I've been working relentlessly to get the game to a place of release-level polish. This devlog will go over the main bits I managed to get done in November. Enjoy!
A perspective shift
A lot of player feedback centers around the camera. I am still trying to fine tune the camera controls but one other aspect that has been an issue for a while is the camera type.
There are two main types of game cameras:
Perspective: closest to how the world is projected onto our cornea. What is notable is that parallel lines in the real world are not parallel in our 2D representation of them
Isometric: Contrarily to the other, parallel lines maintain their parallelism in this projection
The camera in Sea, Sun & Salt used to be isometric. It is not uncommon for city builders and strategy games to use an isometric camera: The old Pharaoh game, Sim City 4, They are billion, Starcraft 2 I believe. It is useful if conveying information to the player is more important than seeking to replicate a "realistic" top down view of a city.
Here's a screenshot of Pharaoh using an isometric camera:
This shift to a perspective camera reflects the shift in my thinking about the game from a strategic game to a more atmospheric and relaxing game: I think it is more important for the player to be immersed in this game than to have the optimal strategic top down view imaginable.
Here is a little before and after:
Before
After
We will see what the players think!
If you squint you can also see some of the other things I've been working on:
The grass has much softer shadows and feels more discrete
The lighting of the sea bed is a bit more noticeable and pleasant, like you are looking at the sea floor on the coast of a carribean island
I'll admit some of these are pretty minor but at this point I'm just trying to land a lot of "1%" improvement to get the game to a nice visual place for release.
This has also allowed me to add a "panoramic" mode where you don't see the UI and have a more inclined view of the city:
Overlays & oversight
I spent quite a bit of time improving the ways the player can analyze their city. Here are the main bits.
Related buildings
When you hover a building, you can see all buildings that share subjects with it (what houses work at a given place of work, who goes at this market etc..):
The white arteries help understand where your subjects walk which is important when planning beautification for your city and where to place pavement.
Accessibility
Now you can also activate an "accessibility" overlay that shows you how far a subject can go or come from for a given building:
Anyone in the green area can go to the hovered market, everyone in the blue buildings do in fact go to the market.
I don't know how much these screenshots do these features justice but hopefully when playing, people will have clear insight on who works where and how far can a subject go to work.
Events
It used to be hard to see where events happened (people getting sick, disputes etc...). Now it is much simpler to see them:
I'm sticking these simple color changes as a way to convey information. I find it very clear and it feels pretty congruent. Never to hard on the eye but we will see what people think!
Balancing (Or how to make players use new stuff in games)
It's a classic for players to just keep the starting gear and never try out new gear.
There is obviously a desire for players to stick to stuff they know, even if it is worse. But often times the problem is:
The new stuff is just not that much better
The value of the new stuff versus the old stuff is not very well communicated and the experimentation to figure it out is just not that fun.
Silksong tangent: I kind of think that it's an issue with tools in Hollow knight: Silksong. I got the Warding Bell in the first 3 hours of playing and beat the game with it equipped. Make me at least beat a hard boss for it... And also could not be bothered with the crests. They add another issue with these types of systems: if you make me upgrade some gear, I'm not going to switch to un-upgraded but newer gear. Great game though, I hope Sea, Sun & Salt manages to capture a fraction of how fun Silksong was for me :).
This balancing problem is also an issue in Sea, Sun & Salt. It was funny to see some playtesters almost discover the entire island with nothing but the starting tech. That shouldn't happen.
To counter balance the two issues I mentionned above:
I massively improved the value of newer buildings to the point where they simply can't unlock more land by staying on old tech.
I added information on how much each buildings produce per minute so the player can very clearly see what is better. I liked the idea of players kind of figuring it out on their own but it gets too difficult to guess what produces what in a massive 2000+ subjects, 1000+ buildings city.
Sneak peek: Goddesses & new worship building icons
And that's it for November!
There is plenty of other small stuff but I won't crowd this devlog with them, you can check them out in the next release patch. All of these changes will be released in the demo very soon!
As always you can come chat with us on our discord: https://discord.gg/vdpcGMf4Nj