Black Bear Studio

Dear Islanders!

We’re excited to announce that Strange Island has successfully passed the selection stage and made it to the finals of the “Indie of the Year 2025” competition held by IndieDB.com!

Over the past nine days, more than 10,000 games — both released and in development — took part in the voting process. From these, the top 100 were chosen, and then divided into categories based on development status and genre.

Strange Island has entered the “Upcoming Games – Adventure” category, where it now competes among just six finalists. The winners in each category will be announced on December 19, 2025.

💛 Help Strange Island take first place — cast your vote using the link below! Together, we will win!

https://www.indiedb.com/groups/2025-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote88802

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