Me and my team have spent the last three years of our lives creating a strange game about building a city on the back of a giant roaming creature called Onbu. We gave our game a name The Wandering Villageand decided that the relationship between the little villagers and the giant animal should be at the heart of the gaming experience. The player assumes the role of the village chief, ensuring the health and happiness of both the human population and their giant mount. This often becomes a balancing act as the wants and needs of the two entities are not always aligned.
One of our main inspirations for the game is the 1984 anime “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” by Hayao Miyazaki. The world of The Wandering Village is heavily inspired by the anime’s setting, a post-apocalyptic world where poisonous plants are spreading and gradually making life on earth impossible. This adds a survival aspect to the game. The villager and Onbu are interdependent and must work together to find a way out of this mess.
Because Onbu – which means piggyback ride in Japanese – is such a central part of the game, our team did their best to create a creature design that was monumental and cute at the same time, while also fitting into the world and making biological sense.
In its earliest design stages, Onbu was a flesh-and-blood beast. We wanted the player to feel like little fleas on the back of a giant dog. Players harvested dander of hair and skin while planting their harvest into the animal’s skin. However, we realized that this could be a bit off-putting for some people (including members of our own team), so we decided to turn Onbu into a creature made of earth and plants.
We wanted the player to feel like little fleas on the back of a giant dog… However, we found that this could be a bit off-putting…
Another challenge was finding a good overall shape for the giant beast. Our art team explored in all directions: from a turtle, to a wild boar, to a moose, to an armadillo, to a six-legged maned wolf. While a lot of these designs looked cool, we always had one big problem with them: how do we shape the back so the player can freely place their city on it? Ideally, it would have to be completely flat given the art style we decided to go with. Again, the “earth and plant” decision played into our hands, since it made much more sense for an earth creature to be shaped that way.
So far we are very pleased with the progress of development and look forward to continuing to work on the game together with our community. We have many plans for the coming months and would love to see you doing them.
The Wandering Village is now available in Game Pass and is exclusive to Xbox consoles.
The Wandering Village (game preview)
Stray Fawn Studio
$24.99
PC Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass
Free trial period
This game is in progress. It may change over time and may or may not be released as a final product. Buy it only if you are satisfied with the current state of the unfinished game. In a world where mysterious plants are spreading across the earth, emitting poisonous spores as they grow, a small group of survivors take shelter on the back of a giant, roaming creature they call “Onbu”. Become their leader, build their settlement and enter into a symbiotic relationship with the creature to survive together in this hostile yet beautiful post-apocalyptic world that now surrounds you. Build your village. A functioning village is the basis of your survival. Build your settlement and expand it over the creature’s back. Plan production chains and optimize them to use the limited space as efficiently as possible. Build a society that can rise to any challenge. Living on the back of another organism Living on the back of another organism presents its own set of challenges. Will you live in symbiosis, connecting with the creature and surviving on mutual trust? Or will you become the parasite just aiming to give your villagers a better life? It’s your decision. Discover different biomes. Travel through a variety of different biomes, customizing your village to accommodate their unique opportunities and threats. Explore your surroundings and send out foraging missions to collect rare resources and ancient artifacts. Research new technologies. Remnants of the ancient world hold knowledge that was long forgotten but can be unearthed by your villagers. Find and research these technologies, but use them wisely, as progress can be a double-edged sword. Survive the wasteland. Ensure the survival of both your villagers and your onbu, even as poisonous spores, unforgiving weather, blood-sucking parasites and many more challenges mean the odds are often against you. Visit www.thewanderingvillage.com for complete information on the current status of the game and how to provide feedback and report issues.
