This is a pretty simple section just about choices made for the overall design and gameplay of the environments to enable a good player experience.
One of the main components of this are the placement of foliage meshes, and the landscape material. Both of these need to work together to create a cohesive look and feel for the world.
The auto material for the landscape (what determines where the textures appear) has some logical to automatically determine slope and heights. This creates the different texture layers as shown.
The sand being near the water level, then the grass and lastly sampling out the steep slopes for the cliffs. This creates the different layers creating a bit more interesting texture, but everything looks a bit flat near the different layers, it is just a smooth transition. This is where the edge functions shown below come into play. They filter the edges between different layers and blend them based on the height map of the blended textures. This creates the better-looking effect shown below. Other than this the sandy patches were added in basically the same way, just instead of using a slope or height filter, there was a black and white map sampled across the entire landscape, where the black represents the grass and the white represents the sand, then uses the same edge function to create the better-looking splotches. This is the entire landscape auto-material at its current state. Future plans for this landscape is to use vertex colors, which is each vertex of a mesh has 4 color channels, RGBA, which can be used to sample other textures based on the painting. The use out of this for the landscapes will be to have hand painted paths to help the player understand the general directions to progress and to smoothly blend between biomes.
The other main component of the visual application of the world is the mesh placement, specifically foliage in this context. Placing foliage in such a way to minimize repetition and help the player see what they need to see while keeping a natural looking environment is tuff. The first thing I noticed when I started placing the foliage is that in the real world, plants clump together, when you see a specific type of plant, there is a bunch of the same kind closely packed together. This made a large difference once I implemented this into the world, everything looked much better as shown below.
The next step was to have biomes internally into a single biome. What I mean is that I have a specific biome that has sections to it, each section has slightly different priorities. One area will have larger plants, one area more dense, another area has a bit more of a specific plant and so on. This creates more diverse environments without having more plant types. The next method of reducing repetition I am using is combining plants. Using some of the larger trees and adding vines to only some of the trees to break everything up. This also gives the player more opportunities to explore.
Using the similarity between the same type of foliage with variations to it gives the player more to look at, and the more the player can look at the more they explore and find items they need to interact with to progress inside the game. This is the key issue when designing an environment. Somehow you have to get players to locate the items and objects they must interact with without explicitly telling them. What I have found to work the best, in the small population I have to play test the game, is increasing the amount of stuff the player has to look at. Small variations of cool environmental areas and so on.
One thing I did to help the player understand that there are objects you can interact with in the world is at the start of the game the only direction you can walk, goes right through some vines which are interactable which will pop up the click to interact with UI. This gets the player thinking about there being interactable objects in the game without having to explicitly tell the player how too. The next way I did was a bit more of a forced tutorial in the game. Leading up to truly starting the game the player must walk through a small cave; inside of the cave there are small rocks that have words carved into them that give hints to the player on how to progress. A delicate balanced between forced information and hints is the best way according to my research to present the gameplay to the players so they understand what to do.