Black Bear Studio

Dear Islanders!

It’s been a little over a month since our last post. During all this time, we’ve been busy setting up Crest Shallow Water and working on the Aura 2 fog. Honestly, we never expected it to be this difficult. Originally, we thought it would take no more than a week. But as usual, reality had some surprises for us.

It all started when Crest Shallow Water refused to work with the older version of the main Crest asset and required us to update it. After updating and restarting Unity, we discovered that the project could no longer be loaded because the main scene was broken. We loaded a backup copy of the project and tried again - same result. No matter how many times we tried, it always ended the same way.

For some reason we still don’t fully understand, the updated version of Crest Water would inevitably ruin the main scene. And jumping ahead a bit, we never managed to find the exact reason. Apparently it was something happening on a fairly low level.

While trying to solve this problem, we moved all the Crest components into a separate scene. And it worked - the main scene was no longer getting corrupted. But of course, another problem appeared. Native Crest didn’t support cross-scene references and required all the important components (Main Camera, directional light, player transform) to be located in the same scene as Crest itself. But this wasn't acceptable for us.

So there was nothing else left for us except getting into the Crest source code and modifying it ourselves. Which is exactly what we did. Along the way, we also added several new features. For example, we made a custom tool that allowed us to increase the opacity of the water in very shallow areas. Needless to say, we had to fix quite a lot of errors because of all this. But fortunately, in the end we got everything working.

After that, we started integrating Aura 2 into the project. There were no serious bugs this time, but we still ended up rebuilding almost the entire asset, because in its original form it wasn’t really suitable for what we needed. Mostly because it didn’t work very well with such large and open spaces, and it also caused a pretty heavy fps drop.

In the end, there isn’t much left from the original Aura 2.

And third, we developed a special renderer that draws fake bushes far away from the player. This helps us avoid large areas of "empty ground", where grass would otherwise suddenly appear from nowhere as the player gets closer.

As a demo, the game is now almost ready. We have already tested the build and there are no performance issues or lag. The only major thing left is choosing where to place the house, which is already finished. Then we need to clear the area, smooth the terrain and "dig" a hole for the basement.

That should take one week at most. After that, we’ll start preparing the demo for release on Steam. We are planning that the demo should be available on Steam in around one or two weeks.

https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island https://store.steampowered.com/app/3822240/Strange_island/

Dear Islanders!

About 11 months ago, we decided to completely rebuild the island we had before. To be honest, the old one was not good enough at all. It was made in a rush, and it showed. And now, after 11 long months of hard, non-stop work, we have finally finished the last big stage - adding objects to the island: rocks, driftwood, fallen leaves, and all the small environmental details that make the place feel alive. As usual, there is still polishing and some small fixes left to do, but that is already minor stuff. Overall, the island is done.

From this point on, the work on bringing the island closer to perfection — at least what "perfection" means to us — and creating points of interest will mostly not involve huge amounts of procedural generation anymore. Most of it will now be done by hand.

Over these 11 months, we gained a massive amount of experience in procedural world generation. Honestly, when we started, we had almost none. MapMagic2 was the tool we originally used for this, but in the end we modified it so heavily, changed it so much, integrated it so deeply into the project and connected it with so many of our own scripts, that there is not much left of the original version in our workflow.

To be honest, the original MapMagic2 is not really built for truly huge graphs. It started lagging, breaking, and falling apart somewhere around 200–300 nodes. In the end, our graph grew to more than a thousand nodes. But when we started, we did not know that yet. And honestly, maybe that was a good thing. Because in the end, we basically ended up building our own procedural generator, where we implemented almost everything we needed and everything we were missing.

Huge thanks to the developer of MapMagic2, Denis Pahunov, for making the source code of the asset available. I am honestly afraid to imagine what we would have done without the original MapMagic2 scripts.

The next steps will not be as massive as this island update. The hardest part is behind us. Also, we need to hurry up now. By September we need to prepare a fully playable version of the game, because we are taking part in Steam Next Fest 2026.

In the near future, we are planning to connect the Crest Shallow Water extension, so ocean waves can break nicely on the beach. After that, we will add Aura 2 for beautiful, realistic fog and god rays. We also still need to do some optimization. And make the trailer. And of course, we must not forget about the quests - luckily, we already have some work done there.

So yes, there is still a lot of work ahead. But by September, no matter what state the game is in, we will show what we have. This has already been going on for too long. The development is now in its third year, and we really want to finally launch the game in Early Access. We will keep improving and polishing it along the way.

In the screenshots you can see the final result of our 11-month island update. In total, we used around 600 prefabs for vegetation and environmental details. I hope it looks worthy. Thank you all for your support, and see you in the next post!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3822240/Strange_island/ https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island

Dear Islanders!

It’s probably been more than 2 months since the last post. Last time we showed how we scattered vegetation across the island - grass, trees, bushes and all that stuff. Back then I mentioned that the vegetation still looked unfinished, like everything was just thrown together without much order. For the last 2 months we were polishing exactly this part.

The main goal was to reduce the feeling of repetition inside the biomes as much as possible. In simple words: imagine the player stands somewhere in the tropical forest and looks around. Then he walks 10 meters and looks around again. Everything looks almost the same. Then after another 50 meters - again almost the same, and so on. This is the thing we were fighting with all this time.

And honestly, we are very happy with the result. Of course, it was not easy at all. In total we used more than 350 vegetation prefabs, from small grass to trees. We also had to write a separate special manager just to be able to handle this crazy amount of vegetation properly.

During the work, MapMagic2 also started to fall apart a bit because the graph became too huge. So we had to modify some MapMagic2 scripts so it could actually digest our graph.

Anyway, enough words. On the screenshots you can see the result of our work. We still have not started with objects yet - rocks, driftwood, mushrooms and so on. This will be the next step.

See you soon, and thank you all for your support! Full devlog is here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island-devlog-6