Black Bear Studio

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

Dear Islanders,

It has been a while since our last development update. We have been very busy filling the island with vegetation. For the most part, the work on placing trees and grass is complete. What remains is adding void masks to certain grass types, mainly in the European and mountain biomes. Right now the grass there looks a bit like "everything was thrown into a pile", but we have already postponed this post for too long, so we decided to show you how it looks at the moment.

Most of our time was spent creating a smart vegetation remover, a vegetation manager, and writing custom shaders. Since we use vegetation from different asset packs, we needed everything to sway in the wind in a more or less uniform way, so we had to develop new shaders. A lot of time also went into building the smart remover and manager to solve issues like trees spawning inside each other or too close together. We also invested significant time into creating spawn masks, so that each vegetation type appears only in its designated biome.

Once we finish polishing the grass, we will move on to spawning objects such as rocks, driftwood, shells, and more.

Thank you all for your support and interest in our project. https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island-devlog-5