Continuing our experimental production, this week we started concepting a very important idea in the Pine world: species moving up and down the ecological hierarchy, which visibly shows in their 'housing arrangement'.

In the hierarchy of Albamare, there are four layers (A-D). Layer D is reserved for critters, more basic animal-like creatures or very rare beasts that have the purpose of being food or balance in the ecology. They are stuck in that layer in terms of evolution. All the others, species, are constantly moving between layers A, B and C, trying to reach the top of the foodchain.

As for environmental visualisation, we started concepting the camps of the Litter and Cariblin, as we are prototyping a lot with these two species. We want to combine the idea of their territory getting larger with them using more techniques and tools as they evolve.

The Cariblin camp looks as follows:



You can see that they start out with very basic tents, made out of mostly leather and wood, and add more materials and tools as they evolve. Their A-camp ("townhall" as we sometimes refer to it) even has cemented stone walls.

Now, the island contains plenty of "camp sockets", places where a house could be. Camps are arranged by clustering A, B and C type houses together. Of course, this is linked to their respective level of evolution.

This means that if the Litter is higher up the rank, instead of the Cariblin, you would see more of their houses. They look as follows:



These houses are made out of moss and rocks primarily, but they add more and more wood as they go, and more interesting and crafted objects as they evolve.

If both species are in level B or even A, you will see both houses pop up a lot, but likely at the very opposite sides of the island.

Other than these visual concepts, we have deepened out the design of these layers a lot more, considering their armor, use of weapons and movesets. We now have design sheets that we can fill in very structurally for any species we make.

On the subject of making those species, we are in the process of researching the ideal pipeline to make them. We have two of them being made from start to finish at this moment, to get a better grip on how long it takes to make one from concept to functional, and to see what the best practices are. We are very excited about the two new ones we are making, but more on that later.

We're also working a lot more on the shape of the island. While not finished at all, here's a little blurred sneak peek at the general shape:



We expect this island shape and design to change a lot during production, but for the species to make sense of their environment it's very important to have a solid structure to begin with. We continue to work on the streaming and our own custom terrain system to get it all up and running, while crafting the island in WorldMachine.

Lastly, we have been working on some cool animations for the Mannoth - a huge and lonesome beast you might encounter on the island. We're super excited about your interactions with this one.





That's it for now - until next time!