Everseed 🌱 Creative Direction

How we found our creative seeds for growing a new world 🧭

Hi everyone!

Today we will be sharing our creative direction for Everseed with a primary focus on digging deep into the worldbuilding and art direction for the game. Before we do that, let’s first talk about why we even have a creative direction.

You can think of a creative direction like a compass. Creative decision-making in game development can often feel like being lost in the wilderness. There are a lot of potential directions you can take creatively—many of them could be right, but some of them probably wouldn’t make sense with the type of game you would want to make. Up front, you won’t precisely know all the exact directions you would need to get to your destination, but with a compass, you could know the right general direction to move towards. A creative direction helps all the individuals on a game team making independent creative decisions move together in the same direction, enabling a cohesion in creative development across large teams of people. When an individual artist, writer, or designer needs to make an ultimately subjective decision, they can look to the creative direction for guidance.

So what is Everseed’s creative direction? Like many parts of our game direction, our creative direction is broken down into four creative pillars, each framed from the perspective of a player in Everseed:

1. Players exist in a relatable fantasy world
   We want the magical parts of our world to be lively, wondrous, and fantastical in a way that captures the imagination and creates immersion, but we also recognize that going too deep into fantasy can be a turn off for many people. We want to creatively ground our fantasy in a lot of relatable real-world concepts so that it's effortless to immerse yourself in our world, while making some of the more complex systems in our game easier to understand.

2. Players are protectors & nurturers of their world

   The primary way players should be interacting with the world around them is by protecting what is great and nurturing what could be great. The ultimate aim for the motivation of a player should be to improve the world around them, whether that’s in our core gameplay like cleansing the Blight from natural spaces, around our gameplay by growing and building things with your friends, or on a meta-level by fostering a healthy community. 

3. Players seek adventures with each corner of uncharted territory

   A big emotional drive for the Everseed player is the call to adventure. Everseed’s core adventure gameplay is filled with uncertainty and danger—rewards are not earned without equivalent risk. At the same time, the arc of a player is to grow and learn over time by facing down the fear of the unknown and adapting to the challenges along the way. Each player has the ability to opt into the level of adventure risk they feel comfortable with or take as long of a break between adventures as needed, choosing to spend time instead in our safer social spaces.

4. Players can be apart, but are never alone

   While players are highly connected to their friends and community in the safer spaces of Everseed, players will spend their time adventuring without other players. However, even if they are technically playing solo, the player should continue to feel connected to their world and never feel alone. Whether it’s the presence of the player’s companion or the omnipresence of social systems within our game, an Everseed player should never feel truly isolated.

Now that you have a good sense of our creative direction, let’s dive into more detail, starting with our worldbuilding.

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The World of Everseed

Everseed is set in a fictional, pre-industrial fantasy world where players will be able to explore a wide variety of different lands and environments. Magic is ever-present in this world, but it doesn’t always behave in ways you’d expect.

Once a place where the different peoples thrived and expanded civilization, the world is now dangerous and wild—putting society on its defensive back foot. The land having been transformed into something hostile, communities have had to congregate in isolated sanctuaries, where they can live relatively safely.

What went wrong?

The source of all magic in Everseed is a peculiar element known as everite. It has its source deep below the surface of the earth, and for a long time it was only accessible in rare, difficult-to-reach locations around the world. It can take a myriad of forms and is unpredictable in its natural state.

Eventually, every significant human culture managed to harness everite in its own way, allowing them to create technologies beyond imagining. However, at a certain point many years ago, human greed led to an industrial catastrophe that corrupted everite at its very source, leading to a phenomenon known as the Blight.

Most of the dangers in this world can be attributed to the spread of this Blight. Now almost totally toxic, everite spreads through the world and thoroughly transforms it, affecting everything it touches. Through its ubiquity it unleashes all manner of calamities upon the world and its people.

Who are we?

When designing the different cultures of our game’s characters, we wanted to reflect the diversity of our own world. Though no culture is specifically inspired by a real-world counterpart, hopefully players can see something they recognize in the game and maybe even see a bit of themselves. 

The five primary cultures in the game are the Druhn, Twell, Boriu, Nythiri, and Piyana.

The Druhn come from a vast, central plains area. According to legend, the world’s earliest peoples first settled in these flood plains—an incredible legacy for the Druhn! Largely a stern and practical people, they have perfected their farming and ranching skills over the generations through a deep connection to the land.

In the dense temperate forests of the west once lived the Twell. Expert gardeners, the Twell are intimately familiar with the great variety of botanical wonders that abound in the forest, and have created a unique means of breeding new plant species. The Twell tend to form loosely structured communities, guided by a free-spirited attitude and playful sense of mischief.

For many years, the great mountain ranges of the south were the domain of the Boriu culture. Stone masons, artisans and metalsmiths form the foundations of this society. Creativity and transformation are key ideals to the Boriu, who are known far and wide for the impeccably crafted artworks.

The Nythiri culture flourished in the deserts of the southeast despite the unforgiving climate. Through sheer ingenuity and perseverance, they became one of the most technologically advanced of all the world’s civilizations. Science and power form the cornerstone of the Nythiri’s outlook on the world.

Mere miles northwest of the mainland is the large island that the Piyana called home. Originally composed of small fishing communities, the Piyana eventually formed a majestic city in the bay to facilitate trade with mainlanders. As a whole, they have sought to find balance and harmony in all matters of life, inspired by the intricate interplay of the elements of nature that surround them.

Regardless of their cultural roots, most of the people you’ll meet in the world of Everseed will be from one of the few sanctuary cities where they can live safe from the dangers of the Blight. As such, these “hub” cities are true wonders of diversity, where the traditions and personalities of all these cultures can commingle, interacting with and influencing each other.

