Grim Wetlands

Sub-region in the Emerald Stair Region

The Context

After wrapping up Shatterscarp, we began visiting older regions, and realized that they did not have as much biodiversity and sub-region theming, so one of our main efforts was to rectify this in Emerald Stair, which was all very much a large conifer forest. We had very little budget or room for new assets with this, so it was all about cleverly using what we already had. I was tasked with doing all the blockout for this new swamp biome.

During blockout, I decided I wanted this lower swamp area to feature a sunken village. I originally envisioned more sunken-house and swimming gameplay, but due to budget constraints, we cut it down to mostly ramshackle bridges like this, as well as some key points of interest with boggy water and clusters of large, barren trees in between.

The image above shows a party camp, a nice area of rest at the front of the sub-region.

A ruined church, with a spooky skeleton priest encounter and a shrine to the bird god inside.

The roof of the spooky church also allows the player to get to a whole new upper section of this swamp. We'll take a look at that later.

A spooky mausoleum for one of our quests. All the encounters in this lower section are skeletons and ghosts, except for the xaurip camp.

A fog-drenched gatehouse, which leads to the next region of the game. This was all handled by other developers, so I'll leave it there.

The roof of the church (as well as another path) can lead the player to this sporeling-infested camp (sporelings are mushroom-shaped enemies). I wanted this to be a subtle biome shift, still in line with the swamplands below, but more focused on rocky outcrops and mushrooms so we could shake up the combat variety. I added more rock ledges and filled the place with mushrooms so that we could sneakily spawn sporelings (their heads poking out of the ground match some of the mushroom shapes).

If the player follows the rock ledges up, they arrive at this locked gate with animancy switches (soul-powered objects that the player can open with the lightning element). Finding the two hidden switches opens the gate.

On the other side of the gate, I added scaffolding. Carrying over the animancy lamps (those purple lights there) was a clever touch by the environment artist.

Hopping over another gap leads to a cave. I removed a big sporeling fight here to give the cave's ambiance space to breath and for the player to take in what they're seeing.

This space was blocked out by one of our quest designers, but I supported by designing the encounter and coordinating with the gameplay team to create a new ogre variant that used a huge animancy stick as a weapon.

Artist: Seth May