HELLO!
It has been a busy stretch of development on Unshallow.
A lot of our recent work has happened beneath the surface not just visually, but in the systems that will eventually hold the entire game together.
While Newhaven continues to take shape, we have been spending a significant amount of time making sure exploration, quests, navigation, wildlife, and world simulation all have a solid foundation before we begin layering more final content on top.
Newhaven's First Quest Flow Is Taking Shape
One of the biggest milestones has been getting a substantial portion of Newhaven's early quest progression working in game.
The current flow can take the player through multiple connected objectives, including reaching important locations, interacting with the environment, restoring key systems, and investigating multiple points of interest.
We have also been building the underlying quest framework so that objectives can be tracked reliably, react to player actions, and restore themselves correctly when a saved game is loaded.
That work may not always produce the flashiest screenshot, but it is a major step toward turning Newhaven from an environment into an actual playable experience.
A New Navigation and Quest Guidance System
Exploration is extremely important to us, especially in an underwater world where landmarks can exist above, below, and all around the player.
Our updated compass and navigation framework can now track world locations and moving targets, display distance information, communicate whether an objective is above or below the player, and handle multiple markers without them simply stacking on top of one another.
Quest objectives can also create and remove their own navigation markers as the player progresses.
The goal is to provide useful guidance without turning exploration into following a giant arrow everywhere you go.
Bringing Nerion to Life
We have also continued expanding our sea life systems.
Our first ambient creatures can now move through their habitats, react when the player approaches, flee from danger, and eventually return to their normal behavior.
More recently, we have been working on schooling behavior and procedural population systems so that groups of creatures can exist naturally throughout the world instead of requiring us to manually place every fish.
We are designing this as a reusable framework because Nerion will eventually contain many different species with different movement patterns, habitats, behaviors, and population densities.
There is still plenty of tuning ahead, but even at this early stage, adding movement and wildlife has already made a noticeable difference in how the world feels.
Dialogue and Story Presentation
Work has also continued on the systems responsible for delivering Unshallow's story.
Radio dialogue can now display speaker information, progress through conversations correctly, and cleanly transition between lines during gameplay.
This is another piece of the larger narrative framework that will eventually connect exploration, quests, discoveries, and the characters supporting the player throughout the journey.
We are deliberately keeping the story details quiet for now.
There are some things on Nerion that are better discovered for yourself.
What's Next
There is still an enormous amount ahead of us.
Newhaven needs more environmental detail, more wildlife, additional gameplay content, and continued visual development. The systems we have been building will also continue to evolve as more of the game begins using them.
But this period of development has been important.
More and more of the individual pieces are beginning to connect, and Unshallow is gradually moving from a collection of environments and prototypes toward the game we have been working to build.
Thank you to everyone following the project while we continue putting it together.
We have much more to show.
Rapture Ready Games