Progress Report news - Frozen State

Hey all!

Unfortunately, due to some technical issues I couldn't make a video update today. But as I promised to make an update in which I was going to tell what we are working on right now, I’ll do it in an old-fashioned, text only way…. with a few screenshots.

At the moment we are finishing up the basic game mechanics, creating new assets and hammering out some bugs that we come across. I’ve mentioned already that many objects will be procedurally generated every “New Game”, however, for a better result we decided to combine procedural game elements with hand-crafted levels.We manually placed big and medium assets ( e.x. buildings and ruins), sculpt terrain, and then place “spawn points” where we want to have a random object ( enemy, piece of furniture, loot etc) . Each spawn point may contain an infinite number of objects that can possibly spawn there. Also the objects can migrate between the points in random order.
Before (The diamond shape markings represent the spawn points, as you can see there are still a lot of static objects, which I placed manually. Later they all will be replaced with the spawners)

After (the new game has been started, and all the spawn points have turned into objects)

Why so complicated - you might ask? Well, we’d like to have more control over the procedural generation and potentially diminish the likelihood of generation of plane and uninteresting locations. But the biggest advantage of this system is that it potentially may grow in a very powerful modding tool. Probably, it is too early to say such words, but we would like to see Frozen State growing and thriving even after we finish all work on it. If we get a positive response from the community, we will continue improving our tool set and one day we will make it available to everyone.

Another big chunk in our to-Do list is UI. In order to optimize the UI code, it was decided to rewrite the code from scratch, yep it did take quite a lot of time, but it was worth it. Along with this we have also redesigned some windows in the Inventory, and added a new UI element for quick interaction with the game objects such as: lootable objects, cars, door locks, cooking and so on.

The most recent implementations that has been made is the transition between locations forth and back again. The trick was to get back in the location you came from, because before the locations couldn’t save the content inside them, now they do. The next step is random generation of the world using the existing locations.This all for today, I hope, the technical issues will be fixed soon and I’ll show you more in the video update.

Thank you,

Alex (satori)

P.S. Special thanks to Mr. Jetcutter for proofreading.