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