Pre-visualization

You pick up a book by your favorite author, crack the cover and begin reading. The words flow smoothly from scene to scene, and in a couple days, you're done.

Maybe it's not a book, maybe it's a game. You log in, create a character, skim over text describing the various archetypes available to you, pick one, jump into the game world. You find yourself in a city somewhere. There are people who are controlled by the game, people who are controlled by other players, and if the game is very high quality, domesticated animals wandering through the streets and birds flying overhead. It takes just a few seconds to absorb the scene, a minute to read your first quest dialog, and then you're headed out to kill monsters and gain experience.

Getting to that point in the creative process, however, is never quite so simple.

Whether it's a bestselling novel, an ingame city, or a game quest dialog box, the process starts with pre-visualization of the final scene. No professional writer jumps in and starts writing, or not many of them anyway. They start with an outline, a descriptive draft, and sometimes, sketches and maps. It's only after all the pieces are in place that they start writing the block of text which after weeks of revision and rewriting, will become the opening page of a novel, a city scene in a game, or a quest description in a dialog box.

So that's what I've been doing the past few days. Thinking, imagining, and pre-visualizing the portion of the world that I will spend the next couple of months writing about. I've decided the wildlands will have three sections, each defined by altitude: oak forest on the valley floor, hardwood forest on the slopes, and an alpine forest in the higher elevations.

I started thinking about the oak forest first and trying to define it. I started here, because this will be the first wildlands players will encounter. A primeval oak forest is a very interesting ecology and there are very few examples remaining in the modern world. Not only is oak a highly desirable hardwood for furniture and house fittings, a primeval oak forest is a dark, frightening place. As oak leaves decay they fill the surrounding soil with an acid that prevents the growth of most grasses, flowers, and shrubs. As they age, an oak tree's trunk and canopy expand, which also expands the dead area beneath. In a fully mature, untouched oak forest, there are massive oaks with trunks two meters thick and huge canopies that each cover nearly a third of a football field. The canopy of each tree entangles with its neighbors until the total canopy becomes so dense that in summer almost no sunlight reaches the forest floor. Depending on where in the world the forest is, some version of either Spanish Moss or Mistletoe feeds off the bark, growing in clusters and creating an eerie, ghostly ambience in winter.

Oak forests are not completely devoid of life, however. Squirrels, chipmunks, mice, and other small mammals feed off the acorns. In spring, many varieties of birds make their nests in the lower branches. The rotting leaf floor that prevents the growth of grasses and shrubs, encourages worms, ants, and dozens of insect species that feed the birds. Fallen branches and dead trees provide food for many types of mushrooms and fungi, which in turn become food for many types of beetles. There are even a few beetles that feed on the oak trees, boring deep into the trunks and laying eggs which become grubs. Mistletoe flowers sustain moths, and a few butterflies as well. Occasionally a dead tree trunk will become home to a beehive that flies to meadows as far as five miles away to gather nectar.

Lacking tall grasses and heavy shrubs, all those small animals and birds have a hard time finding hiding places, which makes them easy pickings for foxes, small cat species such as bobcats, and sometimes even a far ranging wolf pack.

They do tend to be quite dark, however, and in a game like this one, rather than building tension after awhile darkness becomes kind of boring. So one of the things I'm trying to do is look for ways to inject some color into the oak forest. Not a lot, but patches here and there. One idea I came up for doing this is to create a colorful mushroom species that doesn't exist in the real world. If it makes it into the game, clusters of five or ten scattered through the forest will provide both much needed color and another resource for players to gather, encouraging them to leave the safety of the road and venture deeper into the forest where they'll encounter a variety of enemies, some quite deadly.

And assuming the display link works, below is the mushroom I envisioned. It has a rainbow-colored trunk, a two-tone brown and tan cap, and medium brown fins under the cap. At about a foot tall, it won't be very big, but in clusters of five or ten, the brightly colored trunks will provide easy to see spots of color that will tempt a passerby to leave the path and harvest their bounty, or maybe die trying.

Barrell Mushroom