Friday Dev Update: The Road Ahead

8:20 AM willsterling23 9 Comments

Where We Are Now





Our next big update (which is currently on the testing branch and will be out soon to public) will be the GUI overhaul. This has been probably one of our biggest and most in depth updates yet. In this update we have completely overhauled the UI and added a lot of new features as well. This wasn't just a matter of making the UI skin look better, but improving functionality across the board and adding new features like a character screen to display your stats, new health bars and quest dialogue windows, and other features.





In addition to overhauling the GUI, we also have added controller support. With this update you'll be able to play the game entirely keyboard free. This has been a big request from a lot of players so we are pretty excited to get this in.





We've also been able to do a few other architectural improvements in this update such as transitioning to Unity 5, which will help in a lot of areas of development.









Where We Are Going





I'd like to give a brief overview of some of the content you can look forward to in the future. With the GUI overhaul soon out of the way, we will be free to focus more heavily on adding content and new features to the game which we could not be more excited about.









New Humanoid Models





Coming soon will be the brand new humanoid models. These models will primarily replace the pirates, inn keepers, merchants, and other human type npc's. We think the new models look great and will fit the theme of Salt perfectly. They will also have improved and new animations to add entirely new dynamics and life to the AI.









Weather





Weather is something I'm particularly excited about, mainly because it will add a sense of dynamics to the world. With weather will come a lot of fun features such as huge waves and intense moments at sea. We will be unleashing Rob on this implementation in the future and can't wait to get it implemented!









More Story





A couple months ago we implemented the first portion of the main storyline in Salt. The response was great and we look forward to adding the rest of the story. What excites me about the main quest implementation is how much else comes along with it. While I won't spoil anything, these updates will introduce new places, npc's, weapons, lore, bosses, secrets, island types, and other features.









Factions





This idea isn't entirely fleshed out yet, but it's definitely something we want to do and are designing the foundation of. We think it would be really cool if there were certain factions in the world that had their own quest lines tailored to certain playstyles (think assassins guild, beast slayers, fishermen's guild, etc.) Adding these sorts of factions would add more life and diversity to the world of Salt and an entirely new array of quests and rewards.









Multiplayer





Multiplayer is probably the most requested feature for Salt, and we promise you it is going to happen. Our goal from the beginning has been to get a solid base foundation of the game that can be enjoyed as a single player experience, before moving on to multiplayer. We didn't want players to feel like they had to play with others to enjoy the game, but that players could play with others to enhance their experience if they saw fit. Rest assured we will start work on implementing multiplayer as soon as some of these other features are implemented.









I hope that clarifies our thoughts going forward and just some of the content we will be working on. We've got a lot more features than what is listed here that will be added, but this gives a good overview of some big areas we'd like to focus on going forward in development.





As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas regarding future content of Salt!









- Will Sterling (Game Audio and Design)









While some of these questions can be hard to answer just due to the nature of game development, we try to be as open as possible and not keep our players in the dark about what we are working on and what we plan on implenting going forward.Today I wanted to talk about some of the content we plan on adding into Salt and where we are currently. Just as a disclaimer, we aren't always sure when and how fast content will go in or what content will be next, but we promise to keep you updated as soon as we can answer those types of questions.