games as a kid! I’ve made many games before in a variety of genres,” explains McMaster. “They were all hosted on my
itch.io account. This is just my first Steam game! I’ve also been making art, mostly of monster designs, for a long time on Tumblr.” “Having grown up with the console, I loved how exploration felt in those games. As the years went on, fewer and fewer games captured that same feeling for me, so I wanted to fill that void,” continues McMaster, with enthusiasm. “I believe there is a strength to games made with such drastic limitations, and that those limitations are what facilitate those magical feelings of adventure in the first place. Low fidelity graphics means you have to use your imagination. Small environments means every part of them is important and worth checking out. “I didn’t have the PlayStation 1 or Sega Saturn consoles growing up, so I don’t have the same familiarity with the benefits of their styles. It’s important to work with what you know, I feel.” There were several important elements that needed to be achieved in order for Cavern of Dreams to accurately capture the distinct look for the Nintendo 64 then, despite the game coming to PC, rather than the now dated console hardware. “I needed to make sure the game had bright, rich colors,” explains McMaster. “Specifically, using vertex coloring rather than real time lighting, although it would be cool to see both combined. I also wanted small, densely packed environments that use textures, instead of geometry for details. That and lots of sparkly particles. N64 games loved sparkles.
“The N64 also used a lot of low-fidelity assets like small textures, and simpler models made up of detached parts,” McMaster continues. “How much you’d lean into that is a matter of taste, of course.”
DESIGN CHALLENGES
A large focus of any exploration-driven 3D platformer is often spent on making sure the sandbox levels themselves are fun to get around, and that they have lots of things in them that people actually want to do. For McMaster, that meant a lot of playtesting and iteration - by both himself and other people. “Fynn’s movement was very important to me and I spent a lot of time refining it,” says McMaster. “I’m still not totally satisfied with how it turned out, but I think the physics of the rolling move and how it cooperates with the rest of the moves that you unlock is still enjoyable. The game’s levels went through many iterations as well; I think for a sandbox- style 3D platformer like this, having levels that invisibly guide the player toward the points of interest and collectibles is paramount, as otherwise players will quickly get frustrated or lost. The last two worlds, which are bigger, were especially difficult to design for this reason!
“At first I also struggled to find a direction to take the gameplay in - that’s why playtesting was so helpful. I was able to isolate what people enjoyed and what they didn’t.” As for which retro design elements to bring forward, and which to leave in the past, those choices mostly went back to the feelings in particular that McMaster was trying to evoke.
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