SLARPG: Expanding the forest (Patreon)

Been a little while, huh? I've been doing some more work on SLARPG's monster-filled forest area, tentatively named the Uncanny Valley (although the name might change)

I struggled with level design in the original game, and I'm trying to make things bigger and more interesting this time around. The original game's forest basically gave you two directions to go on your first visit: north, to the shop, or south, to the desert. There were also three treasure chests you could find pretty easily. That was it. To fix this, I've mainly been looking to the Zelda series for inspiration. The level design in most Zelda games is really quite good, and there's a lot to learn from intricate little worlds like Koholint Island or the top-down Hyrules

While there are roadblocks that require certain things to be found before accessing certain parts of the map, I don't want it to feel like every area is immediately forcing you down one path, and I want open areas to have more interesting geometry. So the dungeons and environments like the forest and the desert are becoming a bit more complex and more interactive--more inspired by the types of levels seen in games like Link's Awakening than something like EarthBound

So all that is a fancy way of saying "I've been playing a lot of Breath of the Wild, but also I made this map that has a shortcut you can make when you come at it from the top" (that big block turns into a staircase when activated)