Twin Offerings Overlook

Point of Interest in the Shatterscarp Region

The Context

Really the only direction I got on this point of interest was to make a point of interest. Looking at the surrounding desert dunes, I knew that I wanted to make something fairly tall that would serve as a landmark and point of navigation for this sub-region. Early on, I really gravitated toward the idea of twin rock structures, connected by bridges or ledges.

After the blockout phase, I had an idea for the story of the space: There's a soul plague in this game called Dreamscourge that can turn people and creatures pretty suddenly into hostile mushroom zombies. What if this happened to half of a tribe of xaurips inhabiting this space?

So we broke up the gameplay between the upper and lower section, with cut xaurip bridges to show that the remaining non-zombified xaurips had had to flee and cut off their escape route.

This resulted in a really good reason for the gameplay I already wanted: a difficult parkour challenge up increasingly-dizzying heights.

So we kept the non-dreamthrall variant of the xaurips on the bottom of the two columns, with some interesting routes for the player's approach.

As the player scaled the rock structures, they would also get some pretty spectacular views of the surrounding region.

At the top, the player finds a whole group of dreamthralled xaurips, including a unique xaurip bounty boss fight all chomping on some questionable meat. I love forcing the player to adjust their thinking in different encounters, so having this fight on top of this fatal height really requires the player to be aware of their surroundings and to dodge more carefully so they don't fall to their deaths. I made the composition mostly melee to make this even more difficult.

When the player reaches the top, they also find this little shrine absolutely blanketed in mushrooms, just to drive this contrast between lower and upper halves home.

(The player also gets my favorite item in the game, designed by Shea Yonker, a sword which does both fire and ice damage, depending on enemy health.)

Also huge thanks to Peter Wano, who was the artist on this and really brought it to life. We ended up having to basically create a xaurip kit from scratch because we didn't have anything for making xaurip platforms, but the whole team ended up using these assets a lot throughout the game.

Artist: Peter Wano