Dev Update: Unique Points of Interest in an Infinite World

11:27 AM willsterling23 8 Comments



Hey everyone!

Today we wanted to talk about how we are approaching exploration content in Salt 2. A major focus of the gameplay revolves around you sailing the infinite ocean and exploring the islands you come across. But of course exploring an empty island isn't very fun, and so we want to make sure there are lots of things for you to discover that make exploration worthwhile. 


Infinite World = Infinite Content? 



If you don't already know, Salt 2 is procedurally generated. This means that you start in the center of an infinite ocean and can pick a direction and explore forever (theoretically.) As you sail across the ocean you come across islands that are procedurally generated for you to explore. One challenge for procedural worlds is how to handle content. A world can be infinite but that doesn't therefore mean there is an infinite amount of content. Some games handle this by offloading the focus from exploration content and into something like crafting, building, or simulation. 

With Salt 2, while we will have deep crafting crafting systems, survival mechanics, and other things that make "living" in the world fun, we also want there to be a ton to explore and do. We want you to come across interesting locations on islands, quests, and mysteries that make you want to explore further towards the horizon. 

But with an infinite world, how do we handle this? 

Repeatable Vs Unique Points of Interest



Across islands you will discover many different points of interests: pirate camps, ancient ruins, merchants, caves, abandoned campsites, villages, and a lot more. We are separating these into two categories: repeatable and unique. It's important to note that each one is actually hand built whether it is a unique point of interest or a repeatable point of interest. This means unlike in Salt 1, the game is not procedurally generating a campsite for example. It will randomly decide where to put the campsite on an island, but the campsite itself is handcrafted to look a certain way. 

Repeatable points of interest (POI's) are what they sound like: content you can discover multiple times. With these types of POI's there are many different variations, but they do have a chance to spawn more than once. For example, there may be 100 different hand crafted abandoned campsites that can spawn. The game will randomly decide which one is placed on an island. So chances are more often than not, you won't see the same one repeated to often. But there is a chance of course. Our goal here is to provide content that most of the time looks different, but can always spawn so you don't run out of things to discover. 



Unique POI's however can only spawn once. These are generally deeper and more interesting than the repeatable POIs. They may have a specific quest tied to them, a unique story to discover, or some kind of puzzle to complete. Since these have so much personality to them, it would be strange for them to appear more than once, and therefore they will only be able to spawn one time. 

We are working on creating a ton of both repeatable and unique POI's so that there is a massive amount of content for you to discover, in addition to all of the other gameplay aspects (hunting, crafting, character progression, fishing, survival, ship customization, etc.). 



This is something we are very excited about and was desperately missing from Salt 1. In the original Salt, points of interest were very plain and didn't have that much to them. Because we are hand crafting them in Salt 2, they not only look way better, but are much more interesting to explore as well. 

As always thanks for reading!


8 comments:

  1. Love Salt Looking forward to Salt 2, keep up the great work :)

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  2. I can't wait for salt 2 do you think the beta test will be available in the next 6 months

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  3. Yes , also asking for Beta Testing... is there a Date Abviable ?

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. Handcrafted POI's seem interesting!

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