IBT Survival Island Game - Progress Report Twenty

For the past 20 weeks or so I've presented to the Steem Community an update on the creation of the open world game - IBT Survival Island.

The general principal of the game is you find yourself trapped on an island and you guessed it.. you need to survive. 

I created a couple of high level goals/objectives in the beginning... a vision to see if:

1. We can get out an early playable demo - if the interest is great enough. 

2. We can create an Aussie based survival world, with many animated creature and Aussie bush survival challenges, something that later could be multiplayer - if we could learn to use graphics better and learn to code.

3. We can integrate this game with the block chain in some meaningful way, where the players receive rewards for unlocking things in the game etc - if we can become code masters :)

Today's post update is a reflection to see how we are going, after 20 updates it's probably worth having a look/think :)

1. Early Playable Demo

There is enough of the game built to produce one of these and even have some tokenism; however a couple of things have made me hold back on this. The most notable the lack of interest by the crypto community (don't get me wrong, some people have been great! its just the volume of people interested is very low). To check the communities appetite I followed the steps for fundition and provided regular updates;  You can see this original post here:

https://steemit.com/en/@lordnigel/l6mjz3r5q

A big thank you to those who gave generously - unfortunately we are still only about 34% to our target and some of that I put in myself.

It's unfortunate very little support has come from upvotes or interest with comments etc, but it isn't the end of the world. 

Still, it's important to note it takes a very long time to build a game..There is incredible effort required if you have only a small team; learning how to program and use graphic programs is intense and an exhausting experience. The message here is we work at pace, and some of this motivation is based on the level of interest in the product..if the interest is low, the urgency and motivation is low. 

Still, we will never give up! and we do really appreciate all those who have followed along and provided support along the way - good things come to those who wait and we won't stop working on the game and we won't fail to reward those who have believed and followed along the way when it finally starts to release.

2. Aussie based survival world

Creating the Aussie based open world has certainly taken great effort. We have created a number of resources, creatures and objects for interaction such as the iconic eucalyptus tree and the Aussie black crow. 

The above image is original and was created from scratch for our IBT Survival island Game

Making these animations has been challenging to say the least. For instance with the Crow, now that the creature is built we also need it to fly around and interact. To do this we must think about the pathways these creatures take in the open world.

..And this really takes me to this weeks update, mostly this is what has taken up the past week to experiment and start to think about larger game play logic and figure out how to make these pathways work.

The above animation is our first creature flying around the island following a set pathway.

3. Integration with the crypto world.

There are so many ways this can be done - so no decision has been made yet. I want to have a product and then look to enhance the product because of crypto (not the other way around - bringing the gamers to crypto so to speak)

When I started this project I had in mind to use an official Steem SMT and did initially try to align the demo to the notified release date... which came and went. One important lesson in all of this is whatever time you think it takes to program something, just multiple that by about 10 and your probably pretty close to the date to  Beta release. There are so many possibilities how we could tokenise this, from simple rewards benefits to using the Steem API to full integration in game resources. The effort that goes into a game is incredible, it's no wonder it takes years for the big name game producers to push something to market. One thing for sure its not going to be rushed.

IBT Survival Island continues to progress, with the recent success in working out the code for animal pathways we are well on our way to making a really special and different game.

A few people have told me - don't wait release a demo ASAP... But as I have said many times before, I don't mind if suddenly a pro group of game makers come left field and suddenly release a PC crypto game, in fact this would be great and if me working on this and sharing this creates a sense of urgency in others sweet as!! - it's all going to help Steem and then we all benefit!! This game isn't about making money, it's about the love of games and Steem :)

And that's it for this weeks update - Steemon guys!