RAR Islands - Post I

Hello!

As recently promised, I’m writing the first post to share some information about RAR: Islands! 🎉

RAR: Islands⌗

First things first: what is RAR: Islands?

As briefly stated on the previous post, RAR: Islands is set before the events of RAR I and RAR II, and the mechanics of the game will be more focused on:

• Exploration
• Gathering
• Crafting
• Helping Settlers

Before jumping into a brief explanation of each of these points, let me introduce a first screenshot of the main game screen:

Exploration⌗

On RAR: islands, when arriving at a new island, before being able to interact with anything, you’ll need to start Exploring. This will start happening when pressing the [Explore] button. When doing so, your “Explorer” will start discovering the island and its contents:

☝ Although the quality of the gif above is not the best, Exploration can be more or less seen. When the tile discovered contains something, it unlocks and appears in the view showing the island contents, allowing you to interact with it.

Once an island has been completely explored, the [Explore] button is replaced with a [Gather] one, which will be available for a certain amount of times to gather common materials (e.g. Wood Sticks).

I may talk more about exploration on future posts 🙂

Gathering⌗

A part from the basic [Gather] button mentioned above, a lot of the content found while exploring will be gatherable content.

When finding this type of content (like a Pine Tree), then you can start gathering from it.

Initially, when you have no tools, the gatherables you’ll be able to interact with are limited, since many of them require a Tool to interact with. But a gatherable like a Pine Tree is possible to gather without one. It will take longer than with a Chopping Axe, but the first times gathering Wood, you’ll need to be patient until having enough materials to Craft one.

Other gatherables like a Flower Patch or a Berry Bush can be gathered without any Tool and without any restriction.

Each type of gathering has a Skill associated to it, and, every time performing it, you will increase your experience on it and level it up.

The combination of the Tool and Skill makes it more or less effective when interacting with a gatherable.

Tools at this current point are obtained by Crafting them, and have a maximum usages. Once the Tool’s usages are exhausted, the Tool breaks, and you need to Craft a new one.

Most of the basic mechanics related to this are already implemented, but there are some extra things I plan on this part not implemented yet that I won’t be covering on this post 😏

☝ Disclaimer: The Tools and Skills screens are not final yet (well, actually, nothing I’m showing is final, as I could change anything until the day I release the game 😅).

Crafting⌗

Due to Crafting being so important on RAR Islands I decided it should be the middle entry point on the bottom menu on the Game Screen, (which, during my play-throughs has proven very useful lately).

Similarly to RAR II, the Crafting Screen is the main list of Crafting Recipes you know, and, from each of them, you can access the concrete recipe’s Craft Screen, which allows you to actually Craft the item (if you have enough materials, of course!).

There’s a new concept I’ve been recently playing with, which is to allow to spend Gold to increase the Crafting Recipe Lvl.

When increasing a Crafting Recipe’s Lvl, it increases the range of maximum usages on the Tools of that type you Craft (this has already been implemented!). My plan is to also add some perks that will have an increased chance depending on the base material from which the Tool is made from, and also the Crafting Recipe Lvl.

☝ I have it planned to display somehow the range of usages at the current Lvl of the Crafting Recipe as well as the possible perks.

Helping Settlers⌗

One of the last points I wanted to share on this first post is related to the Settlers.

These NPC will be found on the islands when exploring them and, for now, they are just folks requesting for materials which will help them get started on their plans on settling on this new part of the world.

Once you’ve helped all the Settlers on an island, the Chief Settler will want to talk to you and will request for some building materials to allow them to build a Village on the island… more on this on the next post… 😎

Afterword⌗

Well, I’d like to share more about other parts of the game I’ve already developed and also parts I have in mind, and the roadmap ahead, but I will try to keep writing some more posts in the following weeks.

The last bit I want to share on this post is that, even though I don’t plan making RAR Islands as big as RAR I and RAR II were, I still want to make it deep and complete, replayable, and continuing a similar sandbox-y philosophy like on my previous games 😄

Thanks a lot if you had the patience to read until here, and please, share your thoughts either on Discord or Reddit if you feel like it! It’s always encouraging to know there’s people out there who enjoys playing these games I enjoy so much creating 🧡