Friday Dev Update: Cartography and Plans for 2016

8:25 AM willsterling23 8 Comments

Cartography





Our upcoming cartography patch is coming along very nicely. We've been mainly working on coding and underlying functionality of systems required for the mapping system to work. Here's the gist of how it's going to work.





The mapping system will be a chart and grid type system. The chart will have individual squares in which you'll be able to click and add an island to. Once you've added an island to a grid square, you can then add icons to that island detailing what kind of features and content the island has. We've even added a system where you can add your own custom icons, if you don't want to use the ones we've provided or if you'd like to add additional information.





A couple functionality features we've been working on is the ability to click and drag to move across the chart, as well as the ability to zoom in and out on the map. We are currently still working on some remaining code work needed to run these functions as smoothly as possible, and working on designing the visuals.





Plans for 2016









Cartography and Player Journal





First, we are going to finish implementing the cartography update. We expect this to be done fairly soon and will continue to give you updates on our progress.





Last week John added in the ability to input text into the game, and began work on a player journal. Here's how the journal will work. The player journal will be divided into sections. Within each section, there will be an unlimited amount of pages that you can use. Each page can have a number of entries and what we are calling "section links." Entries are just the text that you or the game inputs into the journal. The section links will take you to a new section of the book. There is also a feature to go back to the previous section in case you mistakenly go to a section or want to instantly go back. This journal is also going to act as a quest journal, where the game can add short entries to give you updates on your quests.

We are still working on some systems related to the player journal and visuals, but overall it is coming along nicely. We expect this to come very shortly after the cartography update.









Finishing the Main Quest





Once cartography and the player journal are implemented, we're going to finish adding in the rest of the main story. The remaining quests have been written, and we just simply need to add them into the game, as well as some of the content that goes along with them. The remaining quests will include new rewards such as weapons and items, new backstory and lore, new bosses, and some other fun new features.









Multiplayer





Once this is done, we will finally begin working on multiplayer implementation. This will likely be a long development process. Adding multiplayer into Salt is going to be a huge hurdle technically, and require a lot of design and balancing. We aren't sure exactly how long it will take yet, as we haven't dived into it to see what all will be required. However, we'll be keeping you up to date throughout the process and asking you to help us test multiplayer (we'll probably need a whole lot of testing) once we get the basics of it up and running.





We are extremely excited to add multiplayer and this is definitely going to be our biggest focus this year. We believe that the ability to play with your friends is going to add an entirely new dimension to Salt and we could not be more excited.









Other Features





Depending on how quickly we can get multiplayer implemented, there are some other areas we'll be focusing on this year. One area is settling. We want you to be able to build some basic structures on islands and create yourself a home if you so choose to. We've also got features such as steam trading cards, achievements, cloud saving, and things of that nature that we'd like to work on as well.





As I said before, our main focus this year is going to be finishing cartography, adding in the rest of the main quest, and implementing multiplayer.









We'll be keeping you up to date throughout the development process this year and we will definitely need your help testing out the new content! As always please be sure and let us know your thoughts and feedback.









- Will Sterling (Sound Lead and Game Design)

Hello everyone!Today we want to talk about our plans for 2016, and give you an update on the current cartography update, as well as some other features we've been working on.