Saturday Dev Update: Time and Tide

2:25 PM Unknown 1 Comments

Time plays a big role in Salt's environment. Most of the time it's obvious - the sun moves across the sky, day turns to night, and spooky spiders come out to get you. Other times it's more subtle. We want players to feel connected to the passage of time, notice its patterns, and begin to use its subtleties to their advantage.


When designing the day/night cycle, we wanted a flexible system that let us do more than just rotate the sun and moon around. The cycle of a celestial body is based on the current in-game date and time, it's axis tilt and angle, and it's revolutions per day. Using these parameters, we were able to create a semi-realistic moon cycle just by decreasing the moon's revolutions per day ever-so-slightly. This same mechanic will likely be used on the stars (when they're added) to create a yearly star cycle.

This system opens up tons of possibilities for events, secrets, and mystical happenings for the player to discover. Tides, moonrock, and fish are some of the minor things already in the game that take advantage of these cycles, and we have plenty of exciting ideas for many more. Time will likely play a much larger role in Salt in the coming future.


- Robert Gamble (Game Design, Coding, Environmental Design)

1 comment:

  1. Roy GathercoalNovember 16, 2014 at 5:01 PM

    certain low tides could expose wrecks, or high tides submerge entire islands for a bit. I really like the rhythms thing.

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