It’s been a while since the previous post, so here’s a new island snapshot. Most of what we’ve been working on lately is not visible in this shot, though! The biggest obvious changes are probably in the forest and beach on the left-hand side.
Can it be that we haven’t posted an island snapshot since January 3rd? Well, you got a pretty good look at the island in the trailer we recently released in conjunction with the PlayStation 4 announcement. That version has a lot of new modeling compared to the January snapshot, because we were working on the [...]
as seen in today’s PlayStation 4 announcement: (Watch it in HD + fullscreen if you have the bandwidth!)
We haven’t done one of these in a while. Here’s what the island looks like currently: The current puzzle count is 497. (This is lower than last time; last time was an overcount, as we had some temporary duplicates in the world that were being counted mistakenly.)
Last Wednesday night, just before Thanksgiving, we shipped our first extremely closed beta over Steam to a few limited testers. Today we shipped an update, still to the same limited group. We have some initial tech issues to work out before we go wider (game packaging issues, graphics card incompatibilities, and the like). Here’s a [...]
… when even your barest rough drafts seem like they’d be interesting to explore. Current puzzle count: 528.
As mentioned in the previous post, we shrank the island a bit. Here is what things look like now. They may not look tremendously different from this off-island vantage point, but when you are down there moving around, the difference is substantial. I feel a lot better about the layout now.
One of my primary design goals, all through development, has been to keep the island spatially small, so that there isn’t a lot of wandering through empty or pointless spaces. The idea is to take the best parts of an open-world game, involving choice, exploration and discovery, but compressing these into a maximally dense experience. [...]
Island Snapshot
… which doesn’t look too much different from last time’s. Partially this is because we’ve been working on things that you don’t see from this angle. Here’s a shot from a different angle: We still have so much to do! On my end, I’ve been working for the past couple of weeks on [...]