It's been nearly a year since this game came out. Rather than make myself reflect or do a more traditional postmortem, I thought I would write about some of the less obvious technical aspects of this game before too much of it slips my mind. The single biggest piece of game design™ in By the World's Wind was creating the world itself. In making an open ocean game with no tutorials, no objectives, and an entirely optional, blank map, I had to put a lot of care into making sure that players could actually find their way around.

Let me illustrate the problem:

In a 2D, top-down game that takes place in an ocean,  it can be nigh impossible to tell where you are going or even if you are moving at all. While the latter was easy enough to solve by putting enough rocks and flotsam everywhere to serve as visual reference points, players would still often accidentally sail in circles and never run into land. Legend of Zelda games like Wind Waker, and Link's Awakening were big inspirations for this game. And while both of them have pretty open world designs, neither have this same problem. Wind Waker, which also takes place at sea, is a third-person, 3D game where the player controls the camera. You can always see islands and landmarks on the horizon, even at a great distance. In Link's Awakening, even the outdoor areas are laid out like a series of rooms, with a few obvious entrance and exit points in each screen. The game also has dirt paths in the grass to lead you to towns and other key landmarks. By the World's Wind instead takes place in a sort of negative space. Instead of large walls creating pockets of space, it has large open space with little pockets of walls.

I wanted to make a game where players could have fun exploring and discovering things on their own. Yet quite a few play testers said that they found the idea of navigating without a map or a goal quite stressful. Even though By the World's Wind does have a map that you can draw on yourself, the map is entirely optional — I still wanted the world to feel relaxing to navigate without its help.

So if I couldn't use a big obvious trick like narrow corridors or a dirt path, I would instead use a bunch of subtler tricks to help pull the player to important locations. Over the course of multiple rounds of play testing and iteration, I landed on these systems to help the player find their way.

• Island Placement
• Breadcrumb Trails
• Land Sounds
• Player Impact

Island Placement

The first trick is simple: Place enough interesting locations that players are bound to run into one quickly. When making these locations I also made sure that, if you traveled in a straight line in any direction away from it, that you would end up at another location quickly. If not, I would add a landmark or adjust the position of the island. I also gave islands regional themes. The four regions with their own distinct scenery and ocean colors help break up the world into more manageable chunks.

Breadcrumb Trails

The decorative objects in the ocean, like rocks, barrels, driftwood, and flags also serve a practical purpose. They often form lines or breadcrumb trails connecting one island to another. The colored flags scattered around the world are actually trail markers, with each color corresponding to an important location. While most players did not figure out the flags literal meaning, they tended to follow the trails of same-colored flags anyway. This was great for me because it made people far more likely to actually find the places I put the most care into.

Land Sounds

Another way I tried to overcome the restriction of not being able to see into the distance was with sound. In the game, you can hear land well before you can see it. The game has multiple different background tracks that play depending on location and weather. As you get closer to land, the sound of the ocean gets quieter and you begin to hear waves on the shore and birds chirping. The game even uses a stereo effect so, if you use headphones or nice speakers, you can hear whether land is to your left or right. A few special places even have music that gets louder as you approach. I also used this technique to make players run into dolphins more often. Before I added the sound of them splashing in the distance, a lot of people wouldn't find them.

Player Impact

In the first round of play tests, treasure chests and pots were purely decorative objects. I knew I would get feedback about it (and I did), I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do with them. Almost everyone suggested I make the pots smashable and put money in the chests, but I really didn't want the main character to go around breaking or stealing people's stuff, especially without consequences. I wasn't spending much effort on this problem until I received one important piece of feedback. One player, who told me they have a terrible sense of direction, said that they often rely on seeing which treasure is already empty and what stuff is broken to tell if they have been somewhere already. After that I made sure to give treasure and pots some form of interactivity so they could be used as a navigation tool. I eventually settled on planting flowers in the pots. It was a great revelation when I realized pots are supposed to hold stuff and I could just use them for their intended purpose.

While some giant arrows that say "go this way" could have solved this navigation problem with less effort, adding various little systems that gently encourage the player to find important locations made them feel that they were on their own journey rather than a journey being laid out for them. One final thing that I did to encourage exploration is the feature that gives this game its name. Because the wind randomly changes direction, the player is encouraged to go find somewhere new every few minutes. I wanted people to be free to follow the wind.