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/