The past month has been pretty hectic. Towards the end of June I quit my job to focus 100% on developing Castaways and so far the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it sooner! Development for Castaways is flying. In most cases there isn’t much to see, but the framework for everything we have planned is really looking good.

Build Mode

At this point the build mode is looking extremely good. There are no problems with it that we know of and its designed so that we can add as many build-able elements to the game as we like. It only takes around 5 minutes to add a brand new building to Castaways which has shaved quite possibly hours off the original time.

At the moment we have 5 buildings, 2 props and 3 defensive structures fully working. This means the player must collect the correct resources for the structure or prop they want to build, find a place to build it and construct it using whatever tools that are necessary. So far its looking really good but we wont know fully until we have implemented the team inventory which is whats currently being worked on.

In addition to the build mode taking life, we have also implemented a land flattening solution. When placing anything in build mode, there is a check to see if the ground is relatively even. If so, it flattens it out just enough to place the structure or prop where you like. This means when playing Castaways you can build almost anywhere assuming that its not on the edge of a cliff.

Character Rigging and Animation

We have finally given our character arms! They aren’t the best looking arms but it finally allows us to start adding things such as hammering and cutting down trees. For now it works perfectly but its definitely something we want to improve on in the future.

Playing with fire

In a combination of both the character animations and the building, we’ve now implemented the creation of fire. Once you have equipped a torch or build a camp fire / standing torch, you can now light each of them assuming one of them is already lit. Once lit the fires eventually die out after a time limit but are easily re lit using your torch. Its not a huge feature in regards to development but its definitely fun to play with. Oh and it looks great!

We’ve also made a start on a range of other areas but for the most part they aren’t really worth talking about. Next month these things should be finished and definitely worth mentioning.

Over the next few weeks we will be working on the Team Inventory as well as finalizing how we use resources. With this also comes a complete overhaul of the interface. At that point it will be time to start looking at getting a demo out for people to play with.