Hi everyone ! Welcome to the first development blog for Far North.
In the effort to be transparent with our growing community, we decided to start making these blog posts on a regular basis to let everyone know what we are working on and how the game is evolving.
Before jumping into the current development, let me introduce the team and what has been done so far.
The team
The team is composed of three passionate game developers:
Tim
Role: Programmer, Designer
Tim is the one who came up with the game idea. He is mainly working on pretty much everything you could see so far in our sneak peeks: Lighting, Sky, Level Design and some other core systems. It is thanks to him that the game looks gorgeous :)
Andrew
Role: 2D/3D Artist, Music
Andrew has been working on the theme music for the game and also producing all the images we need for various platforms. Currently he is creating new 3D assets and textures.
Marc
Role: Programmer
Marc has been working on the core mechanics of the game and also the multiplayer integration.
Where is the game at right now
Since the beginning of the development we have been focusing on two aspects of the game:
The game play loop
The game play loop defines the main actions the player will do in the game.
The main purpose of the game is Survival. Even if we don't want the whole game play experience to solely focus on survival, its still at the hearth of the game and can't be ignored.
We worked on various systems that will be part of this loop:
Health, Inventory, Cooking, Calories, Interaction, Wood chopping, Building, etc...
The player experience
Tim has been working really hard to make this our vision of the game comes true. We have a full day and night cycle based on real data from the far north. A lot of efforts has been put on tweaking all visual aspects of the game.
Music
Andrew and his friends at Sleepy Hollows studio recorded some promising music for the game OST.
The tracks are still being worked on, be sure to hop in our Discord if you want to hear a sample!
What are we currently working on
Procedurally generated environment
The terrain and vegetation in Far North will be randomly generated to ensure maximum replayability.
3D environment assets
We are modeling some assets that will be used in the game environment.
Player Character & Animation
Farewell capsule boy ! We finally have an animated character. Note that this will not be the final character but is acting as a place holder so we can start animating stuff!
In the future we hope to have much more character customizations but one step at a time.
Here is the animation flow we used for the character.
If you would like to give some suggestions or feedback please join our community discord right below.