The Wonj

Devlog 5: looks, towns, cattails, and the first finds

The world filled in. Wanderers stopped being copies of one figure, towns appeared, the grass and the shores got plants, and there are now things out in the world worth going to find.

A look for every wanderer

Each wanderer now gets a look of its own when it appears: one of a few hairstyles, and its own colours for skin, hair, shirt and shoes. Both hands share the same skin, so every figure still reads as one person. The player keeps a single default look for now.

The player stands among wanderers on sandy terraces, each with different hair and clothes: a red-haired figure in a red shirt, a blond one, a grey spiky-haired one, a brown ponytail. Cliffs and pines rise behind.

Towns

Towns are rare: a handful of houses, shops and sometimes a tavern gathered round a round square of packed dirt, every building turned to face it. Bigger towns usually have a fountain in the middle; small ones rarely do. When the rim of the square is full, the rest of the buildings line the roads out of town, facing the road. The roads curve away into the hills and fade into the grass.

The ground is smoothed flat for the whole town, and where a hill still leaves a gap, buildings stand on foundations, with the land easing back to its usual shape at the edges.

A town seen from above: timber-framed houses with brown roofs round a dirt square with a blue fountain in the middle, dirt roads running out across the grass, a lake to the left and snowy pine slopes to the right.

Grass and cattails

Tufts of grass, each a few separate blades, are back across the grassland, tinted to match the ground they grow on. Cattails grow in clumps close to the water, taller than a person. Both are there to look at: you walk straight through them.

The player on a sandy shore facing the camera, with clumps of cattails along the water's edge, grassy terraces behind and a few houses on the hill beyond.

The first finds

There are now things to pick up, each tied to a kind of place. Wild herbs grow thickest near towns and thin out further away. Mountain flowers grow on cliff tops, crystals lie deep in the caves, and old relics turn up only far from any town. The harder the place, the rarer the find.

Get close and a prompt names it; press E to pick it up, whether standing, climbing or hanging off a cliff. Finds go into a pack, shown on screen as a line per kind. The pack has limited room, and full means full: nothing is forced, and when to head home is your call. A find you take stays gone.

The player in a grey cave chamber beside a small blue crystal on the floor, with a prompt above reading E: pick up crystal. The same cave with the crystal gone, and in the corner of the screen the pack's list now showing one crystal.

It's the first piece of the game's first loop: going out, gathering, and coming home with a haul.