#worlddesign

Ryan Anelowe

Currently open for work

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Creating an entire world with its own society can be difficult, and often we’re missing vital pieces of that society or world. Here are some tips to help you with that!

1. I like to save pictures of really cool places on Pinterest. I have a lot of futuristic and space art in there, and seeing what I have in mind come to life really helps me hash out the important details of my world. Sometimes seeing it in real life helps with describing your world in your story.

2. Referencing real cultures or religions can really help with specifics, like what’s acceptable in your society and what isn’t, and arguably more important, why. It’s also helps you create unique religions or belief systems, if you have any.

3. If your world is really complex and has a very different society then what most people know, it can be hard as a reader to understand your charcter’s motives. You want to explain (without info dumping,) what your world is. You can use things like narritive and conversations to slowly introduce the world you’ve made.

4. If you’re struggling with a magic system in your story, it’s a good idea to read some original fairytales or look into old pagan religions. These often have cool origins and magic items that you can change to fit your story as you please.

For everyone who believes ‘the world is yours’…

For pacing analysis, I chose Persona 5 as during my time with it, I felt it paced things very well.

The game does pacing through its year-long day-by-day calendar system. It uses an arc based system where it mostly introduces a villain of the month per arc. Each arc introduces a new character and contacts. Each arc has a deadline that the player must complete the heist and defeat the boss by, lest the face a non-default game over. It breaks up the repetitive structure to keeps things from getting stale, such as the summer vacation episode before the fifth arc, using it to foreshadow the sixth arc. Once the player catches up with the in media res episode, the pacing structure starts fluctuating wildly.

My criticism of this pacing is that it felt very predictable and could use a bit of breaking up, as noted by how uniform the first one-third the chart is. In practice, this wasn’t really a problem as the day-by-day system and the dynamism of the world kept the game’s pacing up.