First devlog! We're starting with the fun part: the blades you'll carry across Greece. And a question that, without making a fuss, took up our whole week: what if what a weapon is made of actually mattered?

Work in progress. Everything you see here, the meshes, the materials, the designs, the systems, is a test or a prototype, not the final game. Nothing is locked: not the models, not the materials, not the design. But it's real, hands-on development. This is genuinely how Islands of the Blessed gets built, one experiment at a time.

The first blades

Greece is the first island you'll explore, so that's where the armoury begins. We blocked out a few blades in Blender: the Xiphos (the short, leaf-shaped Greek sword), the Rudis (the wooden practice sword you're handed early on), and then a whole pile of Kopis and other curved blades. Because once you start, honestly, you just can't stop!

Lining up your first real weapons and watching them exist in the world never gets old. That's where a folder of files really starts to look like a game.

One blade, every material

A row of curved Kopis blades sweeping through many materials and colours
The same curved blade, sweeping through woods and metals.

This is where it got a little out of hand. Instead of finishing one sword, we caught ourselves going "ok, but what does it look like in bronze? and in olive wood?"… and, well, we did all of them:

Woods: cedar, hornbeam, oak, olive wood. Warm, light, the stuff of early, improvised weapons.

Metals: bronze, iron, steel and gold. Heavier, sharper, more dangerous. And more valuable.

And the best part: not one of these blades is hand-painted. There's no per-sword texturing. They all run off the same handful of "baked" maps, plus a little material trick we'll show you in a second. But the idea isn't variety for its own sake: we want each material to carry its own character. The metals lean into raw power, and the precious woods lean toward the game's stranger side, the one that plays with perception. Lining them all up also shows which ones actually read at a glance. And that matters: mid-fight, you shouldn't have to squint to recognise your own sword!

We have a favourite. No idea if it's yours. There's a spot at the end to settle it.

How a blade gets its material

Here's the part we're a little proud of, and the reason that line-up isn't a hundred hand-painted swords. Each blade is modelled in Blender, then we bake a few maps off it:

  1. Normal map: records the fine surface detail, so a low-poly mesh still catches the light like a sculpted one.

  2. Curvature map: finds the edges and the crevices, so wear, grime and highlights land where they naturally would.

  3. ID map: the important one. It paints each part of the weapon a flat RGB colour: the blade one colour, the fuller another, the grip another, the fittings another.

Baked Curvature, ID (RGB) and Normal maps for a Kopis blade in Unreal Engine
Curvature · ID (RGB) · Normal, baked straight from the Blender mesh.

Back in Unreal, that ID map feeds a single layered master material. Each colour is a slot, and each slot gets its own material instance. The result: one mesh and one master material become bronze, iron, olive wood, whatever we want, just by changing what's plugged into each ID.

The layered master material graph in Unreal Engine 5, blending materials by the ID map's RGB channels
The layered master material. The ID map's R / G / B channels decide what goes where.

So it isn't a stack of unique assets: it's one clever material reading a colour mask. Swap the instances, get a new weapon. And that's handy, because it's exactly what a crafting system wants. You pick up a material out in the world, you slot it into the weapon at the Sanctuary, and the blade re-skins itself.

Under the hood

Wireframe view of the weapon meshes — low-poly geometry
Low-poly under the paint. Every face earns its place.

Underneath, the meshes stay light on purpose. The faceted, stylised look isn't us cutting corners: it keeps everything fast, and it lets the silhouette carry the read. The wireframe is just us checking that a blade still looks like that blade with the textures off.

Same logic with the systems: we prototype fast in Blueprint to find what's actually fun, and once something proves itself, we validate it, optimise it, and move it to C++. That way, by the time it reaches you, it's running 100% optimised in Unreal.

What's next

Making a material look different is step one. Next, we want it to feel different: hooking materials up to the real behaviour of the weapons, getting the blades into your hands, and firing up the Sanctuary's forge, where you'll actually craft them. We'll post it all here as it happens.

And that's a wrap on the first one! The road to Early Access is long, but we're glad to have you with us.

More devlogs

Devlog #02
Building our own water
Devlog #03
Building dungeons
Devlog #04
A detour: Blueprint Lab

So… what would you forge?

Swing by the Discord and tell us your favourite blade, and what you'd want to craft. We read everything! (And yes, the good ideas have a nasty habit of sneaking into the game.)

Join the Discord ← Back to the devlog