Distant Bloom | Sebastian Lund

Genre

Adventure/Crafting

Engine

Unreal

Platform

PC/Switch

About

Distant Bloom is a cozy management and exploration game far away from home!

After a long expedition through space, you and your crew land on an alien planet with the critical mission of establishing a new home for your species. But this place is very different from the vision you saw through your telescope. What happened to the verdant life of this world? And what will happen to you?

Contributions

Gameplay Design

Revised the design of several gameplay mechanics and systems in response to user feedback and to more closely align with the project's core pillars.
Handled the balancing of the game's various puzzles, resources, and unlockables.

Level Design

Did extensive iterative work on a majority of the game's levels/regions, bringing them from blockout to final versions.
Revised much of the world design to accommodate changes to the critical path and progression gating.

Quest Design & Implementation

Implemented a majority of the game's quests, dialogue, and cutscenes.
Revised the player onboarding experience.

Narrative Design

Revised sections of the narrative to accommodate changes to the critical path.
Assisted the team's writer by adding supplementary character dialogue to a large number of quests.

Steam Page

Section Navigation

Game Design

Level Design

Content Design

Game Design

The Planting System

A low-intensity, puzzle-like system where players fill areas consisting of hexagonal grids with plants of varying types, in order to make sure that each grid contains a certain level of biodiversity (e.g., containing multiple types of vegetation). Depending on the number of varying plant types adjacent to each plant, each of them can reach varying states of growth.

With no adjacent types that differ from its own, no growth occurs.

With one adjacent plant of another type nearby, they both grow to a sustainable state.

With two adjacent plants of varying types nearby, they all grow into a blooming state.

Blooming
A blooming plant serves two functions for the player.

It enables the player to harvest its seeds (and eventually other parts).

Plants automatically attempt to spread their seeds to an adjacent cell.

Completion Requirements - Old

Prior to the final version, the requirements for a planting grid to be considered completed was as follows:

1. Each cell of the grid had to contain a plant.

2. Each plant had to reach the blooming state.

The resulting gameplay experience proved problematic for a few reasons:

The experience was reported to feel repetitive in the long term, with each grid usually containing very similar-looking vegetation upon completion. Despite all plants having varying visuals depending on their growth stage, they all had to be blooming in order for a grid to be considered completed.
The plant spreading mechanic that occurred when a plant reached the blooming state could often prove to be more of a hindrance than an assistance for the player, as it simply looked for any adjacent vacant cell to populate.

Completion Requirements - Revised

In order to try and alleviate these issues, the requirements for grid completion were eased, with plants now only required to be in a sustainable state in order for a grid to be considered complete. This meant the requirements now looked like this:

1. Each cell of the grid had to contain a plant.

2. Each plant had to reach the sustainable state.

The intentions behind this change were to allow for the following:

To speed up the general grid completion process and allow for more visual diversity, as a grid could now consist of plants of varying growth states.
To improve the spreading mechanics' usefulness, as having two plants of the same type adjacent to one another was now less likely to be a detriment when completing a grid.
Lastly, it aimed to make the act of having a plant reach the blooming state optional rather than a necessity, either being used to trigger the spreading effect or in order to harvest a plant's specific resources.

While this change lowered the overall difficulty of the planting puzzles, the system still featured other mechanics that would add to the puzzle complexity over time, such as plants requiring specific soil types or objects/NPCs that would obstruct cells on the grid.

The Cooking System - Old

A system that utilizes the resources gathered from plants to create various food items, either used as quest items or as gifts to be given to the player characters' various crewmates to improve their relationships.

Initially, the player process for utilizing the system followed these steps:

Gather materials from blooming and fertilized plants.

Bring materials to the pantry station, converting them to ingredients

Visit the chef and select a recipe to prepare.

Following playtest feedback, the system was reported to contain a few pain points for the players:

The system reportedly felt cumbersome and overly time-consuming.
Despite having a journal to aid resource tracking, it proved difficult for players to keep track of the various materials and ingredients, as well as which plants contained what resources.

The Cooking System - Revised

To streamline the cooking process, materials were removed, and players were instead allowed to harvest ingredients directly from the plants. This removed the need for the pantry in the cooking process, speeding up the process for players while also reducing the amount of resources to keep track of.

Gather ingredients from blooming and fertilized plants.

Visit the chef and select a recipe to prepare.

Besides removing materials, the following additional changes were also made to make ingredient gathering easier:

The total amount of ingredients was reduced from 16 to 8, with each of the remaining ones being divided between the game's 8 explorable regions.
Each region's various types of indigenous plants were altered to all provide the same ingredient, making sure players only had to hunt down (or grow ) any plant from a specific region to harvest its indigenous ingredient.
The names of the remaining ingredients were altered to feature descriptors that represented the region they're indigenous to, such as the ingredient found in the game's snowy environment being called "frozen flora".

Click on the above image for a larger view

Game Balancing

Handled all game balance adjustments for the project when moving into the final production period, creating various documentation and visual aids in order to track important information and get a complete overview of the tasks at hand.

Plant configurations and resources

Documenting important plant actor components, configurations, traits, and in-game information displayed.
Adjusted all plants, making sure there is no overlap between their available soil types, a parameter used to determine what planting areas they can be used in.
As planting area completion served to unlock both new paths and quests, balancing their availability to players was crucial in order not to break progression.

Click on the above image for a larger view

Cooking and Crafting

Tracked all of the available cooking and crafting aspects, such as recipes, ingredient progression,
and in-game information displayed.
Overhauled most recipes and ingredient configurations in conjunction with revising the cooking system.

Click on the above image for a larger view

Planting area availability and progression

Mapped out all planting puzzles, using color coding and various characters in order to visualize their availability to the player.
As the completion of these puzzles was the primary gating mechanism for player progression, balancing how many of them were available to the player at any point was crucial.

Planting Area Map [1 -12]

Planting puzzles available on game start, with required [S] and optional areas marked.

Planting Area Map [4 - 12]

Further progressed map, with color codes and further markers added to indicate accesibility requirements.

Planting Area Map [12 - 12]

Final map with all plant puzzles and their requirements marked.

Planting Area Map [1 -12]

Planting puzzles available on game start, with required [S] and optional areas marked.

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Click on the image and use the arrow keys to navigate the image gallery

Level Design

World Structure & Design Limitations

The world of Distant Bloom consists of a base/hub area and eight interconnected regions, with all but one of these regions being divided into two sub-regions. The exception being the volcano region, which serves as the final area and climax of the game. Each region's initial area serves as an introduction to new biomes and introduces new story and gameplay elements, whereas their later halves are meant for revisiting later on in the story.

Click on the above image for a larger view

As of joining the project, the size of the world and most regions/areas were already locked in, as were their general themes. As such, all level design work from that point on was primarily focused on iterating on what was in place, keeping the general layout intact while aiming to improve the experience along the critical path, the pacing of optional content, and balancing progression gating. With this in mind, my fellow designer Ludwig Sjöstedt and I established the following targets to aid us in the iteration process:

Push to maintain a general pace among all areas' critical paths, primarily making sure that areas with larger play spaces do not become drawn out.
Keep backtracking to a minimum along the critical path, always aiming to provide easily accessible returning paths.
Allow for ample opportunities for optional exploration along the critical path.
Focus on incorporating opportunities for vistas that can provide players with both guidance and scenic views of their efforts to revitalize each area.

Revision Example: Forest - Giant Grove

Below is a top-down blockout image taken from one of the first areas I worked on, showing the state of it as I joined.

A general idea of the area was already established, with the then-current critical path following a large main road (blocked out in brown), moving through the first forest sub-region and passing by the area's main quest objective.

The surrounding white/greybox areas were designated as optionally explorable areas, filled with various resources and plant puzzles.

Click on the above image for a larger view

Click on the above image for a larger view

Below is a walkthrough video of the final version of the area as seen in the shipped game. Besides iterations based on our established targets, this area (and many others) also saw additional changes based on alterations to the game's narrative and quest structure. These changes included additional quest elements and alterations to the game's progression structure, changing an otherwise fairly linear experience into one where the player was regularly provided with choices on where to go next.