Hi all,
Not posted in a while. The Christmas break was good and allowed us all to take a step away from the project and approach it with a fresh perspective in the new year.
As you can see from the image below, the island looks less like an island and more of a square. Although this may seem obvious, when staring it at for hours a day, you don’t notice yourself. So after the break we decided to study the structures of islands to create something much more organic which also allows us to still house all of our design ideas.
So the image below is what we came out with. I’m happy with the results. Although the area of the island has reduced dramatically, it feels much more open and fresh. Early play testing also feels much more promising with areas becoming much more accessible. The island hasn’t been refined yet so textures are still all over the place and some hard edges which need smoothing down but the overall shape works.
(ROTATE MAP CLOCKWISE IN YOUR HEAD FOR ACTUAL LAYOUT)
So far we’ve got 3 puzzles done for the ‘vertical slice’ demo we are going to release to test. We’ve got some pretty interesting mechanics going on, which although pretty simple is Kismet, play really well. An example of the cave puzzle is below. I didn’t want to add screenshots of the cave puzzle because I didn’t want to give too much away, I’d rather you play the game 😉
Another mechanic I spent the afternoon with was how to stop the player from leaving the island. We didnt want to have invisible boundaries which the player couldnt pass. Hopefully we’ve created a mechanic which will lend itself to the gameplay. The idea behind it is if the player gets too far out there are multiple trigger volumes situated around the level which will pick up the player depending on what section they are in and then an event will happen and wash the player up on the beach. Again, I won’t give too much away but I’ve put the Kismet example and a few matinee shots up for curious people!
I think thats all for now. Ben has been ironing out the script over Christmas and we have pretty much sealed the story in terms of events. We’re still on track to having a trailer out and we’ve got our artists working hard on the assets and texturing so everything is coming together.
Thanks for checking our stuff out and hope to hear some feedback! 
