Designing the hexcrawl: Fukai, the cutoff test for the End Game

The following excerpt is from my unscripted ramblings in my discord, the Fistoverse. I highly recommend joining if you want high-quality rants like this consistently pumped directly into your brain 

Okay so here's what I'm thinking about the evil jungle section of the 'crawl

(Which, by the way, the term used to describe this thing in Nausicaa where I cribbed it from is pretty awesome: "腐海" or Fukai; "Rotten Sea")

(Yeesh, just thinking 'bout it gives me the willies)

Actually, I'm inspired by a bit of design from a youtube video I watched forever ago, let me dig it up:

Yeah here it is, back before Extra History sucked:

Vitriol Paradise is the Durlag's Tower of my hexmap, it's the endgame that's meant to cap off the 'crawl with a huge boom

Fukai is quite literally the border that separates it from the rest of the map, as you can see;

Yeah there we go

Vitriol Paradise is the orange bit in the bottom left, and Fukai is the green surrounding it

So I've got a few things I want Fukai to do, and the foremost is that it serves as an unavoidable test of "are you ready"

It's not like, impossible to sequence break here? Like you could conceivably get teleported directly past the jungle, or you could try to like fly over it with magic or a helicopter or something. But that just means you're the kind of player-power-over-avatar-strength player that can get past challenges at lower power levels, so that's still a qualifying test in my estimation

The rest of the hexmap is largely defined by its inhabitants; who you meet and what they're doing is the bulk of the content. Fukai doesn't have any inhabitants; nothing lives there but monsters

It's also vertical in two dimensions; the rest of the hexmap has two, the surface and the tunnels underneath, and the mountains have that plus altitude, but this one is the most permeable. Falling into the Labyrinth to escape is easier here, so easy that it often happens accidentally. And the vertical element of the super-tall spore-trees ensures that flying over doesn't really work (there are also plentiful flying monsters! See, I thought of that too)

The ease of access of the verticality both increases the "unavoidable" aspect (the tunnels here use Fukai enemies, unlike the standard variety) and allows for multiple paths to escape and turn back from enemies who turned out to be more dangerous than the players had expected

The big idea is this: if players go into the jungle, they will get into a fight

So the big thing is, since I want them to get into a fight, these bad guys have to be designed to test them

I'm actually working backward from the "boss thesis" IE "The boss is the final test of what the preceding gameplay taught you"

Naw son, these bosses are the entry-level test to make sure you're a Bad Enough Dude to survive in Vitriol Paradise

Well? Are you?!

What's a boss like this gonna test?

Obviously, your fists; so they've got to have big Ferocity to swallow those low-level scrub parties that swagger in here and need to get taught a lesson

But also, they've got to have the kind of mobility and/or scope that means running past them just means you die tired

They've got to be hard, so they can soak up those lucky alpha-strikes and coordinated booms and keep fighting. Ideally, I'll add some sort of "blooded" mechanic like in 4e so they go berserk if they're low on health

Finally, they need to test if you can deal with the passive deadliness of Vitriol Paradise, so they should work in tandem with the environment to increase the dangers to you. This is, strictly speaking, more Environment design than Enemy design, but one can design both to function as two parts of the same problem

Thankfully, I have the genius of Hayao freakin Miyazaki to help me here

To conclude: Fukai serves as the bouncer for the end stage of the hexcrawl. It does so by being present in the three vertical elevations and entire border of that area, by forcing you into a fight with incredibly powerful enemies who test your ability to survive in the final zone, and by allowing ample opportunity to run away if low-level players realize their mistake in the early game

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm just gonna continue having this cake and eating it too