Dev Diary 2 - First steps into Northern Lights Overhaul

Greetings everyone! You’re probably wondering why we’ve been silent for the past few weeks!

And to answer that, the whole team is working hard on the big update, which will completely change the core mechanics of our game and the visual representation of those mechanics.

In this Developer Diary, we will be taking our first steps into showing you some components of the game’s overhaul.



Big part of the user experience and the part that you will see on screen the most during gameplay sessions is the First Person HUD. So we started by redesigning the HUD from ground up based on feedback from our UX team and the representatives of the community!

The new HUD is more streamlined, less cluttered and takes less vital space on screen. We have also re-themed the whole interface to fit better with our game's "natural" thematic. No more industrial looking UI elements!



Another important bit that we noticed from your feedback is that opening a menu to see your current afflictions is annoying and breaks the game flow. To make this a better experience we have moved the list of active afflictions to the HUD and we simplified the data we display for them. This panel can be shown by holding the [Q] key in your keyboard!



As a quality of life improvement, looking at an interactable object now also displays contextual information! Looking at a tree trunk? Now you will know if you have the correct tool to harvest it! Found a new coat? You will know if its better or worse than your currently equipped one without having to take it and navigate through menus!



It is also now possible to do certain actions such as harvesting or consuming pickable items without having to loot them first, by accessing their right click menu while inspecting.



We have also put a lot of effort into polishing the world map menu lately! As per your feedback, the map is now displayed in full screen and features a legend to make it easier to understand what you are looking at! The maximum zoom has also been increased.



A new feature for the mapping system is the addition of the push-pins to the game! Push-pins can be used to mark locations such as loot caches and points of interests on the map. And to make things more interesting, they have to be found and looted while exploring certain locations before they can be used!



Note that the number of push-pins the player will be allowed to loot and carry will be limited to balance difficulty and to avoid filling the map with pins!



We are working hard on polishing the game and on adding new features for the Overhaul Update, and until the update is ready for release, we aim to publish a weekly dev diary with the new awesome stuff we add to the game to keep everyone updated. So stay tuned for more!

Feedback is important for us, especially now with all the big changes we are making to the game, so don't hesitate to let us know about your potential ideas! Also let us know how you feel about what we're currently working on! We encourage everyone to get in touch with us over Discord or Steam Community!

And as always, thanks to everyone for the support!