The Wilderness: Forest Roleplay

Soaring high overhead
Saying good morning!
Nighttime with a new friend listening to the band
Nighttime bug hunt
Hunting for salmon
Getting a request

WorldID: 839575325198880

Inspiration

We wanted to create a roleplaying experience that had "lo-fi" vibes. A place you could just sit and watch, or spend a bunch of time swimming after fish or flying around.

What it does

The Wilderness: Forest Roleplay is a cozy, living ecosystem, roleplaying space. Players grab totems to magically transform into animals (with full dual joystick control, even during flight!) and explore a magical forest full of creatures who need help. The core experience is roleplaying, with many interactive elements and environments to explore and play in. For solo play or those looking for more structure, helping animals while transformed grows their loyalty to the player, which unlocks new skins for your avatar animals.

How we built it

We used Horizon Worlds and a lot of Blender. We also consumed an unhealthy amount of coffee and missed a lot of sleep. We'd do it again for sure.

Challenges we ran into

Transforming into an animal is something we've tried in the past, with limited success. We felt we could push it further and really wanted to maintain traditional, two-joystick controls for players. So we made a new world and re-wrote the entire system from scratch with a new approach. We think the results end up being invisible most of the time, which feels a bit magical. Not wanting to make it easy on ourselves, we pushed for flight. This was extremely challenging to make work with the transformations in a controllable way on mobile. We thought our past experience with Jetpacks (Jetpack Geography!) meant we were prepared. We were not.

Setting up a world for roleplay certainly has challenges, but making that world something you can perform quests in and have it react to you while maintaining the freeform feeling of roleplay was an additional design challenge we didn't fully appreciate when we started. In the end, we have a number of quests that we're proud of, but would like even more interaction between species and more loyalties to gain.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The goal from the outset was to make flight and other locomotion feel smooth and using comfortable and familiar controls for both motion and camera. We went through a lot of iterations on different movement and control mechanisms for flight, with and without physics, avatar motion and more before eventually settling on the system we use. Lots of complex math, management of server and local entities and custom animation controls all combine to let you move beyond your human avatar and become a soaring bird.

We worked very hard to make the world feel alive and dynamic. We’re proud that this is something you can leave on and just watch. (We've lost a lot of time just watching for fish to jump.)

Dynamic lighting proved a challenge at this scale, but we felt the day / night cycle was important to the world feeling real. Fireflies are an important part of the ecosystem at night. We want to add more interactions based on time of day in the future.

What we learned

We learned a lot about avatar animations, many forms of player and entity locomotion, customUI and custom input controls to pull together the ability for players to embody their land or air forest counterparts.

We learned a lot about animation techniques and workflows, continuing our Blender learnings. We learned what the limit of dynamics lights is in a world. We learned to stop worrying and chill with the frog band.

What's next for The Wilderness?

We'd like to add more animals and more quests and continue to make the ecosystem more and more interconnected and alive. Also, hoodies. We want to make animal hoodies with stats on them so you can show your bird love in other worlds.