Custom Tiles
In Survivesmith, the maps have always been randomly generated, 100% of the time. While their content were all hand-made and hand-animated, the map itself placed those content (trees, rocks and other objects) randomly all over the tiles. Now, we have created a bunch of "Custom" tiles that were handcrafted by ourselves!
The custom tiles basically don't generate anything via random placement within that tile, i.e: all its content were placed at the exact positions deliberately by us.
Survey Sites
Remember defeating creatures or collecting resources randomly to fill up the "Biome Points" bar at the bottom, to progress the game? Well no more! Introducing, survey sites!
Survey sites are custom tiles with a surprise in the middle. Rather than having to do random stuff in order to progress through a run, now the player only has to discover these survey sites and place their trusty Survey Beacon at the center of the tile.
The beacon will scan the area for a while and drop some "Data Points" for you to gather, which will then let you progress further into the run.
POIs (Points of Interests)
POIs are special custom tiles with an interesting landmark at the center. Each biome in the game will have at least one POI, and these will spawn a bit far away from the teleporter.
Once you discover these POIs, you'll have to figure out what to do on your own. These are not hard, mind-numbing puzzles, because who has time to THINK while surviving hordes of enemies! While the POIs are relatively easy to understand, the rewards you get for completing them can be much much more valuable! So be sure to lookout for them while exploring survey sites.
The Map
The map is a new addition (it was there at the beginning actually, but removed later for having no obvious use) to the game that can help you locate the nearest survey sites and POIs. Yes! You will be able to locate POIs from the map too, but only if you're close enough to them. Consider yourself extremely lucky if you see the golden marker, because there can be only one POI of a kind in the entire map!
The map can be opened at any time and will update with your position.
Dev Notes
We spent a considerable amount of time making the custom tiles and POIs because biome exploration felt like one of the weakest aspects of the game. While the game loop was centered around running around biomes, collecting stuff, mining stuff and shooting stuff, the biomes were pretty generic because of the random object placements and nothing interesting to actually discover. Now with these additions, exploring has become even more crucial for the run and you're also rewarded for doing so!
That's all for this devblog.