Black Bear Studio

Hello, Islanders! We’ve uploaded a new version of the build.

We’ve added and improved a lot of things. Here are the main changes:

• Added a trigger system inside the house. As the player moves around the house or explores the area outside, most objects inside the house are no longer rendered when they are not needed, reducing GPU load
• Improved the user interface. The Exit Game button now works properly
• Added a progress bar and new loading-screen screenshots, so you no longer have to stare at a grey screen while the world is loading
• Added a temporary workaround for the unfinished indoor lighting system. Walls and objects should no longer become dark when the lights are switched on The terrain now lives in a separate scene -Fixed the emission on lamps, which previously caused them to remain dark even after being switched on
• Further optimized the main house. When the player is outside and far enough away, the entire interior of the house is now unloaded to reduce the load on the system
• Fixed a coastal wave bug that caused the water to flow up into the sky
• Broke the fog again, and then fixed it again
• Added new objects to the terrain
• Added sounds of the sea and seagulls when approaching the water
• And many other smaller changes that would be too long and boring to list here

The ocean is still pretty crazy for now. The waves can look rough and broken, and sometimes they may move in the wrong direction, flowing away from the beach and back into the sea. The trees also shimmer like christmas lights against the sky. There are still no quests, except for one. Forest ambience and footsteps on hard surfaces have not been implemented yet. We’ll continue fixing and improving everything in future builds.

Download the latest build of the game for free:

https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/downloads https://blackbearstudio.itch.io/strange-island

www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/downloads/strange-island https://blackbearstudio.itch.io/strange-island

Strange Island Alpha 0.1.2 is the first public demo build of the game.

This is a very early and unfinished version created mainly to let players explore the world, test performance, and share feedback. There are currently no quests, and many mechanics and systems are either incomplete, unavailable, or may not work correctly.

What is available in this build A 3 km² open-world island to explore Approximately 9 km² of total world area, including the surrounding sea A detailed house that can be explored inside and outside Several interactive objects inside the house, including: A telephone A television A computer Doors Cabinets Curtains Light switches Basic first-person exploration Early versions of the game’s lighting, interface, environment, and interaction systems Important information This build is still very rough and should not be treated as a finished demo. There are no quests or complete gameplay progression yet. Saving and loading are not currently available, and some objects, controls, visual effects, or other features may behave incorrectly.

Loading the world may take some time. The loading progress bar can remain at 100% for a while, so please wait and do not force-close the game immediately.

We would greatly appreciate any feedback about:

Whether the game launches successfully Performance, stuttering, or crashes Visual or gameplay bugs Your operating system, processor, graphics card, and amount of RAM Thank you for helping us test Strange Island!

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/