SWAMP devlog #1 — carving the first bog

Starting from water

Every region in SWAMP begins as a flat plane of water. Land is carved out of it, not the other way round. That sounds like a technicality, but it changes every decision: paths are the exception, not the default, and the player is never standing on something that is guaranteed to stay dry.

For the first bog we wanted one region small enough to finish and large enough to get lost in. The current version is roughly 400 by 300 metres, with four islands and a single settlement site.

The survey pass

Before any art, one of us walks the whole map with a debug boat and drops markers at every point where the route is unclear. Those markers become the survey path, the bone-coloured trail on the cover image above.

1. Carve the islands with the height brush (still a placeholder tool).
2. Flood to the season level and see what survives.
3. Walk it, mark it, move things until the walk is interesting.
4. Only then place reeds, trees and the first stilt house.

What worked

Reeds. Nothing else in the toolbox does as much for so little. A dense reed bed hides the horizon, muffles the audio and makes a 20 metre crossing feel like a decision. We now spawn them from a single ReedField volume with a density curve instead of placing them by hand.

What did not

The first island layout was symmetrical, which reads as designed and therefore safe. We broke the symmetry by sinking the north-east island by half a metre. That one change produced the first genuinely unsettling moment in testing: the path you came in on is gone by nightfall.

If the player can see the whole route, it is a corridor. If they can see none of it, it is a maze. The bog should sit somewhere in between.

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Next

Water level simulation across a full day, and the first pass on sound. Patch notes for build 0.1.3 will follow once the build stops crashing on load.