Greetings Pioneers!

This week has been full steam ahead in the run up to the next release. We have been pushing ourselves to get most of the new features into an internal build this week so we can test and debug them over the next few weeks. Oh so many items, icons, creatures, features and new mechanics coming soon!

John – Lead Designer

So this week we have been working really hard to get an internal build together of the following components; Armour System which includes crafting of the armour and how it will affect stats, the survival system’s first pass, including food stuffs and looking at how it may affect level design, the Wolf and Deer (placeholder names – these just represents the creature’s characteristics), the Loot system for finding Armour, Weapon Parts, Full Weapons, Compound Resources (Parts such as circuitry or advanced metals for stronger Structures and new Utilities).

Once these are all in, we will then review the level design of the Compounds that the players can raid and how we are going to spawn enemies within the Compounds and smaller procedurally spawned Bases. I’ve also been working on the final stat designs for the Modular Weapon system which will be receiving its first internal build next week and guiding the guys with the final HUD and UI designs.

Matt – Art Director

Many icons were made this day, pixels were sacrificed and saturated, layers were copied and deleted. Their memory had consumed most of my maximum capacity, but what was discarded shall not be forgotten. I’ve been putting together models for many of our new survival items as well as taking images for icons to use in our armour system ‘paper doll’.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I began by debugging the group behaviour component and started testing it. I’ve also been working on creating some new AI this week, the deer and the wolf. The deer is ready for testing now, while the wolf still needs a bit more care and attention. Another AI I’ve been looking at is our first crustacean creature, which is now ready for testing too.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on implementing the majority of the modular weapon system. We still have to put the crafting components in but hopefully you will be able to experience it sometime soon.

Yves – Senior Developer

I have been working on the first pass of the loot spawning, we have a selection pre made bases which are randomly spawned in, and their lock boxes are filled up randomly from a loot table.

Ricky – Developer

Armour and HUD/UI redesigns.

Adding extra polish to the HUD and UI, along with ironing out a few leftover Armour system HUD components. (Approximate target designs below)

Marcin – Designer

With so many new systems planned for the next release and the core mechanics of them all already in place, we are currently focusing on making sure that the user interface is crystal clear about how it all works and fits together. This week, Joe, Ricky and I have been mainly working together on integrating new UI elements for the armour, the new statistics and the effects they’re under, and the new map, while at the same time identifying and fixing readability and usability issues with our current solutions.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I finished all the initial UI and HUD concepts that were needed before moving on to creating the artwork we required for our new ingame HUD! Over the past couple of days I’ve been helping Ricky and Marcin with implementing the new HUD so we can actually use it in-game. Additionally I’ve gone over a huge number of issues with the Tab Menu.

Tom – Character Artist

The flying beast is complete! Prepare to be attacked from above muhaha

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working to refine the ‘deer’ and ‘wolf’ animations, adding additional movement such as leans and turns, idles and reactions and adding variant wolf attacks. I have also been putting together animation blueprints for two of our crustaceans.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been mainly working on creating concepts for different Tiers of the Eden Kit. Each Tier needed to feel more and more stable, while also building up to the current Eden Kit which will be Tier 4. We have worked to make the Tier 1 have a more portable feel, with more folding parts and simple shapes to make the overall kit less bulky. Whereas, the Tier 3 of the Kit has more of a skeletal structure of the Tier 4 Eden Kit (current Kit), such as the petals that encase and fold down around the current kit. There is still work to do to get these 100% what we want but exciting times!

Andy – Lead QA

This week I continued with the testing of the new consumables and got play around with the first implementation of the new armour mechanic.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix