So people have been asking me about how I came up with the setting for Baum, as it apparently is one of the features that is most memorable about the game.
As I briefly mentioned in its postmortem, this was actually the first* game in which the gameplay was inspired by a general setting and not purely by abstract mechanics. The high concept was to make a game in which the player directs the roots of a tree and has to collect certain things and avoid touching certain other things.
*excluding Mini Tanks, but that's a different story...
When it came to deciding on what these certain things should be in the final game, I mainly took three aspects into consideration and asked myself various questions on each:
- Context: What is the setting of the game? What kinds of object would appear believable in the context?
- Function: What is the object's function in the game? Is it passive or active? How does it move/behave/interact with other objects? Should players perceive it as a "good", "neutral" or "bad" object?
- Visual Appeal: Is the object interesting to look at? Is it easily distinguishable from other objects? Does it draw the players attention? Does it distract the player?
As this was my first experience with explicitly thinking about setting, I'm sure this list is all but complete. Hopefully, it will grow and improve over the course of future projects.
There are not that many objects in Baum, so I'm going to briefly explain why I chose each of them.
Bones
The first decision I made was about what the collectibles should be. They had to be static objects (catching moving objects turned out too difficult) and they had to be underground. Based on that, bones came to mind pretty quickly. I really liked the idea of a tree silently and secretly devouring human remains beneath a graveyard, which was a perfect fit for the creepy mood which had developed over time. I did have some concern about the symbolic implications of bones, thinking maybe players wouldn't want to collect them at first (which turned out to be true). But I decided to keep them anyway and risk players not getting what they were supposed to do on their first try.
Spiders
The enemies in the game also had to be underground, but mobile. Also, it had to be something that would make players really uncomfortable when crawling up their arms. Worms or maggots would probably have been a better fit for the underground setting, but considering the unpredictable movement pattern, spiders made more sense to me. Also, the black silhouette of a spider draws the players attention much more, and makes for a great contrast with the white bones.
Balloons
The balloons came into being mostly because I wanted to use the space above ground in some way and add an additional (yet optional) challenge with moving collectibles. They started out as birds, but I quickly replaced them with happy balloons. My intention was to create a humorous contrast to liven up the mood and make it even more bizarre than before. And players really seemed to enjoy it.
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