A technical sprint for the team this time with the star of our game getting some attention, yeap; ocean shaders! We also started on the all important inventory system and made our game handle multiple controller inputs (and switch between them) nicely.

• Base control prompt system – This is where we start to think about what will feel natural to our players whether they’re using a keyboard or any of a number of controllers. Do we use normal button presses or should this action require a hold? We also needed to make the system errorlessly handle switching of inputs. 
• Inventory – Your inventory in Dredge is very tactile and you interact with it a lot — this is no simple inventory. Joel needed to make sure it obeyed your normal inventory rules – you can’t put more items in it once it’s full, you need to be able to move items around or get them out of your inventory somehow and of course to save the contents of your inventory. To this he also needed to add the ability to rotate items and restrict where some items can be placed (but not others). 
• Dock – You’ve got to come back to land eventually and now we have a way! Docking at a town will save your game and allow you to access Stores, Places of Interest and Townsfolk… eventually. 
• Water – There is a lot going on with this feature – needing to create multiple meshes, setting up the Level of Detail and of course; make waves. As you can imagine there is a whole lot of ocean in Dredge so having variation is super important to us; deep sea should be a different colour from shallow and bigger waves should generate more froth than calmer seas, not to mention making it look stylised in the way Alex wants. Importantly your boat should ride the waves

And that’s our Sprint 2 wrap-up! There is a lot planned for Sprint 3 so stay tuned!