Who are you?

As a player character in Everseed, you will take on the role of a ranger. Rangers have the important job of going out into the world together with their loyal companions to plant everseeds and cleanse the blighted groves that dot the landscape. To protect themselves from the harms of Blight, rangers have to consume a special elixir. In addition to this basic layer of protection, the elixir also provides rangers a number of modest abilities, such as a sixth sense that alerts them to the presence of extremely high concentrations of everite and Blight.

To become a ranger, all you have to do is raise your hand. In this time of great struggle, there is no shortage of need for those willing and able to brave the wilds for the benefit of the community.

Now that you have an idea about the world of Everseed, let’s take a deeper look at the art direction.

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Art Direction & Visual Style

When we started concepting the world of Everseed, we wanted to create visuals that appeal to everyone and mesh well with the gameplay. Looking towards games like Zelda, Genshin, Pokémon, and many other fantasy games for inspiration, we started by collecting reference materials and creating concept art for the various elements that we would like to see in the game. From this, we established our art direction, which has four pillars:

1. Fantasy with present-day realism
   The fantasy genre allows us to create out-of-this-world concepts, but we felt that it would be appropriate to ground some of the familiarity among players. This allows us to create a unique world that is more believable and fun to engage in. The theme we are aiming for can be described as a modern medieval fantasy, where the wardrobe, props, and even environmental assets are a mix of new and old. 

2. Colorful & vibrant
   We want the game to be colorful—not just in the art, but in the story and culture as well. Many other games just borrow liberally from Western medieval or Japanese designs, but in Everseed we want to incorporate influences from other cultures that aren't often seen in many games. As a team that has members from different parts of the world, we bring ideas from our own cultures into our concepts to create interesting designs. 

3. Simplified & readable

   

   This is one of the important visual rules for our game especially when creating characters, creatures, and props. Most of the game assets are scaled quite small on screen so small details often get lost. In our art style, we ensure that we can provide strong shape designs while keeping certain cool details and making sure that all assets are easily readable to aid players in their gameplay.

4. “2.5D” isometric style

   

   In choosing this style, we wanted to combine the appeal of a traditional hand-painted look with 3D models. This would give our in-game assets more personality and uniqueness in their design. We use a toon-like line art style to give characters and assets a stylized appearance similar to anime or other 2D cartoons. On the 3D side, we managed to create shaders that create a cell-shaded shadow that complements the style as well.

Let’s now dive into some examples of art direction for different types of content in Everseed.

Character Avatars

There were multiple iterations when it came to designing the proportions and style of our characters. Following the art direction pillar of simplifying our designs, we settled on a chibi-inspired style. There are multiple reasons why we opted for this path, but the most significant would be good readability of the character at a small scale on screen. We want to be able to present interesting details while still making them visible from afar. As for facial features, we iterated more closely to a broadly appealing anime style while maintaining some of our original chibi design elements:

Character avatars can be customized in certain aspects such as their skin color, hair, eyes, headgear, upper clothing, etc. The outfits of the character avatars reflect the theme, which is a modern medieval fantasy. The world of Everseed takes place in a somewhat “post-apocalyptic” world, so a lot of the clothing looks more handmade and mix-and-matched with different fabrics and props. We like to imagine our players coming across varied items on their adventures and then using them to create outfits to their liking.

Companions

This was where we started when concepting for Everseed—we had a lot of fun brainstorming “pun-ny names” that mixed animal and plant elements together. You can see some examples in our Dandelion, Corgiflower, Cattus, and many more.¹ As fun as puns may be, we ultimately decided we wanted to be freer in our concept process, so now we instead combine animals with different natural or magical elements. This also allows our companions to embody a variety of personalities, such as cute, edgy or silly, which can shine both in concept and animation.

Tower Plants & Enemies

For our tower plant visuals, we wanted to incorporate their abilities and elements into the plant’s base design. We originally took inspiration from games like Plants vs. Zombies, but shifted concepts to match our style and design direction. 

We like to create a strong contrast between our tower plants and enemies by using distinctive shapes and colors. Tower plants are more saturated and colorful whereas enemies have a monochromatic color scheme and more angular shape language.

Environment

There are distinct visual differences between our tower defense game maps and our social hub city environment. We wanted the tower defense maps to feel more risky and wild than a safe and relaxed space like the social hub. We achieved this by adjusting the background concepts as well as mood lighting for each space. The tower defense maps have darker tones overall. Characteristics of the environment can be seen around the edges of the map, while various runes in the center symbolize the magic in the area. We will explore adding more tones to create different times of day for each layout, and iterating a lot more on the appearance of these environments to capture things visually well like the Blight.

Social Hub

Our social hub is a place where all cultures coexist and live in harmony. We wanted to create a feeling of belonging and safety after players are done exploring the wilderness. When designing the city, we blocked out specific areas to create enough space for players to explore and interact with one another. Here are some very early WIP sketches and ideas:

There is a deep narrative that is woven into our worldbuilding and we want this to shine through in our environment design, but we are still in the process of finalizing the city’s concepts. One of the big tasks is to make the five cultures outlined above feel different within our city through methods like shape design, iconography, colors, patterns, and references to real-life architectural structures.

That wraps up our overview of the Creative Direction for Everseed. We are excited to share further progress with you over time as we continue to iterate and refine our narrative, art, audio, and all the other creative elements that make a game great. We will be hosting an text-based AMA on our Discord this week, so if you have any questions about the creative direction of Everseed, please feel free to drop in and ask!

Incorgnita
Naomi, Game Director

Jazzy
Jaslynn, Art Lead

HBBONG
Hannah, Lead Producer

1. All companion names are WIP.