“He became a big problem, because you’re so focused on getting stuff to survive thirst and hunger,” says Bengtsson. Developer Redbeet wanted the raft to be under constant pressure of damage, so they added a new behaviour: the shark would swim up to the raft and start chewing on its edge until it destroyed the section. The shark also opened the way to more solutions. As soon as players jumped off the raft, the shark would zoom right at them and start dealing massive continual damage, a perfectly natural - and fearsome - threat for Raft's lost at sea theme. “So we added the grill and water purifier to allow the player to survive thirst and hunger, but quickly the issue arose that people could jump into the water to collect stuff instead of hooking it.”Įnergy-sapping cold water could have also stopped players from going in the water, but the shark was a far better solution. “That obviously led us to wanting to add more to the game, and one of the first things we realised is that there was no pressure for people to do anything,” says Bengtsson. Raft started out as a student project at the University of Gotland, with a simple prototype in which all you could do from your raft was to hook nearby floating planks and pull them in. But in Raft, the main thing which limits what you can do and where you can go is a single scary fish. Outside their customary hunger bars, most employ endlessly spawning enemies and environmental conditions to keep you on your toes, whether night-borne zombies and skeletons, ice storms and fucking wolves, or ridiculous dinosaurs. “He gives you a kind of company out there, even though he’s trying to kill you.”įew survival games feature such a personal relationship with their core threats. “They talk to the shark and name it,” co-developer André Bengtsson tells me. Yet players have developed a strange relationship with it. That shark is Raft’s principal antagonist and it sits at the centre of many of its survival mechanics (as observed by Steve Hogarty in his early access review of the game). So you can understand why I admire Raft, the survival game in which you try to stay alive on a rickety wooden craft constantly circled by a giant shark. That enormous blue conceals awful primal horrors which I can’t help but be fascinated by. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.
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