Greetings, we are here to help. And in this case, what we can do for you is get you information.
There's been a lot of chatter in the airwaves around Dead Forest Island. Well, just two voices. They call themselves "developers" .. whatever that might mean to them, we are unsure. But they've been up to a lot of odd things. We've finally cracked enough of the encryption to deliver some of it to you, faithful observers.
Below is our best attempt. We also snapped some moving pictures for your eyes of the relevant topics. Please gaze upon them with appropriate levels of attention.
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[ Status ]
Our overall goal right now is getting the game ready to release into early access. In that process, we currently are playtesting the first two areas that'll be available and finishing anything we need to in them. Some of that is level specific content, some of it is systems that are used throughout the whole game.
I'll be updating you folks occasionally on where we are in development and including a few parts of whatever recently was worked on.
[ Rocky Paths ]
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Most of the terrain is untouched and without roads of any sort - at least until you make some paths. But, naturally, quite a few places have rocky terrain that must be traversed.
Placing those rocks is interesting - because of the physical nature of the gameplay of rock crawling, the details of placement, shape, type and size matter immensely in difficulty for the player.
[ Islands ]
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The game begins along a series of islands. The terrain on these first islands has dust, deep sand, few green plants, a lot of rocks and dead plants. These islands are on a future earth - so while these first few environments are quite wild, there are often left over structures, debris and .. other things .. from past events.
It has been very enjoyable making the areas as a whole look pleasant. We heavily make use of LODs to allow for expansive views while keeping the details of physically driving over objects precise. The terrain system also needed some creative optimization to make sure the dynamic ground wouldn't keep us from having environments that are a bit larger.
[ The Darkness of Night ]
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The nights are dark - very dark.
This makes time a factor in preparing to build or explore. If you're exploring far from where you built your camp or building something that takes many supply trips, inevitable night will either force you to return to camp to progress through the darkness of night in safety or require you to more carefully navigate.
Light becomes extremely important, particularly lights on your vehicles. So making sure you don't break headlights or you've acquired addon parts that offer additional light under and around your vehicle.
Night has a brief amount of time when the moon light illuminates directly but almost all of the night is dark enough to present a serious obstacle. There is no ambient light for most of night so it renders as full black outside of artificial lights.
[ Holding Objects ]
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The player can grab objects to help move things in a very limited way. This can help with putting lighter supplies back into a trailer if they fall out or transporting things a short distance, like food. There's also sometimes occasion where it can help tip a vehicle juuuuust far enough over to re-right it.
It's a general way to interact with your environment physically in a very limited way but when it's useful, it feels great to be able to do it.
[ Investigating ]
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While the primary focus of the game is on driving, exploring is a natural and important aspect. I wanted to make sure there was a way for the player to explore the world in a slightly deeper way than visually, so we have a simple system for your character to "investigate" objects in the world. If there's something in the environment that's interesting, sometimes you can take a closer look and get more information through your character's reaction.
This plays a role by giving the player more lore and information about the world and gives us a way to reward players who enjoy getting out of their vehicle to take a closer look at the environment.
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We hope this data was useful to you. Our spies will continue to diligently seek out new motion pictures and data. . . Oh and please pardon some of us showing up in the captured pictures, it is hard to contain our excitement in the moment.
Until next time.
