вЂњYou feel you can hide from it a bit and outsmart him,вЂќ says Bengtsson. You can check if you can see which side itвЂ™s patrolling and then quickly nip into the sea on the other. One way Redbeet massages the sharkвЂ™s danger level is by reducing the range at which itвЂ™s aware of you when youвЂ™re on a reef. вЂњWe wanted it to be very difficult when you went into open water off your raft, because we wanted people to treat it like an actual danger, but when you got to a reef you had to be able to swim around a bit and gather.вЂќ вЂњThe shark became more about making it less easy to collect from the reefs,вЂќ says Bengtsson. While the shark started out as lethal, it was demoted to very dangerous when Rebeet added islands and reefs to the game, locations rich in resources which youвЂ™ll need to dive to recover. The effect is to make you feel that you should be keeping unblinking watch. Redbeet have it surface so its fin knifes through the water, and other times it goes deeper so itвЂ™s invisible or barely perceptible. Apart from a few minutes after being killed, the shark is continually being simulated somewhere nearby, but you canвЂ™t always see it. One of RedbeetвЂ™s solutions is to play with the sharkвЂ™s visibility. So RaftвЂ™s shark is a multifunctional beast, a shadow in the water which deals sporadic attritional damage which you need to spend hard-won resources to repair, as well as a mortal danger in the places where youвЂ™ll get those resources.ДЄnd itвЂ™s proved a great deal of challenge to develop, the main thing being the need to make it seem dynamic, unpredictable and interesting вЂ“ and not simply a robotic killing machine. вЂњIf he bites the piece of the raft your grill is on, you lose it. вЂњHe became a big problem, because youвЂ™re so focused on getting stuff to survive thirst and hunger,вЂќ 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. вЂњSo 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.вЂќД®nergy-sapping cold water could have also stopped players from going in the water, but the shark was a far better solution. вЂњThat 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,вЂќ 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. вЂњHe gives you a kind of company out there, even though heвЂ™s trying to kill you.вЂќДЇew survival games feature such a personal relationship with their core threats. вЂњThey talk to the shark and name it,вЂќ co-developer AndrГ© Bengtsson tells me. Yet players have developed a strange relationship with it. That shark is RaftвЂ™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 canвЂ™t help but be fascinated by. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys theyвЂ™ve taken to make their games.

Raft survival game