Dev Blog
Hi, this is the Stranded III development blog (see also Forum Thread, Comment Thread).
Entry 23 - Stranded Deep Is NO Unreal Software Game - January 28, 2015
Yes, I'm still working on the game!
No, I have nothing cool to show at the moment.I recently added a day night cycle. You can specify the light color for each hour with a definition similar to Stranded II. I still have some problems with the skybox though so I won't show videos/screenshots of this yet. I'm also working on a lot of stuff in the code base to get the core code as clean and stable as possible. Unfortunately that's nothing I could write interesting dev blog posts about. So I'll write about something else today:
Stranded Deep has been released 5 days ago on Steam Early Access. It is/was under the top 5 sellers and I tried it as well. For research of course. I have to admit that the graphics look really good but the content is still pretty limited. I think and hope that this game won't become a Stranded III killer as it doesn't support modding or multiplayer. I will keep an eye on it and I'm very interested to see how it goes on and what cool stuff the two guys from Beam Team add.
As inventor and developer of the Stranded series there are three things I dislike about Stranded Deep:
The name, simply because it has Stranded in it which might lead to confusion They added a Wilson reference. To everyone who doesn't know who Wilson is: Watch the (awesome) movie "Cast Away". I added Wilson to Stranded II as well - about 8 years ago... They are earning tons of money (it's a topseller on steam which means much) with a game which - at the moment - has significantly less content than my free titles... this makes me a bit thoughtful...I made this image. Please consider to show it everyone you know who likes / talks about Stranded Deep but never heard anything about Stranded
Update (31.01.2015):
I want to clarify some things based on the comments here:
I clearly don't want to take any legal steps! I'm not against Stranded Deep! Everyone should be allowed to develop whatever they like. I fully support this idea of total freedom in game development. Only the result counts: Good games. Taking existing ideas and improving them is crucial and should be supported by everyone. I'm doing exactly this myself a lot. I think that Beam Team / Stranded Deep deserves the success. They put a lot of time and effort into the game and they did many things right. The game looks amazing and has huge potential become really awesome. My actual point was and still is the following: Please tell people about Stranded. I want people to know that Stranded Deep is not the first/only game of this type (of course Stranded isn't either!).