This week in "Kurofune: Descobrimos Portugueses", we will go over our finishing touches, extra polish, and last-minute changes.
Hello everyone, welcome to another weekly DevLog from 3PAStudios, where we explain our thought process bit by bit on how our game is being made and give a piece of our mind on this journey of game developing. If you have any questions or tips to give us be sure to post a comment or talk to us in our social medias at twitter and instagram.
Polish
In the past few weeks, it's safe to say that our focus in the game has been on reducing the scope and polishing the essentials, and as of now, the final bits of polishing are almost done, only missing a better balancing of the game as a whole and better UI readability.
Last-minute changes
Our game was lacking a bit in the visual department; our map was flat, and it's hard to perceive 3D waves in a plane in the top view, so we decided to redesign our map to be more realistic.
Using real-life samples and data, we were able to use a satellite image of the earth made by NASA satellites to create a realistic, 1:1 apropos of the world map, with mountains, rivers, and plains.
For those that don't know how a height map or topography map works, it's usually a plane photo of a map or object, and it's assigned a color scheme based on the amount of evaporation each point on the map has.
As you can see in these maps, the white color symbolizes the highest places, while the darker tones are representative of the lowest evaporation.
Using multiple tools commonly used for small-scale, real-life representations of certain places on earth, we were able to create a realistic 3D world map.
Also based on the height map, shorelines have a yellow tone to symbolize sand, the highest points are white to represent snowy mountains, and the rest are green as in fields of grass and plains.
Unfortunately, using a realistic texture on the map would not only need to be 16K to have the resolution necessary, but we would also lose the low-poly style of art, and it would be almost uncanny valley.
Our last step in terms of art and assets is just to add a lowpoly model of a Caravela, a typical Portuguese ship that is essential for the element of immersion in the game.
Conclusion:
We are on the final streatch mark, our only task is to improve what we have already made and make a lot of testing.
Join us next week's DevLog as we are going to start to make a final trailer for the game and announce a release date for the game.
