Friday Dev Update: Creating Your Own Adventure

11:20 AM willsterling23 14 Comments

Minimal Hand Holding

To create your own adventure, you need to discover the world on your own. It's no fun if someone is holding your hand the whole way. For this reason, we've tried to implement a very minimal amount of hand holding in Salt. The world isn't explained to you and you are basically just dropped into it to figure it out. Questions such as "where do I go from here" or "what do I do next" are yours to answer and yours to discover. While this may add a little frustration in the beginning, the feeling of reward when figuring something out on your own is far greater.





A Discoverable Story

Another way we want to leave the world of Salt open is to let you discover the story and lore on your own. As we implement the main quest line and story, we aren't going to force it upon you. The rabbit hole will be there for you to venture down if you please. Should you choose to ignore it, you are free to go along your way. We plan on implementing a lot of story and lore that you will have to intentionally search for to discover. This adds tremendously to the feeling of depth and constantly gives you something to be searching for.





Randomization and a Dynamic World





Because the islands and the world of Salt are procedurally generated, each experience can be very different. You never really know what to expect and this adds to the feeling of openness and unpredictability. We want to ensure that many encounters are dynamic and random, giving you a new experience that you may never have had before. You never know if an island is going to have a Queen Spider on it or an albino deer, and therefore your experience can change from one island to the next. As we add in more island types, wildlife, and enemies, this will become even more apparent.









We want Salt to always have a feeling of openness and always feel like a new adventure. No matter what kind of content we implement, we want you to have the ability to discover it on your own and experience something new and unexpected.





If you have any ideas on how you think Salt could be more open or lend to you creating your own adventure, we would love to hear them!









- Will Sterling (Game Design and Audio)









A good example of this I believe are the Elder Scrolls games, particularly Skyrim. I have this memory of going about my travels and suddenly being interrupted by an enemy bandit, only to have a dragon come swinging by carrying a mammoth and dropping it in the midst of battle. It's moments like these that make me appreciate the openness and unpredictability of open world games.We wanted to implement this same feeling in Salt. We want you to be able to create your own adventure and share your stories with others. Because of this, we've intentionally tried to design the game from the ground up with this element in mind.Today I want to talk about some of the ways we are currently doing this, and ways we are going to continue to implement this feature in the future.