After the GameJam, with mixed results but a clear idea in mind, I decided to start working on a full point-and-click game. I began by exploring ideas around the theme of secret agents, with a historical twist: the paranormal secret services of MI-13 — a British agent sent on a mission in the 1960s, just before the Bay of Pigs invasion.
But I wanted something light-hearted, a bit removed from real historical events — ideally set on a small island. I imagined beautiful beaches, palm trees, and jungle... BUT NO PIRATES, this isn't going to be The Curse of Monkey Island all over again. :)
So the setting will be Navy Island — it's not very large, far from major conflicts, and interestingly, the island once belonged to Errol Flynn, the movie star of the 1940s.
First, I wanted to focus on the map and terrain. So I started by gathering topographic data in Blender, which I planned to export into Unity afterward. There's a plugin called Blosm that lets you pull satellite data directly, but I also needed access to the Google Maps API, and of course, I had to find the coordinates of the island itself.
Buildings, roads, topography — everything’s there. It’s really great!
The only downside is that the topographic data isn’t very accurate, so I’ll have to rework the terrain manually.
After some scaling adjustments to get everything at the right size, I began refining the map using Unity’s terrain editor. I had a reference satellite image at the correct scale, which I gradually used to shape the terrain so it would match up perfectly.
The second step is texturing the terrain. For this, I’m using Unity Terrain Painter and Quixel Mixer for the textures and blending. I’ll also need a few PBR textures to get good-quality results.
Terrain Painter allows blending textures based on altitude, which is much easier to implement — so I went with that. After exporting several textures, the result is looking pretty good.
I have 4K PBR textures with Diffuse, Gloss, Normal, Roughness, and Specular maps. Unfortunately, I can’t use EXR files directly for the terrain layers — no big deal, I just transferred them into the normal map instead.
Now it’s time to gather assets for the vegetation. I already own quite a few asset packs — both purchased and free ones from various sources (especially PolyHaven and the Unity Asset Store). I’m going to sort through everything and clean it up, keeping only LOD 0 models and basic HDRP or Shader Graph materials. For the LODs, I’m using InstaLOD, which is great for a small budget like mine.
After a bit of effort, I now have a beautiful map ready for the next steps…
