POLYARIS: Mid-March 2025 Development Update

[h3]Core Focus:[/h3]

Interactive animations for pickups, food & drinks, medical items and more
Storage looting mechanic
Grid-style inventory improvements
Streamlining efforts to polish core systems instead of spreading resources too thin.

[h3]Next steps:[/h3]

Integrating survival mechanics with player controller (i.e., falling from great heights will break your legs, drinking soda will replenish your hydration, etc.)
Implementing crafting and cooking mechanics
Creating and polishing procedural Arctic world
Hand-crafting unique props relevant to our game’s setting

Psst: wishlist the game and join our discord to stay in touch.
Here's an invite link: https://discord.gg/8BMbZf7uN9

We took a short break in February to touch (grass) snow and reconnect with our family and friends, but now we’re back on the project and working hard on finishing up core mechanics of POLYARIS.
[h3]Immersive interactions with the world[/h3]
We strongly believe that small details can make a game extra immersive. That’s why we’re adding animations for most interactions in the game, such as using food and drink items. Take a look at this soda drinking animation:

Or this item pick-up animation, with automatic equip if a slot is available:

[h3]Storage looting mechanics[/h3]
Where there’s loot, there’s got to be a lot of opportunities to find it! From abandoned huts to Arctic military bases, there will be many opportunities to look for supplies in POLYARIS.
Some loot will be lying on the ground, but most of it will be found in various storages, such as crates or dead bodies.

We have finished implementing storage looting mechanics. When you come across an unlooted storage, you will first have to go through a search animation by holding down an interaction key before you can see what’s inside the storage. The searching duration will depend on the type and complexity of a storage. If you have already searched a specific storage, you can open it instantly. Here’s a demonstration of this mechanic:

[h3]Improvements to Grid-style Inventory[/h3]
As we mentioned in our last dev update, we’ve switched to a grid-based inventory, where different items may take up several slots in your inventory and can also be rotated. This “tetris” mechanic fits well with the other mechanics centered around looting in POLYARIS.

Lately, we’ve added several usability improvements, such as moving items between storages with a click, double-clicking to equip an item, as well as dropping an item from the inventory with a single click.

[h3]Custom-made props[/h3]
We try to avoid third-party generalized assets as much as possible where it matters - to not lose the unique visual style of POLYARIS we’re trying to build. This primarily includes interactable items that you can pick up and use.

Here’s an example of the latest model we’ve created: a bottle of the traditional Scandinavian strong alcoholic drink, Akevitt:

That’s not everything, but these are the key details we can share for now. We’ll keep you posted.

Wishlist the game and join our discord to stay in touch.
Here's an invite link:
https://discord.gg/8BMbZf7uN9