Ahoy Mateys!
We wanted to give you a quick look at what we've been working on for Salt 2 recently and give you an update on Kickstarter rewards.
Kickstarter Rewards
First off, we again want to say thank you to everyone who supported our campaign in any way. We're thrilled to have a successful Kickstarter and it will really help us get the game in a more complete and polished state for launch.
We're currently working on designing and getting the Kickstarter physical and digital rewards in order. We sent out a survey a couple weeks ago on Kickstarter requesting info for your rewards. Most everyone has responded but if you backed the campaign and haven't responded yet, please hop on Kickstarter and fill out that survey so we know where to send your rewards and other relevant info.
We expect physical Kickstarter rewards to start being mailed out within the next couple months but we'll have more concrete info on that soon.
Combat Improvements
One area of focus for us recently has been combat. We still have more tweaking and work to do, but we're making some good improvements and combat is feeling better than ever. We recently started tweaking camera animations and weapon swing animations to make swordplay feel more quick, responsive, and weighty. The camera movements are subtle but they really help add a sense of weight to your swing. We've also added in a parry and block mechanic, new enemy tactics such as ranged attacks, and death animations.
In addition to combat tweaks, we've added a new loot window that will make looting enemies and containers much more fluid. Instead of having to click on an item and it opening up a whole screen or stopping your game, simply hovering over a lootable item/enemy will pop up a small window where you can quickly see what items are available to loot. This is particularly important in a game like Salt where you are constantly looting and don't want to be taken out of the game flow.
Main Menu
Over the past couple weeks we also set up a new main menu scene and the code/logic needed to create a game, save a game, and have that game associated with a world seed. Like in Salt 1, locations will be shared across world seeds. This means if you find a merchant at 10 East 4 North, your friends can also find that merchant as long they are using the same world seed as you.
New Points of Interest
I feel like this gets added to every blog post but it's something we are constantly working on so I like to mention it! We are constantly adding new and exciting points of interest for you to explore from caves and ancient ruins to fishing holes and shrines. We really want Salt to be a fun exploration experience and so we're working as hard as we can to add a ton of unique areas for you to explore. The world is infinite, which means we obviously can't fill up the whole thing without repeats, but our goal is to have hundreds of places with unique visuals so that you are always on the lookout for something new.
We are also adding random elements to some points of interest so even if you come across them again, they can have different enemies, resources, and even some randomized puzzles.
As always thank you all for reading! Development is going smoothly and our current plan is to launch on Steam Early Access in October of this year, with a closed alpha/beta shortly before release. Keep in the mind this can change depending on development but we're working as fast as we can and will keep you up to date.
See you on the high seas!