If you're new to Salt and wondering what the game is about or how it differs from Salt 1, let me go over a few things. Salt is an open world pirate exploration game with a focus on freedom and discovery. Your character gets plopped in the middle of an infinite procedural ocean and you are free to pick a direction and explore. The main loop of the game is sailing the seas, finding an island to explore, fighting pirates and picking up quest, and progressing your character. This is not a game focused on ship combat but rather focused on life at sea and exploring the world. 

Although Salt 2 shares a lot in common with the first game, a lot is changing as well. For starters, a complete visual overhaul. We are switching to a new rendering pipeline allowing for much better graphical fidelity. This means brand new models, textures, shaders, lighting, animations, UI, and performance improvements. While the game will still have a stylized look to it, we want everything to feel polished and much better than in Salt 1. We are also implementing a new island generation system for more varied and interesting islands.

In addition to visual changes, Salt 2 will have a much greater focus on crafting, ship upgrades, character progression, and survival mechanics. We want the gameplay loop of exploring islands and the sea to fit directly into upgrading your character and your boat. Your ship will be your home at sea, and we want it to really feel that way. In addition to a deeper crafting and upgrade system, we also want progression systems in many aspects of the game, including talents, levels, and things of that nature.And of course Salt 2 will include brand new quests, more elaborate and interesting points of interests, new gear, better combat mechanics, and new music.

Now, on to what we've been working on recently!

One major area of focus for development recently has been working on our island generation system. Since our world is procedurally generated, we want to make sure our island generation system has a lot of flexibility to create interesting and unique islands to keep exploration fresh. We've been working on setting up systems to populate islands with various foliage, creating different shapes of islands, and even creating islands that allow for water inland. 

This is something we are still working on and will share more in depth details in a future blog post.

Another area of development we've been focused on are animations. We've been working on combat animations, swimming, jumping, falling, gathering, and idle animations. We want every action you take in the game to have feedback and feel good. 

We've also been spending some time implementing sailing mechanics and new ocean mechanics. We want sailing to feel epic at times with massive waves and relaxing other times as you sail into the sunset. A lot of work is being done on ship physics and deciding the sweet spot between realism and fun. 

We are so excited about the development of Salt 2 and can't wait to share more progress with you in the coming weeks! If you are interested in getting development updates you can sign up for our newsletter or join our Discord.