Interview: Nightingale devs talk worldbuilding and how to stand out in a competitive genre

destructoid.com:

After over five years in development, developer Inflexion Games is set to release its whimsical survival-crafting title Nightingale. Earlier this month I spoke with three Inflexion Games developers—CEO Aaryn Flynn, Director of Production Leah Summers, and Art Director and Head of Audio Neil Thompson—about the upcoming release, the road to get there, and the road ahead.

DESTRUCTOID: Hello everyone! I had the opportunity to spend some time hands-on with Nightingale both solo and co-op, with each realm I experienced having a completely different overall layout. However, I was the overall size between realms seemed to be rather similar. Is it possible for realms to generate smaller or bigger than usual?

NEIL: So all realms are 2km in total space, in terms of playable area. The realms are procedurally generated, so some might have more POIs or actual used space, and that does change and get bigger and smaller. Vaults, however, do not conform to that size.

DESTRUCTOID: In regards to the building aspects of Nightingale…I love the ability to mix and match the styles. At Destructoid, we’ve recently noticed some players tend to build simple cube structures when given the opportunity to open-world build, while others are a bit more creative and really put us to shame. (I’m working on it, I promise.) But are there plans to add more styles to Nightingale as well as additional foundation and structure shape similar to that in say Conan Exiles?

NEIL: Yeah. We’ve got seven styles at launch, but we’re adding to those all the time. We got a running reference deck of architectural tileset ideas that the whole team contributes to. The ones we like we take forward and start conceptualizing with the intent to put them in, and I think that can continue to run. I’m pretty sure we won’t run out of ideas for building pieces. There are also plans to add more custom individual pieces to the existing sets. You can be pretty flexible with foundation pieces already because there are no limits to