Hello!

Its been quite a while since we talked about Cryo. There's been not so much eye-candy stuff going on, but progress is being made. This post will mostly serve as an introduction to a video that we're preparing that will touch upon more interesting topics.

Core

We already implemented a substantial amount of gameplay features that we want to have in Cryo. Such mechanics like interactions or PDA (which for now is used for viewing notes with a simple interface) are waiting for major rewrite. Other gameplay elements rely on previously mentioned ones, so it won't take too much time to implement them.

Compared to Dyingworld, our previous project, we managed to implement only a tiny fraction of gameplay elements we wanted. But it doesn't mean that Cryo is almost complete, there's still a lot to be done other than programming.

V-Slice

We are working on a set of levels to test all of the features we implemented so far. We want to explore different ways to make interesting puzzles and interactions with the game world.

Level design is something alien for us, so we spent some time researching this topic. While we are able to produce good assets for the game, we are not sure how to properly make a game level. We decided to make a bunch of simple, proportional, modular prototype pieces out of which we can quickly build the game world.

(the result in-engine)

For now we only got ones for indoors, but we will soon start prototyping Triton's landscape. It presents a huge challenge for us because of this moon's flat features.

(image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/jjqu11/view_of_neptune_from_the_surface_of_its_moon/)

While we don't have accurate surface photos of Triton, this artistic render is the closest to the truth. As you can witness, there's no high mountains that would've covered the horizon to be seen.

(Triton's surface, taken by Voyager 2)

We don't want to break the immersion by creating invisible barriers, so we need to think of a better way to handle that, but for now we focus on interior environments since most of the gameplay is occurring in those locations.

In conclusion

Welp, that was a short post.

There's not a lot of features to implement and we are slowly starting working on audio-visual aspects of the game. We will let you know once we will have something to show, but meanwhile, stay tuned for more!