The World Kept Getting Bigger

Development of Dawn Upon Us has changed significantly over the past few months. One of the biggest challenges has been finding the right scale for the world.

Development originally began with a 1 km × 1 km prototype, which gave us enough room to establish the basic gameplay and environment systems.

From there, we experimented with a 2 km × 2 km world before making the jump to a much larger 8 km × 8 km map.

That first 8 km world taught us a lot about building at open-world scale, but we eventually pulled development back to 5 km × 5 km so we could focus more heavily on terrain quality, roads, vegetation, POIs, optimization, and gameplay systems.

After everything learned from those versions, we’ve now made the biggest world decision yet:

Dawn Upon Us is officially returning to an 8 km × 8 km world — and this is the map we’re moving forward with.

This isn’t simply another resize. The new world is being built around better terrain, mountains, coastline, road planning, vegetation, and four major areas of interest designed specifically around the geography.