WildWood

Below lies the link for our itch.io site. Feel free to try out our game!

https://team-tree-interactive.itch.io/wild-wood

WildWood is an open world first-person platforming game which was made in four weeks during a school project in FutureGames in Stockholm, Sweden. This project required us to combine any two sports of our choosing to create our game concept. In WildWood, these two combined sports are parkour and orienteering!

During our pre-production phase, it didn’t take long for us to realize that we wanted to create a game that had an emphasis on fast-paced movement. With this in mind, we figured that choosing parkour as one of the two required sports would be a no-brainer.

Choosing the second sport would prove to be a larger obstacle. In the end, we decided to go with orienteering because having a sport where you have to explore an open environment and find checkpoints within a time-limit would prove to work beautifully with parkour.

The reason why we chose to use a first-person perspective had little to do with collective preferences in gameplay in our group, but more with the limitations of our 3D artists skill sets.

Since our 3D artists had little experience in working with animations, we figured that having a first-person perspective in our game would lower the amount of detail needed on the main character, giving more time to get the animations right. 

As a goal for the gameplay theme, we wanted the player to master their environments as they kept on playing the game. During the first two weeks of development we had several discussions about how we should go about making this concept work. Eventually, we realized that a small tweak in the game design made us reach our personal goal.

Instead of having the player be forced to collect all fifteen checkpoints present in the level, we tweaked the number so that the minimum requirement for finishing the game would be ten out of fifteen checkpoints instead. This small adjustment made it so that the player would have to figure out what the optimal path for finding these ten checkpoints is, which made the game more interesting and addicting to play.

The largest obstacles we had to face during development were probably knowing when and how to scope down the size of the project. Since we were making a compact open-world in four weeks, we had learn how to cut corners and prioritize the most important aspects of the game which made the core experience fun and rewarding. We feel like we managed to successfully compromise the parts of the game that created the largest bottlenecks in our development process and what we were left with was a game all of us genuinely enjoyed playing.

Thank you for reading and we hope that you will enjoy our game!

Best regards
Team Tree