[h3]
The World of ASKA[/h3]
ASKA is a survival tribe builder where you command AI villagers to help you build a lively Norse settlement. It’s a beautiful and dangerous world and the way you manage to organise your growing village will make all the difference. But a lot of what made ASKA what it is closely tied to our past projects and the many lessons we’ve learned over time.
In this series, I’ll try to share with you our process and our journey. For that, we have to start from the beginning…
[h3]Why survival? [/h3]ASKA is our third title as Sand Sailor Studio, and probably the most relevant project to ASKA’s development is Bossgard, our 2nd game, where in the latter stage of the project we came up with the idea of an open-world survival level.
Bossgard was a 5v1 asymmetrical boss-battler. One player would play a boss, and the other 5 would team up as Vikings. The bosses were a bit unorthodox, taking the shape of a huge and evil slice of bread, a plunger, a jackhammer, and the like. We had great fun creating all these characters and we were exploring alternate game modes besides the 5v1 arena fights.
We found our models to work pretty well in a 3rd person perspective and wanted to try our hand at making a 3rd person mode. The problem is, arenas would be too small to justify a standalone 3rd person mode. Thus the need for an open (or open-er) world level popped up.
We called the level “Jotunheim” and the deal was simple: you would enter a frozen wasteland where your fire would diminish as time went on. You had to explore the land, slay a number of mini-bosses, each of them holding a key to opening the final boss fight.
The level was challenging to explore because the player would have to navigate a constant blizzard and everything was white from the snow. Locating landmarks and building a mind map of the level was key.
We learned A TON from what was essentially a mini-game, a side adventure to our main game. But we saw so much potential in this game mode, we basically prototyped all the essentials to a survival game: the diminishing resources, the weather, the hostile environment and combat.
At the end of Bossgard’s development we were already tinkering with our next idea and we knew it had to be Boassgard’s survival mode but cranked to the max.
The first ideation rounds remained very “Bossgard” and it had a very different name. Our studio history was made of sharp low-poly stylized games, so for a while we stayed in the same vein.
At the same time Cristian, our studio owner and creative director started exploring Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline, while Hyperg (Răzvan), the studio’s senior and lead programmer, started working on world generation tools.
We’re the kind of team that likes trying out new stuff with each project, we don’t really have a history of doing sequels. Our engineers enjoy building bigger and better tools, and our artists won’t say no to a completely blank canvas, it’s one of the things that keeps us together as a team, we share the same kind of curiosity, but catered to our own professional domains.
We started looking more and more towards a realistic style, or how we call it, a semi-realistic style. There’s still a strong level of stylization in ASKA. The reasoning behind this choice is the same behind us deciding to go for a procedural world - realistic scope. Our team was under 10 members in size, so we had to make sure we made sustainable decisions.
A semi-realistic style allowed us to keep art pipelines in check and procedural generation takes a lot of weight off level design. Instead of designing “areas”, we’d design habitats and biomes that would then blend together according to world generation rules we would define afterwards.
[h3]
The Village[/h3]
So far so good, we knew we wanted to make a survival game, we largely knew how it was going to look, we knew how we would make the world, but the cherry on top was an untapped ambition of ours - strategy games. More importantly, city builders and more importantly - colony sims. We wanted to be able to build intricate and functional settlements that would make full use of this world we were making. We wanted this world to be a functional one above all else and this remains a core principle in ASKA - most of what you see in the world is interactable, usable, harvestable, craftable, refinable. Apart from a few rocks, grass and bushes, the world and its resources are interactable.
Geography must really come into play when picking a place to start building your village. Some areas are good for farming, others are good for fishing, hunting, or mining.
What applies to resources, applies to village building as well - everything has to be practical, buildings must be clearly made out of the materials you actually have access to at a given moment during gameplay.
A building can’t be held together by iron nails if you don’t have iron.
A building can’t be made of planks if you don’t have the tools to process wood.
And so on. You want houses made of planks? Find mines, extract iron, smelt it, make blades. This goes for everything.
You’ll see that the first tiers of buildings in ASKA seem improvised, makeshift - they use extremely raw materials, like unprocessed bits of wood, sticks, bark, rough rope and so on, the kind of materials someone finding themselves in extreme survival conditions might make use of. We’ll dive deeper into architecture and technology trees in future dev logs, but this is the main takeaway - ASKA is about representing realism in key areas.
[h3]
Creative Liberties and Why Vikings?[/h3]
That is not to say we don’t take creative liberties. It doesn’t take long to see that our Vikings are more fantasy Vikings than historical Vikings.
This isn't a lack of understanding of historical facts, we actively chose to go down the fantasy route. We like to think we’re representing Vikings as they saw themselves, or as others saw them, rather. Adventurous, intimidating, impetuous warriors, raiders and pirates that share tall tales and rely on intimidation and a notorious reputation.
The tattoos, the bare chests, the leather attire, we are full aware this is not how 9th century Scandinavians looked like, but it’s how the Viking lives in the common imaginarium.
It also gives us a lot of freedom when designing. I’ll go deeper into the design process in a different dev log, but what I can say is that we always look at historical facts first, afterwhich we “gamify” and “fantasy-fy” our findings.
For instance building materials, or building proportions, these have to cater to the game’s reality. For instance when designing a house, we have to take into account the 3rd person perspective. It’s not just the character going inside the house, it’s the character and the “camera crew” as well. This alters proportions, and everything in ASKA has to answer these challenges.
[h3]
In Conclusion...[/h3]
That's it for today, remember that you can
see weekly gameplay of ASKA on our Twitch
This is one of many upcoming devlogs and hopefully it manages to provide you with a wider perspective into the whole creative process behind a game like ASKA.
And if you have any burning questions you can always join our Discord and start the conversation directly with us devs!
