When people talk about their dream homes, they usually speak of them in terms of the features that a home will have - “I want a swimming pool in my backyard that looks like a weird lima bean,” or “I want a fallout shelter with perky colors, paisley wallpaper, and rich shag carpeting.”

People seldom speak of the foundation of the home, despite everything resting upon it.

Videogames are often the same - people describe their ideal games or desired experiences in terms of features or characteristics. This is why you’ll often hear things like “A Metroidvania with cooking simulation and rhythm gameplay,” or “A battle royale with turn-based combat in an evolving open world setting.”

Those can tell us what a game has, but does it truly identify what it is?

For that identity, we look to our foundation - in the case of games, our pillars. Pillars are a concise set of words, or short phrases that are meant to embody a concept that is core to a game’s experience. They do this for two primary reasons:

The first is to excite and inspire a team to the possibilities of what the game could be. These are aspirational words, evocative ones, that invite conversation. An excellent pillar brings people together, lets them bounce ideas from one to another as to how they can best achieve the feeling or the ideal that they want to create.

The second is to inform and constrain. One of the most important parts of building a game is knowing what the game isn’t. I am certain that most people have played at least one game that lacked constraint - you can tell it by features that don’t feel like they fit or serve a purpose, when something feels messy and unfocused, or simply “too much.” A good pillar lets a team ask “Is this valuable for our game? Does this bring value to the core of our experience?”

Even if you don’t know the pillars that a game was built on, you can often intuit or identify them based on what the game makes you feel. A seminal example would be The Legend of Zelda - a game that positively relished in the feeling of mystery and exploration. There were secret caves, hidden dungeons, woods that you could feel hopelessly lost within, to name only a few. All of these aspects both motivate and encourage one thing: the romanticism of adventure; the love of exploration.

It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that the game was inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto’s childhood days spent exploring the caves, forests, and lakes of Sonobe, Japan. You can feel the lived experience, the love and warmth that translated and inspired that experience. This is what an exceptional pillar does.

When it came time to define the pillars for Smolville, we knew that “Adventure” was going to be a key word for us. There is an almost restless kind of energy that comes from the team when the topic comes up, a desire to go and do. This is at the heart of why we’ve chosen a location that is mobile as our central setting.

From a purely gameplay perspective, it’s easy to see why that would be an appealing spin on traditional farming structures - being able to go to new places can introduce you to entirely new fruits, vegetables, and flowers. You can discover new architectural styles. Obtain new tools. But those are systemic - they’re outputs of a decision. The true passion comes from the why.

Farming and Expeditions are our how - the way that we keep our Sky Whale moving, the way that we build and grow our home to bring in new friends and villagers that can explore further. It is the why that makes those activities special; meaningful. For us, we want to build a world that feels worth living in. A place that encourages and rewards exploration, of sharing thoughts, theories, and discoveries with friends and communities.

Those were experiences that shaped us, and as is the way of creative works, we in turn want to give life to something that inspires others - to find their own version of the joy and wonder that we ourselves had felt.

Adventure has already played a significant role in the development of the game, in ways that we’re excited to share more about in a future update (coming soon!) It is however not our only pillar - there is the particularly salient piece on “Zaniness” - but those are stories for another day!