DevLog #6: Development Progress
With this DevLog we want to share with you some of the development progress that’s happening in Red Frost. What are we working on, how it goes and where do we stand with the game. The past months we made a lot of progress on making the game world. As you might know, the game worl
With this DevLog we want to share with you some of the development progress that’s happening in Red Frost. What are we working on, how it goes and where do we stand with the game.
The past months we made a lot of progress on making the game world. As you might know, the game world in Red Frost is handmade, which allows for best possible quality. Is is however also a very time consuming process and we expect to spend at least another 4-6 months working on it.
That being said, the outside is just part of the workload when it comes to the game world. Red Frost will also feature lots of interior locations for you to explore and this is something we also put a lot of work into. We have a list of planned interior locations divided into locations we must have for storyline and questing and additional locations that once in the game we would feel comfortable with the amount of interior locations for the exploration we envision. Then there is our wishful thinking list which contains all sort of interior locations we wish would make it into the game given the time will allow for it. Right now we are making good progress within the “comfortable list” and create location after location on basically a weekly basis.
Over the past 4 months a lot of work also went into improving our visual tech to make the game world really shine. Yes, Red Frost was already looking good, but there was still room for improvement and that’s what we did.
While we are not finished with the new tech just yet, we already accomplished the vast majority of what we wanted to achieve. However, the changes were so significant in terms of visuals as well as performance, that it made us face a different problem: testing everything. While internal testing is great to find issues early on, when it comes to tech and performance you optimally want to test it with a larger audience.
We are however not ready to make a demo of Red Frost just yet, so we found another solution to take the new visual tech for a spin with a larger audience: Winter Survival Simulator. Is it a much smaller survival game we have been working on for a while now and figured we port the new tech from Red Frost to Winter Survival Simulator and release a demo. That worked very well and the few issues we encountered could been easily fixed. This in turn meant we now have a better understanding how far we can go with the world building in Red Frost while still maintaining good performance.
Another part of the team spent a lot of time on creating new enemies and enemy types. This is a very important area of development for us since we face a bit of a problem here. Many people think of Red Frost as a zombie game. Yes, we might have featured the infected too predominantly in the video footage we released, but in reality the infected drive the main storyline while human and wildlife are by far the more common enemies you’ll encounter.
We are also in the process of creating new types of infected enemies that are less zombie-like with very interesting combat behavior and AI.
Yet another big area we are currently working on is quest based content. As you might know, apart of the main storyline, there will be lots of side quests and side storylines to make Red Frost a great action RPG experience on its own and aid the exploration of the large game world even further. We are about to increase the amount of human groups and settlements you will encounter in the game, each of them featuring their own content ranging from a few quests to entire storylines that are independent from the game’s main storyline.
As you can see, Red Frost’s development went very nicely so far and we are pretty happy with the progress we achieved. There is a lot in the works and quite a lot to be done before the game is finished, but we hope to be able to present you a first playable glimpse of Red Frost in a demo toward the end of the year before the game’s release.
