Aderyn's Cradle - interview @ 80 Level

Eye noticed that 80 Level talked to Hank Zwally from Mojo Games Studio about Aderyn's Cradle, which is currently trying to get sufficient funds on Indiegogo.

To build the environments of Aderyn’s Cradle and keep them as beautiful as we want them to be, we do a number of different passes over the level and use heuristics to make that happen. When you look at an environment, you can separate its components into two categories: the pieces that affect a player’s motion, and the pieces that don’t.

For example, a lot of smaller plants will not really affect the way a player moves but will add beauty to the scene. So the first thing that we do is build all of our levels for functionality and we block them out and make sure they play just right. After that, we go back and think about the natural world. When we’re actually building these to be pl ayable we also think about real-world geology; how rocks would form, how elements would exist in the environment that we’re creating.
Given that information, we then build a playable version of the game with these rocks and rock formations and a myriad of other details in mind so we produce the right feeling of what we’re trying to build. Following that, once we know it’s playable and it feels good, then we go back and add the secondary elements that don’t guide the player’s ability to move. We continue that back and forth between the artist(s) and the level designer until we create a world that really matches our vision.