Friedrich Bode · Principal Level Designer, Persistent Universe

There's a lot basically that we already white boxed and prototyped, and we had fun ideas like steam geysers and lava pools and all these nice things that could add more variation to them. And I believe these are definitely not off the table. We haven't gotten around to implementing them yet. Again, it depends on certain systems: abilities for the player to slide down slopes, to climb steep walls, to be able to swim, for a start. All these things first need to be implemented to add more traversal mechanics to the caves, so we have more interesting layouts and traversal challenges in there. More features for the actor status system so we can add hazards, like I said, lava pools and that sort of thing. So we definitely have ideas on that and some prototypes, and we just need to implement them for real.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

So one more approach as well is we try to make stuff modular. So even these traversal challenges that Fred did, they are also modular. We can combine them. They can have different components, interchangeable, right, in the white box. And that's what we want to do across the board, right? Because hand-building something very specific and playing it once is pretty boring. But if you see something but you never really know exactly what it's going to be, and you have to analyze the environment to see what the best approach is, that's where it becomes interesting, especially exploration in dark caves with limited visibility where you have to bring your own light and stuff. It can be quite interesting once we get the opportunity to do that.