by PurpleSnow (Game Director)
It was really cool to see all the great questions during the YouTube stream a couple weeks ago as well as all the follow-up in #purplesnow-chat on the Smol Discord!
I thought it’d be fun to break down my process and share it with you all on the Notion hub. You can expect updates from me and other members of the team about once a month. In this post, I’ll take you through parts of my conceptual phase; including the inspiration that led to our selected direction for Smolville.
This may seem like an obvious first step, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore it.
My immediate thought was to learn as much as possible about what’s going on with Smols today. I wanted to know where we’re starting. So I browsed around the websites, looked up Discord comments, and got familiar with the general vibe. Basically, I wanted to go through it like a first time user.
Some tidbits that really resonated:
If we want to design a mass-market hit, we need to understand the market, so I gathered data around the space today:
<aside> ❓ What’s been successful?
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<aside> ❓ How have downloads been?
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<aside> ❓ How has growth developed over time?
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When I better understand the Smol world and feel entrenched in the product landscape, my design sandbox can start to take shape.
Now I’m in a place where I can think about specific reference games that are relevant, exciting and inspiring: here’s a list of all my fav games that come to mind when I think about crafting the right kind of game for the Smolverse. As a first step, I analyze all the elements I like about them, before further organization and categorization.
While I play said games, I take notes and screenshots along the way on what I like and how it could potentially fit into the Smolverse world. I played through through many titles, but below are some of the highlights:
Harvest Moon
I took out the first one I ever played (Island of Happiness) and restarted it, noting how much I like the cut-off islands and cows. The roundness of the character sprites and animals really added a lot of charm, despite the game’s old age.
Genshin Impact
At the end of the day, it’s an RPG with battle at its core, but it does a great job bringing its environments to life and delivers a memorable exploration experience. I still remember the first time I climbed to the top of Qingyun Peak in the middle of night after getting through the statues puzzles where you had to shoot arrows certain ways. The sun rose as I arrived at the top and the original soundtrack kicked in at the perfect time. And I just stood there with my Venti and watched the view from the peak for a whole day and night.
And the NPCs have been woven into the world in a significant way, and of course, there’s all the time I spent on the Seretina Pot customization and all the crazy things I can do with it. You know, back when I had more time :’)