My team and I have spent the last three years of our lives creating a strange game about building a city on the back of a giant, wandering creature called Onbo. We called our game The Wandering Village, and decided that the relationship between the small villagers and the giant beast should be the focal point of the game experience. The player takes on the role of village leader, maintaining the health and happiness of the human population and their giant mountain. It often becomes a balancing act because the wants and needs of the two entities do not always align.
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 Draws a lot of inspiration from the setting of the anime, a post-apocalyptic world where poisonous plants are spreading and gradually making life on the ground impossible. It adds a survival aspect to the game. The village and Onbo depend on each other and have to find a way out of this mess together.
With Onbu – which means riding in Japanese – being such a central part of the game, our team tried their best to come up with a creature design that is monumental and cute at the same time, while fitting into the world and making sense from a biological perspective.
In its earliest design states, Onbo was a flesh-and-blood animal. We wanted the player to feel like tiny fleas on the back of a giant dog. Players would harvest hair and skin scales while planting their crop in the animal’s skin. However we realized that this might bother some people (including our team members) and so we decided that Unbu should be made into a creature made of earth and plants.
We wanted the player to feel like tiny fleas on the back of a huge dog… but we realized that it might be a bit disturbing…
Another challenge was finding a good overall shape for the giant beast. Our art team explored in all directions: starting with a turtle, moving on to a pig, a moose, an armadillo and even a six-legged wolf. While many of these designs looked cool, we always had one big problem with them – how do we design the back so that the player can freely place their city on it? Ideally, it would need to be completely flat, given the art style we’ve decided on. Here, the ‘land and plant’ decision again played into our hands as it made much more sense for a land creature to be designed that way.
So far, we are very pleased with how development is progressing and look forward to continuing to work on the game together with our community. We have a lot of plans for the coming months and we would love to see you come along for the ride.
The Wandering Village Out on Game Pass now, and available exclusively on Xbox consoles.
The Wandering Village (game preview)
Stray Fawn Studio
$24.99
PC Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass
Free trial
This game is a work in progress. It may or may not change over time as a final product. Only buy if you are comfortable with the current state of the unfinished game. In a world where mysterious plants are spreading across the planet, emitting poisonous spores as they grow, a small group of survivors seek shelter on the back of a giant, wandering creature they call ‘Onbu’. Become their leader, build their settlement and form 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 on the creature’s back. Design and optimize production chains to utilize limited space as efficiently as possible. To create a company that can overcome any challenge. Living on the creature’s back Living on the back of another organism comes with its own set of challenges. Will you live in symbiosis, connect with the creature and exist in mutual trust? Or will you become a parasite, just to ensure a better life for your villagers? The choice is in your hands. EXPLORE DIFFERENT BIOMES Travel through a multitude of different biomes and adapt your village to their unique opportunities and threats. Search your environments and send out foraging missions to collect rare resources and ancient artifacts. Researching New Technologies The remains of the old world hold long-forgotten knowledge, but your villagers can uncover it. Find and explore these technologies, but use them wisely, as progress can be a double-edged sword. Survive the Wastes Ensure the survival of your villagers and your Onbo, even though poisonous spores, merciless weather, blood-sucking parasites and many other challenges mean that the odds are often stacked against you. Full details on the latest state of the game, how to give feedback and report issues can be found at www.thewanderingvillage.com.