Strange Island devlog #7

Dear Islanders!

About 11 months ago, we decided to completely rebuild the island we had before. To be honest, the old one was not good enough at all. It was made in a rush, and it showed. And now, after 11 long months of hard, non-stop work, we have finally finished the last big stage - adding objects to the island: rocks, driftwood, fallen leaves, and all the small environmental details that make the place feel alive. As usual, there is still polishing and some small fixes left to do, but that is already minor stuff. Overall, the island is done.

From this point on, the work on bringing the island closer to perfection — at least what "perfection" means to us — and creating points of interest will mostly not involve huge amounts of procedural generation anymore. Most of it will now be done by hand.

Over these 11 months, we gained a massive amount of experience in procedural world generation. Honestly, when we started, we had almost none. MapMagic2 was the tool we originally used for this, but in the end we modified it so heavily, changed it so much, integrated it so deeply into the project and connected it with so many of our own scripts, that there is not much left of the original version in our workflow.

To be honest, the original MapMagic2 is not really built for truly huge graphs. It started lagging, breaking, and falling apart somewhere around 200–300 nodes. In the end, our graph grew to more than a thousand nodes. But when we started, we did not know that yet. And honestly, maybe that was a good thing. Because in the end, we basically ended up building our own procedural generator, where we implemented almost everything we needed and everything we were missing.

Huge thanks to the developer of MapMagic2, Denis Pahunov, for making the source code of the asset available. I am honestly afraid to imagine what we would have done without the original MapMagic2 scripts.

The next steps will not be as massive as this island update. The hardest part is behind us. Also, we need to hurry up now. By September we need to prepare a fully playable version of the game, because we are taking part in Steam Next Fest 2026.

In the near future, we are planning to connect the Crest Shallow Water extension, so ocean waves can break nicely on the beach. After that, we will add Aura 2 for beautiful, realistic fog and god rays. We also still need to do some optimization. And make the trailer. And of course, we must not forget about the quests - luckily, we already have some work done there.

So yes, there is still a lot of work ahead. But by September, no matter what state the game is in, we will show what we have. This has already been going on for too long. The development is now in its third year, and we really want to finally launch the game in Early Access. We will keep improving and polishing it along the way.

In the screenshots you can see the final result of our 11-month island update. In total, we used around 600 prefabs for vegetation and environmental details. I hope it looks worthy. Thank you all for your support, and see you in the next post!

https://www.indiedb.com/company/black-bear-studio/news/strange-island-devlog-7

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3822240/Strange_island/