Black Bear Studio

Dear islanders,

We are happy to announce that the work on placing the textures across the island is finally, for the most part, complete. A few minor, insignificant elements remain, but we won’t waste time polishing them right now — the texture pass alone has already taken four months of intense and meticulous work. We’ll finish the remaining small details later.

Over these four months, we faced an enormous number of challenges we never even imagined at the start. We managed to overcome all of them and gained invaluable experience — the kind you cannot get at school, in programming courses, or at university.

While working on the texture system, we had to create several tools ourselves — tools without which our original vision simply wouldn’t have been possible. In fact, we ended up building an entire custom module (with several supporting sub-modules) for MapMagic 2 that solved its biggest weakness: the practical impossibility of highlighting arbitrary terrain regions. MapMagic 2 is incredibly powerful and unmatched in procedural generation, but when it comes to manual adjustments… things get rather difficult.

But we made it work. In reality, out of these four months, nearly half the time was spent not on placing textures, but on developing this module. Thanks to it, we can now highlight absolutely any area of terrain with surgical precision — down to the exact pixel — and programmatically do anything we need with it. Tasks that used to take us weeks can now be completed in one or two days.

This module will be extremely useful in the future, especially as we move on to object placement (trees, grass, rocks, driftwood, and so on). But now the work will go much faster, since almost all masks are complete, and objects will spawn strictly based on them.

Our plan is to finish the island 100% by the end of this year.

In the screenshots below, you can see the result of our last four months of work. All textures were placed procedurally — not a single brush was used, exactly as we intended.

The next stage is object placement. Everything is going according to plan, even if slower than we originally expected. It’s going to be fine. We’ve got this.

Thank you all for your support and for your interest in our project! More screenshots here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island-devlog-4

Dear islanders,

We’re continuing our work on the global island update. At the moment, we’re about halfway done with placing coastal rock textures. As I mentioned earlier, we strictly avoid using brushes — all textures are placed procedurally through nodes in Map Magic 2.

We try to apply each texture according to specific conditions: at a certain height, under a certain slope, inside depressions, on ridges, only near water, in specific regions of the island, and so on. In most cases, we combine several conditions at once. For example, the mossy rock texture only appears on narrow erosion grooves along cliff slopes — the same paths where rainwater naturally flows down.

We also aim to blend every primary texture with several secondary ones, to avoid uniformity and repetition. A lot of time goes into fine-tuning transitions, seams, and smooth blending between materials. Earlier, we encountered a serious issue that slowed us down quite a bit — we needed to “highlight” specific areas of the island (coastal cliffs) at precise slopes and elevations, but without affecting other areas with the same parameters elsewhere. We struggled with this for a long time using standard MM2 tools, but nothing worked properly.

Finally, we managed to write two custom tools that completely solved the problem. In short, our script temporarily lowers the entire island by 40 meters, except for the target areas we want to isolate. Then we process those selected regions as needed — adjusting their size, applying smoothing, setting step values, and so on — and generate a dedicated heightmap. This heightmap is then imported back into the graph and used as a mask.

This was a huge breakthrough for us — now we can accurately highlight and isolate any part of the island we want.

We’re currently continuing the placement and polishing of rock textures. Object placement hasn’t started yet — we’ll move on to that once all textures are complete. It looks like we won’t make it by the end of this month. The new target date for completing the global island update is mid-November 2025.

We’re fully confident in our progress — everything is going according to plan. Thank you all for your support! More screenshots here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island1

Dear Islanders,

We are still working hard on the global island update. Since our last post, we’ve fully finished placing and fine-tuning the sand textures: the general background sand, the ridge sand of the seabed mixed with wet sand, the wet shoreline sand gradually blending into shell sand, the placement of individual ridge patches to mimic tide-formed ripples, and a special sand zone with leaves and branches that serves as a natural transition from beach to forest.

We’ve also completed the placement and setup of the grass and mountain soil textures. Nine paths are now finished and in place. Cliff and rock textures have been added in preliminary form — they still need more polish.

The actual placement of textures wasn’t the hardest part — the real challenge was the polishing. We had to ensure smooth transitions between different textures and guarantee that each one only appears exactly where it should. For example: grass and soil textures must not spawn in the sea or on the beach; shell sand must only appear between wet sand and leafy sand; wet sand must be strictly limited to where the water meets the shore — and so on.

All of this has to be done procedurally with MapMagic 2. We deliberately avoid manual painting, because the procedural approach gives us far more control and flexibility. Later, object placement will be tied directly to textures. Since the world map covers about 3 km² and we need to place thousands of objects (trees, bushes, around 30 types of grass, rocks, sticks, driftwood, shells, mushrooms, and much more), doing this manually would be impossible for such a small team. Thanks to procedural generation, however, this becomes a manageable task.

What remains is to refine the rock and cliff textures, and to enrich the grass and mountain soil with a few additional textures for ravines, slopes, landslides, and small uplands.

Today we faced another challenge. As the graph grows, recalculation times are becoming unacceptably long. To fix this, we’ll split the main graph into several sub-graphs using MapMagic’s biomes system. We’ll start with splines, moving all related blocks into their own sub-graph, then do the same for the beaches since they’re already complete. This alone should greatly reduce the load on the main graph and speed things up. After that, we’ll return to finishing the remaining textures and then move on to object placement.

We must admit — we were overly optimistic when we thought we could complete the global island update in just 2–3 weeks. We’ve faced more challenges than expected, but we’ve still managed to accomplish everything we planned (though it took more time and energy than we imagined). A more realistic target for completing the update is now the end of October 2025.

We keep working. Everything will turn out great. Thank you all for your support! More screenshots here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island