Worth The Time Spent!

Keeping things unique in a map this big is a damn difficult thing to do by hand and it was just so tempting to copy and paste entire city blocks in order to get through it faster…but I didn’t do it. 🙂 I figure there is about another 2 weeks until the map is complete (including the buildings that you can go in) It was a time-consuming process for sure, but there was a lot of stuff that needed to be fleshed out!

I went into every last nook and cranny that you could see and added details. I also had to keep that up for distanced areas that you couldn’t access but could still see if you zoomed in. That’s something that drives me absolutely crazy in some games; how everything is detailed only in the play area and no real work is put into extending the visuals into the distance! It breaks the illusion!

I posted a pretty long video showing a few more areas of the map and at the end it shows how potentially dangerous it will become once the sun goes down. It’s extremely dark and even with an upgraded flashlight (you get a wider, stronger light if you can find it in the game) it will still be difficult to deal with things that come at you!

The idea is that you do your exploring during the day, collect as much stuff as you can and then make your way to a safe area to spend the night. Of course, there will be pros and cons to both staying out the entire night or hunkering down in a building, but that’s something you’ll have to decide when you’re playing!

I always intended that after this map was completed I would begin working on the public demo and wrote up a checklist of things that needed to be done in order to make that happen. The thing is, I found the list to be pretty long which meant that I would have to stop work on the next handful of small maps in order to make the demo.

Timing is a huge factor in this and I think the best thing to do is to release a demo followed by a trailer when I’m about 6 months or so from the finish line. This way, it would give me some time to make any fixes and changes from public feedback and then people wouldn’t have to wait that long until they could play the final version.

If I stop now to make the demo, it will basically be like working on another small game which takes time away from the main project. If I were to just continue work on the project itself, that long checklist of things that need to be done for the demo would naturally be completed anyway. I can then release the teaser without too much work.

At the moment, I don’t know what I should do, but I am leaning heavily towards just continuing what I’m doing. If you want a demo really soon, I’ll definately need some convincing. Let me know what you think! 🙂