I knew this was gonna happen
because I had three words.
And now I need to remember what they were.
Adventure, survival.
Windbound for me is probably about
exploration, discovery, and adventure.
Ancient?
No, I'll go with mystic.
Windbound is a crafting survival game
that marries the experience of the the open world,
procedurally-generated experience,
with a story and narrative that drives you
through the whole adventure.
And coupling that with
you being on a boat
carrying your base through
the whole thing as you go
makes it a really unique experience.
So when we started we basically
just had Kara, the protagonist
collecting resources, crafting slings,
and bows and arrows,
and kind of things like that.
That was great.
But at some point Mitch looked out onto the
ocean that was surrounding the island
and said, Well, I kind of want to go out there.
So at the beginning of the game Kara
finds herself shipwrecked and
basically just needs to survive.
She comes from a people
who have made their living
living off the land.
They're hunters and gatherers,
But then they also just as much as
important as the land to them is the sea.
We wanted her to be a character
that was able to survive in situations.
She isn't completely out of her depth.
So when she washes up on shore,
she knows what she needs to do
to hunt and gather food to survive.
She knows the resources she needs
to start crafting her initial canoe
and to start crafting sales and to eventually
get off that first island onto the next
and the next until she can eventually
make her way back to her family.
early on when you first start the game,
you'll more or less see the same types of islands.
So it is procedurally-generated,
but then as you play through the game,
there'll be more types of islands
with different biomes and different
visuals and lighting.
It's quite intentionally very friendly early on.
And then as you progress through the game you'll start
getting introduced to more obstacles
within the environment, both
the environment itself and the creatures
that make things feel more hostile.
So as the player goes through, they'll go
through forests and deserts and swamps
and savannah-y kind of landscapes.
And every player will see that differently
going more into the belly of the beast
as you're going through it.
When we initially came up with
the idea with the boat,
I'd been going out on a few
sailing adventures with my brother
at a lake near his place.
And as soon as we mentioned the idea
of putting a boat into the game,
I immediately wanted to try and
replicate having that experience of really
raising and lowering the sails and
tightening the sails in and out.
Once you get your head around how that
actually works is really rewarding,
a really fun experience.
The boat was a great way
to have players be able to still
get that level of commitment and
investment in something
that they care about and rely on,
but also be able to not feel tied down
to one single location.
Obviously there are still risks involved.
Like you you've got reefs and you've got rocks,
and you've got waves and all that sort of thing
which don't play nice with a boat,
But you're never tied down to one place.
You rely on your boat to not only collect resources,
but it's it's also your way
to get back home ultimately.
Working on the creatures especially
I think is probably my favorite part
as well as being the most challenging.
They've all got this level of
kind of a bit of familiarity,
but they're also very obviously distinct and different
from the things you might expect to see.
The blink that the sort of little rabbit thing,
that's actually just me going like,
huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh.
And you speed it and you get this,
(high pitch noise), sort of thing.
Rather than being covered in regular fur,
you'll see on their ears they've got like these
sort of we call them "blink fronds."
They're almost like a feathery type of thing.
Then you'll use that for crafting,
um, crafting your arrows and things like.
Pond Whompers which will fire
a toxic sort of sludge at Kara
and temporarily poison her
or anything else that's around.
It's got this big burp it does.
And so I actually had to do this
sort of (weird duck sound) sound
and slow that right down,
and then it sounds like this giant, tremendous burp.
Having the Nautilus there was,
uh, one of the things we had
right at the very beginning.
Yeah, the the idea of having this big creature
that played some part in the story.
And how you got through the world
was something that was there
right from the very beginning.
The Nautilus, she finds out more about it
as she plays through the game
and more about the world that she's in
and the nature of the storms and
everything around her.
It's obviously got a lot of power behind it.
It's something that gives
the impression of being ancient.
Perhaps doesn't take kindly to the presence
of Kara or her tribe sailing so closely.
I would hesitate to say more than that
without just telling you what happens at the end.
