May Development Update 3

Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been continuing with the level work in our internal main stream and it’s really coming together. We’re putting together gameplay sequences, placing lights and sounds and hooking up interactive buttons that do things… 🙂

Very good news on the condition of our update to the multiplayer with turret upgrades – we’ve managed to remove the majority of critical crashes! so we confidently say you can expect to see a new version landing shortly.

Here’s what we’ve all been up to this week:

John – Lead Designer

Heading up another fantastic testing session with Staffordshire University. Getting the students involved in UE4 always brings a smile to my face, and it’s eye opening for them to see a working title in it’s development stages. The production on Eden Star has been rapid these last two weeks as we move to the later stages of implementation where we start to see everything come together!

Matt – Art Director

Lighting passes, mesh work and all sorts have been done. The guys have vastly improved the benchmarks for the different areas of which variations will come throughout the level. Our primary goal has been to replace the design blockout with our tile sets ready for artification. Personally I’ve been working on the silo area and bringing the lighting quality up to standard.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week has been mainly testing the latest fixes to do with the multiplayer server issues. Everything looks good! I can now focus on finishing off moving the AI over to our new behaviour component.

Tristan – Sandwich (Lead) Developer

This week I have been putting in some partial optimisations for the spawning the prefab bases and general level loading. I have also been working on bugs oh glorious bugs. I also made fishfinger sandwiches on monday. For the team. Coz I’m kind.

Yves – Senior Developer

Working on implementing our new melee system, it’s looking good and should vastly improve the feel of close quarters combat (plus make it much fairer than it stands currently)

Alex – Designer

Lots more revisions have been made to the transmitter tower this week, making sure it’s a fun play space, that also seems functional and realistic. An entirely new top section has also been modelled and with some inspiration from watchtowers and air traffic control towers going into the design of it. Still lots to do before it’s ready for release but it’s going to be worth the wait.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Preparing to implement the first of 3 shiny new features…

One will allow level designers to build deeper underground. It was a request, don’t tell anyone but I think they want to secretly build one of them evil bad guy superbase compounds underground.

There’s next crafting of makeshift items on the player.

And finally finishing touches to the new use interact system which will enable you to do things like pick up items from the floor or either tap or hold the use key to do different actions such as open a blocks inventory or use it in some other way. This will also allow you to pick up items even while having a weapon equipped.

Joe – Environment Artist

So this week I started on the Silo base – while Matt was working on the awesome Silo area itself, I took a look at the hallways, entrance and corridors that lead to it. They will form a long-abandoned laboratory that should be good for short/mid range combat and tense exploration of a creepy sci-fi facility. I also took a look at some of the collision/navigation issues with the new areas with Marcin, paving the way for exciting AI interactions using all the new Melee and combat systems.

Tom W – Designer

This week, I finalised the Dam’s interior, adding multiple entrances and exits, allowing for a variety of ways to explore the area. Now that the layout of the Dam is complete, I’ve moved on to producing the high-poly assets for various important areas, starting off with the Power Generators.

Lauren – Animator

This week has been mostly about axe animations, improving the feel of the swings for mining rocks and rigging up the latest axe model with the pointy pick side. I’ve also been continuing work on 3rd person locomotion, working on new crouch movement animations and tweaking player acceleration.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been working Lee and Trist on the fixing of multiplayer and optimisation of the game. I’ve done several reviews of the Dam, Transmitter and Ancient Eden Kit and worked with the guys to iron out any tweaks we decided upon.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix