Welcome back to another Dev Diary! Today’s topic is jam-packed, Smol enough to fit in an overhead compartment, and anything but plane - or rather, plain - because we’re going to be talking about Travelers!
When we say Travelers, we don’t mean Smol tourists on a road trip to see the world’s largest novelty (but fully functional) rocking chair. We mean Travelers from other worlds. Just like that we’ve answered the age old question and found the truth out there - our Smols are not alone in this universe!
Let’s do a quick recap of things that we know so far: Smols lived peacefully and obliviously on their home planet. One day, for reasons not yet divulged, their world was shattered into countless pieces - the shards of which became the foundation of what we know today as Sky Islands. Each of these islands became its own little world, host to the Smols that were stranded there.
This all remains true, but there’s something more to the story - there were other worlds affected by this incident! This means that countless shards from heretofore unknown alien destinations were also scattered about, many of which crashed into and merged with shards from other worlds. This has brought our Smols into contact with an entirely new host of characters!
Creating these new Travelers has been an enormously exciting part of the development process, because this is where we begin to more fully realize the promise of drawing Smols into an even larger living and growing universe. Adding new facets such as these is not something we take lightly - it’s all too easy to obfuscate or lose what makes something special by adding too much. So how do we strike a balance?
Our answer has been to create our new Travelers out of a system of thematic contrasts and similarities. This means taking something as a baseline (Smols, in our case) and pushing out into different extremes from that baseline to develop new identities. This approach centers on creating foundations for interesting and entertaining character interactions, because there will always be core elements that bring characters into either conflict or alignment.
Let’s take that out of design-speak and ground it back with a practical example. If we know that Smols are our baseline, then we need to know what is “true” about them - what are the most important characteristics that make them who they are? In this case, we know that: