Harvest Quest: Level Design - Town Level

The process of designing the Town Level was more complicated than the Farm Level. The major problem is taking into consideration all of the activity that would be theoretically going on there. With the Farm Lever, the primary aspects you have to take into consideration is the farmer (player) and what they would be doing there (raising crops). For the Town Level, there would be people walking around, going shopping, saying hello to their friends and neighbors. A town would need to facilitate this kind of activity.

Once aspect that I knew would be critical was what I call the "community area". It is difficult to find a Farming Sim game of this genre that doesn't feature a large open area somewhere in town. This area is often used in-game for seasonal events and festivals. I feel like this is extremely important to the overall design of the game, as it emphasizes the importance of community to the town, as well as to the player. To further emphasize this importance, I decided to start with the community center in the middle of the town and work from there.

The first design is very simple, but extremely modular. The buildings are arranged in a way where we could move them, remove them, do mostly anything and not have to worry about the overall town layout. This would help us avoid possible issues down the line in production. The inspiration is primarily from the town design in "Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. The grid layout made remembering where everything was much easier when I was young, so I designed the layout with that in mind after placing the community area in the center.

The second design is more aesthetically pleasing, but sacrifices some of the modality in the process. The town has a large area right in the middle of town that all of the townsfolk would nearly always cross to go anywhere. The circular design of the community area also creates a nice contrast with the rigid lines of the streets. The primary inspiration behind this design is "Rune Factory 4", as I have always remembered the large area in town and how characters could often be found idling there relaxing.

After discussing it with the team, we decided to go with the second design. While it does sacrifice some of the modality, we are pretty far in the development process for this demo and don't have anything planned that could result in a serious rework of the level layout. The better aesthetics is also extremely important, as it is important to make a quick impact since this is a small demo. However, the largest reason for going with the second design is the layout of the town overall. The player only needs to walk forward to be able to see the rest of the town in the second design, and the community area being visible when the player enters the scene encourages them to explore. Once they have, they are able to see all the routes around town and can navigate them as they please. With the first design, the grid layout makes it so that if a player is sitting down to have a quick play session of the demo, they could easily miss most of the town or not feel that compelled to explore.

And with that, the Town Level is complete! Now to add the props to both this level and the Farm Level! That may come a bit later however, as the battle system design is up next!