Hey everyone!

We've got a lot of new content to talk about that we've been working on over the past month. Progress on Salt 2 development is moving along well and we're excited about a lot of the upcoming changes to the game. We know you can't wait to get your hands on a ship and start exploring the seas, and we're working as hard as we can to make that happen as soon as possible. 

Our goal right now to release in Early Access sometime late in the Fall of this year, though that could change as is the nature of game development. We want to make sure that not only is the game full of fun content to experience at launch, but also that it is polished and as bug free as possible. Even though we plan on launching in Early Access, we don't want to have a buggy or half baked experience. Our goal is for the game to be very polished at launch and we're going to work hard to make that happen. We're getting close to our content goal for the game in terms of all the systems and how much there is to do in the game, but we really want to spend some time making performance improvements, improving visuals, fixing bugs, and just overall polishing the game before you dive in. 

Here's a look at just a few things we've been working over the last month. 

Recently we started work on some intro cinematics for the game, including some voice over work and just setting the stage for the adventure you're about to take. Although it's short and sweet, we want you to really feel the isolation and novelty of awakening on an island in the middle of a massive ocean and uncovering the story and lore of the world. While our game is heavily focused on crafting and just general exploration, there is a story to the world and we want that feeling of mystery to be all throughout your experience in Salt. Creating a little cinematic intro helps immerse you into that world.

One of the major features in the Salt 2 gameplay loop is crafting. While you are on your ship or at a workbench, you'll be able to craft all kinds of items. Crafting will also be a skill that you can level up. This means as you get better at crafting, you'll have a greater chance of crafting high quality weapons, armor, and other items. Weapons and armor in the game also have randomized talents, and high rarity items have a bigger talent pool to pick from. 

You'll have a handful of basic crafting recipes to start with, but many of them you will discover while exploring and looting the world. We've recently begun implementing the crafting UI and the ability to stack items, sort by rarity, and things like that. This system is moving along well and we should have it fully implemented soon. 

Exploring caves, ruins, and other strange places is a massive part of Salt 2. This is a major change from Salt 1. In the original game, we didn't have any way for you to transition into a dungeon, cave, etc., from the islands. This meant if you couldn't find a point of interest on an island, it didn't exist. In Salt 2, we've added the ability to transition into new scenes from an island. We recently implemented a saving/loading system and it remembers where you are in the dungeon, and also what island what location you were at on the island. This is important especially for a procedurally generated world where you could be on any number of infinite islands. 

As always we're still adding lots of new caves, shrines, ruins, and other interesting places to explore. We want you to have a lot of fun areas to delve into in search of treasure and loot. 

We've also spent a good deal of time recently improving the visuals of the game. We've added new foliage that can spawn, improving the fidelity of some assets, and even made changes to the wind and particle systems to make the world feel a bit more atmospheric. We're also still working on tweaking performance and making sure the game runs smoothly. This is an ongoing process and something we will continually be working on even through release.

Thanks for reading and don't forget to hop on over to our Discord and chat with us some time! We'll have more updates coming soon.