In a recent concept art showing a battle (which can be found in the recent interview), one of the things illustrated is the way Paper Soul Theater (in battle and out) is made of hexagonal prisms fit together like honeycombs. Each hexagonal prism stands upward and their height is usually about that of the prisms surrounding. Together, they form an island, and their ends are cliffs surrounded by open air. You might be reminded of a diorama upon seeing a location in our game for the first time, and that's a reasonable connect to make. Each place Aponi and her friends venture through vaguely resemble dioramas connected by bridges.
You might wonder how serious we plan to take this idea. After seeing how hell-bent Intellectual Systems and Nintendo were on making Color Splash a world of paper, in the same vein as Yoshi's Woolly World, I discovered that other people and I feel a videogame world is fake if it realistically looks constructed by arts and crafts, and that can be enough to ruin an experience. It would be a mistake to really ham-up that the entire world is a series of dioramas brought to life by your imagination. In my mind's eye, I don't see Aponi's world that way. Games like Yoshi's Island and Paper Mario (N64) have a style that hints at being colored by crayon, and existent inside a story book respectively, but this isn't meant to be much more than a stylistic choice. Yoshi's Island gets across the very imaginative world in a time when Mario was young, and Paper Mario made it clear that it was a game with a concrete story, starring Mario. The style acted as a foundation to lift up their games, but these also remained very subtle. I dig that. The diorama look in our game is borrowed from Paper Mario keep the game scope small, but the hexagon level design serves the same purpose while also evoking an atmosphere of strategy. Games like Thea the Awakening and Civ 5 share the hexagons, while games like Legend of Grimrock share the free grid-movement, and games like Final Fantasy Tactics share the elevation and battle 3rd-person view.
Each "diorama" will be a fairly small size. From the perspective of the player, they will be shallow in spatial depth yet wide. This has some very clear drawbacks: the world won't feel big, no matter how much content is actually in the game because it is viewed in tiny chunks; there will be a lot of moving between "dioramas" by walking off screen; and there are heavy restrictions from the size limit of each little area. As you expect, it also comes with benefits. Each "diorama" you enter feels like a distinct place with clear boundaries in your mind. You will be able to mentally identify a place like "this is the place with the bridge over the lazy river" as opposed to "I think there is a bridge and a river somewhere near here." A person's yard and home exterior could evoke a unique sensation, like "this is a place that feels distinct; friendly; and soft," yet your feelings for the house would be lost in a sea of feelings for surrounded things in a connected world. If you don't believe me, experience sequential art (like comics, graphic novels, or manga) for a while and pay attention to how each panel's shown location feels distinct and evocative; better yet, stare at a photograph. Maybe most of all, severely-chopped-up areas are easy to design and complete.
The combat arenas are also constructed by hexagonal prisms, but remain in a straight line, with a few rare exceptions. The main reason for this is so that background tiles can be used to represent the status of the tiles you can stand on which happen to be next to those tiles. The quasi-random nature of these tile set-ups are only possible through this method and will lead to many interesting twists and additions to TTYD's stage arenas, such as the height factor, locational influence, and the distance factor. These are all things that a direct sequel to TTYD might have had, with a continuation of general themes and ideas that TTYD constructed. Somehow, this also keeps the game separated too; hexagonal tiles in a Paper Mario game is not-at-all something anyone would remotely expect, and I find that exhilarating.