Brisbane developer Flow Studio has announced that its survival game Len’s Island will be expanding into a fully open-world game in an update scheduled for later this year.
Len’s Island launched in Early Access in November 2021 and has been a hit with players with the game sitting on Very Positive reviews. But while it seems like updates on the game have been slow since its release, behind the scenes, Flow Studio has been hard at work planning for the next stage of Len’s Island’s development.
The studio isn’t quite ready to share details on what an open-world Len’s Island will look like just yet, however I was able to squeeze a little bit of information out of Flow Studio’s founder Julian Ball about what players can expect from the game when the update drops later this year.
Ball tells me that the team at Flow Studio has been working on a new system, one that they believe is a solution to the many problems created by procedural generation. Right now they’re calling this system ‘Procedural Generation – Done Right’ and this will allow them to expand Len’s Island into a fully open-world game.
“Put simply, we have made a tool that randomly distributes, hand-crafted islands and cells of a map, and organises them around the world in unique ways,” says Ball.
Thanks to the Procedural Generation – Done Right system, the studio has been able to expand the overworld of Len’s Island, with Ball telling me it’s “more than 50 times the size of the previous world, with infinite possibilities.”
“Previously we just had one forest biome with some subtle variations. Now we have developed six distinct biomes with unique variations of each that will be spread across this massive new world. These five biomes will have unique resources, enemies, bosses, places to build and rare items to uncover. The new content we have created in six months far exceeds all of the content in the game right now, which took us four years to make.”
According to Ball, this tool is easily customisable, meaning that players will be able to mod Len’s Island should they wish. It’s something that the studio is really excited about.
When the game does launch, the studio is aiming for the map in the full release of Len’s Island to be over 200 times bigger than the Early Access launch build. As of right now, Flow Studio is aiming to launch this major Len’s Island update later in the year and will share more details about the future of the game soon.
What do you make of Len’s Island going open world? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
