This Week at Lavaboots: Story and Cartography

6:24 AM willsterling23 2 Comments


Hey everyone!

It's been a fun week over here at Lavaboots with lots of stuff going on. We've been hard at work at a few different things and I wanted to give you a brief overview of some of the content we've been working on.


Cartography


John and Rob have been continuously working on the upcoming cartography update. If you don't know much about that yet, we are essentially designing an in game chart/map that you can use to mark locations of islands and information about those islands. We are making good progress on this and can't wait for you guys to try it out! 

This week John has been focusing primarily on the design aspect, creating icons and the look of the map. I have to say it is currently looking really nice and will fit well with the rest of Salt's UI theme. Rob has been working on map functionality features, such as map zooming and things of that nature. We want to make the map smooth and fun to use and so we are spending time polishing it's look and functionality. 


Main Story


This week I have been primarily focusing on design work for the main story. One of the upcoming updates we'll be working on soon will be implementing the remainder of the main quest line. Our goal with the main quest is to give you a sense of linear direction in otherwise open game, and give you some information on the backstory of the world as well. When we implement the remainder of the main story, we'll also be adding in a quest journal to help you more easily keep up with the tasks you've been given. 

Since Salt doesn't feature any voice acting, I've been spending a good bit of time re working old dialogue and writing new dialogue that is more concise and easier to digest. My goal is to find the balance between not having to read a wall of text, but getting a sense of personality and depth to what is going on. This can be a challenge but we've got some ideas and I think the new dialogue achieves this fairly well. 


As always please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments. We love hearing your feedback! 


- Will Sterling (Game Design and Sound Lead)

2 comments:

  1. I have so many books on my ship, and have enjoyed reading all of them. Is there any chance you will add a bookshelf? It would be nice to have easier access. Also if there was a way to label the chests, it would be great. I keep loosing my stuff! LOL! Love the game, thank you, and Happy Holidays!

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  2. Keep up the stellar work guys! I'm only about 40 hours in, but I haven't been this excited about a game since Skyrim. I would agree with Ava that a bookshelf would be very functional and aesthetically pleasing, especially if it held like 40 books. Anyways have a Happy New Year!

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