Strange Island devlog #4

Dear islanders,

We are happy to announce that the work on placing the textures across the island is finally, for the most part, complete. A few minor, insignificant elements remain, but we won’t waste time polishing them right now — the texture pass alone has already taken four months of intense and meticulous work. We’ll finish the remaining small details later.

Over these four months, we faced an enormous number of challenges we never even imagined at the start. We managed to overcome all of them and gained invaluable experience — the kind you cannot get at school, in programming courses, or at university.

While working on the texture system, we had to create several tools ourselves — tools without which our original vision simply wouldn’t have been possible. In fact, we ended up building an entire custom module (with several supporting sub-modules) for MapMagic 2 that solved its biggest weakness: the practical impossibility of highlighting arbitrary terrain regions. MapMagic 2 is incredibly powerful and unmatched in procedural generation, but when it comes to manual adjustments… things get rather difficult.

But we made it work. In reality, out of these four months, nearly half the time was spent not on placing textures, but on developing this module. Thanks to it, we can now highlight absolutely any area of terrain with surgical precision — down to the exact pixel — and programmatically do anything we need with it. Tasks that used to take us weeks can now be completed in one or two days.

This module will be extremely useful in the future, especially as we move on to object placement (trees, grass, rocks, driftwood, and so on). But now the work will go much faster, since almost all masks are complete, and objects will spawn strictly based on them.

Our plan is to finish the island 100% by the end of this year.

In the screenshots below, you can see the result of our last four months of work. All textures were placed procedurally — not a single brush was used, exactly as we intended.

The next stage is object placement. Everything is going according to plan, even if slower than we originally expected. It’s going to be fine. We’ve got this.

Thank you all for your support and for your interest in our project!