedback. Then we move on to the blockout phase where we simply draw polygons that define the platforms and shapes Ori will run and jump on. We start the level design process in the simplest way possible, by first starting with a strong concept on paper. ![]() Our world-building tools for our design department were honestly quite simplistic. What is the process of creating such a lush and non-grid-based world look like? What was its design phase, and what are your favored world building tools? Many times in game development multiple things across multiple disciplines have to be tweaked just right before something starts to feel really fun to play. The controls had to be fine-tuned for an ungodly amount of time, the animations had to be top-notch, sound effects had to play into the mix, particles, etc. We spent a crazy amount of time just trying to make the movement as fun and satisfying as possible and there's so many things that go into that. Platforming is one of the core elements in Ori, so we knew we had to get that element perfect. Simply through our insane iterative polish process. Ori has a gratifyingly graceful and rapid movement. We really tried to perfect all the elements that were introduced in Ori and the Blind Forest: The visuals had to be way better, the combat had to be far more engaging, the story had to be expanded upon, we wanted the whole progression loop to become more satisfying.In the end, I think we're quite proud of what we shipped and hope that Ori and the Will of the Wisps will be remembered as a sequel that "got it right." We wanted Ori and the Will of the Wisps to become a sequel akin to how Nintendo improved upon Super Mario Bros. Our goal with Will of the Wisps was to not just deliver a phoned-in sequel, but to elevate every pillar of Ori and the Blind Forest to a crazy degree. ![]()
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