If you’re a big fan of Studio Ghibli, or find yourself wishing you could dive into its worlds as you watch the films, you might want to check out the upcoming game Towers of Aghasba. Earlier this month, Polygon attended a remote preview where the devs showcased a prerecorded look at the game and talked about their inspiration.
The open-world fantasy survival builder game is the first title from Dreamlit Games — with developers having previously worked on everything from Hawken to Titanfall and Call of Duty 2, not to mention films such as Independence Day and Ready Player One.
In Towers of Aghasba, players take on the role of junior architect for the fictional Shimu people, who had to flee their homeland after a mysterious force ravaged it. Now, the player must nurture the land back to life, restoring its flora and fauna, and rebuild the villages. Once that’s done, multiplayer is unlocked — with players able to explore, trade, hunt, and battle with up to three friends.
The original idea for Towers came in 2009, taking inspiration from Minecraft as a sandbox experience where players utilize resources to build, as well as Shadow of the Colossus for visual inspiration. But the biggest influence, Dreamlit CEO and director Khang Le said in the recorded preview, was the Ghibli film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. “It feels like a place I want to explore and live in,” Le said, after pointing out the film’s big creatures, strange forest, and teenage princess Nausicaä harvesting spores.
Le pushed Towers to the background while developing Hawken, which was released in 2012. Then, when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released in 2017, he revisited the idea, this time seeing it as more of an exploration and builder game, drawing inspiration from Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, alongside Viva Piñata and Princess Mononoke for the forest-building and luring creatures aspect.
“For the visual style, the choice was to go with a bit more African and Aztec, and ancient cultures like the Jōmon from Japan,” Le said. “I think a tribal fantasy style fits our game mechanic.”
One of the things Le wanted to test out for Towers was using real, hand-painted textures in the game, rather than doing everything digitally. As part of this process, he became friends with one of the background painting artists from Studio Ghibli, Yoichi Nishikawa, who hand-painted some (but not all) of Towers’ textures using poster colors.
“Being a huge fan of Ghibli Studio and all their films, it’s such an honor to be able to have a bunch of these textures where […] when you look down at your feet or stare at a rock or certain walls, you can see the hand-painted texture on them and it’s quite beautiful.”
The textures aren’t the only analog part of the development process; the map is also handcrafted, with Le saying during the Q&A portion of the preview that “it took a long time” and the team is “still wrapping it up.” Being able to handcraft the terrains has been part of the fun for the development team, according to Le, instead of using other traditional tools like procedural generation.
Even if you’re not a fan of Studio Ghibli, it looks like there will be a lot to explore in Towers of Aghasba once it is released into early access for PC and PS5 on Nov. 19.
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