I am working on a natural, fairly small, grassland like environment/level. I have a few natural, minimally intrusive paths (something like this) throughout it to help guide players to the main weenies but other than this the environment is kept very open so that a player has good visibility from where ever they are.
(not the actual level just an example for a bit of context)
I would like to add some hidden/secret areas which the player cannot simply walk to easily, and needs to take a specific path to get to, and of coarse work out what that specific paths is. This doesn’t mean that they cannot see the secret/hidden area, it is more so that they need to work out how to get there. Also the barriers/obstacles may not necessarily have to be hard barriers, they could simply just make traversal so tedious that it makes more sense to go the intended way.
I have read through the answers in this question, however the majority don’t apply as in this case the environment is not a giant open world, and secondly since we are talking about inner barriers/obstacles I cannot simply turn part of the environment into islands, or strategically place mountains or walls of trees around, since as mentioned this would hinder visibility (glass mountains and trees need not apply please).
Some of the ideas I have come up with so far:
- Using bodies of water where the player either cannot enter, or traversing through is so slow that any player would usually give up and go around
- The main issue with this is that in a small environment this would be limited to ponds and streams which a player may be able to jump over and bypass completely
- An annoying NPC positioned at any shortcuts, which when getting close starts automatically talking to you and explains why you cannot go that way
- The issue being that I can’t think of a way to not make this annoying and contrived, clearly every player is going to hate this NPC
- A natural enemy such as an animal protecting it’s nest/den positioned at any shortcuts and when getting close it attacks/chases the player away
- The only risk I can foresee here is having too many nests/dens everywhere, this would most likely need to be combined with one of the above or another alternative to not break immersion
I am happy to accept more general answers to be more useful to other users but I think the use case is pretty common enough as is.
