Ocean Island Survival

Ocean Island Survival is a first-person survival prototype set on an island about 4 km across, surrounded by open ocean. You start on a beach next to a wrecked boat with almost nothing, and you have to explore inland, gather supplies, find fresh water, make tools, build a shelter and stay warm and dry through three nights.

Four routes cross the island through spruce forest, fern-covered gullies, rocky overlooks and upland meadow, and they all meet at a mountain pool called the Tarn.

There are two parts to the project. One is making an island that still looks right when the player can walk anywhere, turn any way, and see it in different weather and light. The other is making the survival systems underneath predictable and testable.

• A full island you can explore, with terrain, rock and ground materials, generated rock formations, forests, grass and undergrowth.
• A vegetation system that builds the forest when the world loads, and then streams smaller plants in around the player as they move.
• A GPU shallow-water simulation for the freshwater pools, separate from the ocean.
• First-person walking, running and swimming, with settings to reduce head movement and camera shake.
• Survival systems for health, hunger, thirst, warmth and wetness, with inventory, crafting, building and drinkable fresh water.
• One survival state that owns all of those values, so they aren’t changed from different parts of the game.
• Ambient audio that changes gradually with distance from the coast, elevation, tree cover and weather, instead of switching at trigger zones.
• An automated validation runner that goes to named locations, takes screenshots, and checks survival, progression, collision, comfort settings and saving and loading, then writes the results to a report.

• The ocean is calculated from waves at the current moment. That looks good over a big open surface, but it has no memory of where the water was, so it can’t fill a pool. The freshwater pools use a separate shallow-water simulation that moves water between grid cells on the GPU and conserves it, so the pools hold their own water and ripples keep moving after whatever caused them has stopped.

• The island has about 305,000 plants. They’re placed from a grid that marks each area as forest, clearing, damp ground, rock or shoreline, so nothing is placed by hand, and they’re drawn in batches by area instead of as separate objects. Distant trees switch to flat impostors generated from the original meshes, and only trees close to the player cast full canopy shadows. Across 27 test viewpoints at 1920×1080 on High settings, performance was between 85 and 215 FPS, with a median of 121.

• The benchmark was measuring frame rate right after taking a screenshot, so the result included the pause from capturing the image. One forest view read 42 FPS that way, and 95 FPS once the frame rate was sampled before the screenshot and averaged over several frames.

• There are 248 automated checks in five suites covering survival, progression, saving and loading, comfort settings and collision. They run inside the full game instead of against mock objects, which leaves the visuals and how the island feels to play as the things that still need a person to judge.

Ocean Island Survival is a prototype, and the repository says so. The forest assets look basic up close, grass and small plants can visibly pop in as you move, and there are no first-person arms or character animations yet. There’s also a fully simulated waterfall for the Tarn behind a command-line option, but it’s turned off because it didn’t look good enough to include.