GENERAL

Probably the most interesting aspect of Escape The Pacific is the realistic Season and GeoLocation system. The entire environment and weather system is based on Latitude and the day of the year.

When you start a new game, you select the “day forward” constant which is used to calculate the “day of year” in game. You can choose between 1, 2 or 3. If you choose 3 for example, this means that each in-game day is 3 calendar days. In this case the player will experience a full in-game year by surviving 121 in-game days.

The actual season is calculated using the player’s geolocation. As the player changes locations by travelling around the map (north/south) the latitude is also changing. This is limited from ~30N degrees to ~30S degrees. The playable area in the story mode is displayed above in the title screenshot inside the darker square on the ocean map. As the player travels and the latitude is changing, so do the actual season and weather parameters change.

If the player is located around the northern latitudes and wants to avoid the upcoming winter (shorter days/longer nights/somewhat colder temperatures), the player can set sail and travel to the southern latitudes where the upcoming season will be the summer.

SEASON

The actual season is affecting every aspect in the game: weather, fauna, flora. Every day in the game starts with different parameters based on the actual season. All the parameters are taken from real world weather data.

REALISM

At each tenth latitude we have chosen a couple of real islands from the Pacific and applied the data to our weather mechanics. For the other in between latitudes the weather mechanics performs interpolation calculations to get the respective weather data.

WEATHER

Real Pacific islands weather data is used in our weather mechanics.

Escape The Pacific has 27 different factors that impact the weather mechanics, where the player can choose between different weather models:

• Normal (default), hot, cold, wet, dry, windy, calm modifiers. Every weather scenario results in a totally different gameplay. Imagine a calm scenario making sailing difficult due to the lack of wind, or a scenario with lots of storms and high humidity that makes managing fire a real challenge.
• Latitudinal based weather and seasons - the actual weather is depending not only on the actual day of the year but also on the player’s actual latitudinal location. If you don't like the winter season in the northern zones, simply travel south for a warm summer breeze.
• Complex temperature system (sun, shadow, wind, rain …) - The player can experience the temperature exactly like in real life. Seek shade to hide from the heat of the sun, learn to use the heat of the sun and the wind to speed up drying yourself and your wet clothes and be careful when it's cold and windy because without protection, you risk dying of freezing.

Below are some example graphs (not all) for the 20N latitude.

Daily average minimum and maximum temperature

Daily precipitation type (light/medium/heavy rain and thunderstorm)