Hey everyone, here's another recap of the stuff the team has done in the past few weeks! As always, thank you for your trust and patience and without further a do, let's dive in:
The new map lends itself well to give the quest system a bit of a rework.
The main goal is to make it less hand-holdy and minimize the amount of reading you'll have to do.
And one of the biggest tools we decided to utilize is...
Instead of having to read an entire phonebook every time you want to complete a quest.
You will now hear the captain give you hints and tips from time to time.
In addition, your own character will point out stuff as well.
We've been testing it and so far it feels a lot more smooth and fun than getting a detailed step by step list of directions for every single task. There will still be some pointers on the hud in a few cases but not as text heavy as before.
Since we put together the locations like a big puzzle, there were a lot of holes and unnatural transitions.
So we had to spend some time patching it all up making sure the transitions between different locations are smooth so we could then generate terrain over it.
Another thing that the smoother terrain allows us to do is start placing landing sites (where the drillship parks on surface). However, since the island is way more complex than before, we decided to ditch the U-shaped landing sites. Instead the drillship will park in plenty of different positions to make sure it fits in the environment. And not vice versa. This way the environment won't have unnaturally flat planes everywhere.
On the example below you can see how the drillship fits nicely between the Wrenchlow town and the cliff by landing in a straight line.
Building are getting their final detailed models that also work gameplay-wise. And their final textures. For example here's a final model for the lighthouse and some of the port buildings.
Last but not least, we wanted to introduce some interactive elements into the world. Here are a few of them in the most basic form.