Laurie's MA Games Design Blog

Preparation As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, I was tasked with coming up with five different mountain city concepts to present to Josh so that we could establish a direction to go ahead with. My goal was for these concepts to each be quite different takes on what it could be, within the limits of my brief of a closed off city in a rocky region. I started by making notes in a document so that I had an idea of what each concept was before starting on them: Aside from deciding on my five design variants, as you can see above, while I was making my notes I had a sudden idea for the surroundings of the city to be a vast maze of rock formations raised by the city founder around his city, rather than a naturally occurring landscape that he selected as the location for his secluded city. I have already done some rough work around this 'red forest' concept and am planning a blog post on it at some point. It also led to a chain of story related ideas that really excited me,...

 Initial Idea Since the last post on my near eastern project, I  have decided to move away from the Oasis City and onto the other major city in my game world, founded by the other of the two brothers. I knew that in contrast to the former, I wanted this second city to be closed off from the world outside as though its king had cocooned himself and his people away, in line with his inward-looking ideology. I therefore wanted to make it look and feel drastically different (within the bounds of this setting) from the oasis city, which is open and welcoming to all.  The first thing I decided was that it would be set within a different environment - whereas the oasis is located in the vast, empty sand dunes, this second city would be located in a mountainous, rocky region, which would lend itself to the city's secluded nature. For simplicity, I refer to it as the Mountain City for now. I searched online for other fantasy mountain city concepts, to see what sorts of things of h...