March Development Update 3

Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been planning the development of the tutorial and the environment to add points of interest, feature areas and optional objectives while hopefully reducing the load times as these structures can work differently to those that players can build. These lost-colony abandoned structures should offer plenty of intrigue and opportunity to explore.

The tutorial/introduction we are designing to stagger the player abilities and reduce the difficulty of the starting area while still ramping things up for late-game. We have some bright environment and tech artists we are bringing on board to assist with the level development as well as vehicles.

John – Lead Designer

At the end of this week Flix was invited to the Epic games Post GDC Unreal Engine 4 meetup in London. I’ve been down and it was the perfect chance to catch up with some of our contacts and look into some of the upcoming tech on a more personal level. In terms of Eden Star, this really helps us get a better understanding of where we can take the game from a technology point of view.

For the beginning of the week I’ve been overseeing the design work for the objective based tutorial from a production standpoint, this is essential to getting a realistic measure of the time we’ll be investing in this section of the game early on.

Matt – Art Director

As the developers are tidying up the grenades. We’ve moved onto some heavy design and art related working to re-shape our game introduction, with the help of two rather lovely chaps, Tom and Alex. Both will be doing most of the design work that’s needed to better pace the player learning process and introduce game lore and new mechanics to come. The changes are huge, and will include a whole new start area that will eventually introduce players to basic objective based locations. Cue cheeky WIP Concept –

We’ll be working towards more discovery based progression, and improvements to the A.I that will mean you can pick and choose your fights when and how you encounter them, as opposed to having the constant onslaught. Next week i’ll be looking at sharing some of the artwork for the locations we’ll be adding.

Lee – Technical Director

Having finished work to make it easier for the designers to change the behaviour of the AI, I have begun work on tailoring the spawners to allow the designers to get what they want from them in regards to the story of the game.

Tom L – Character Artist

And we’re done! For now. The characters are ready to go to the game mesh and rigging process. Excited to see these two going into the character customisation sprint 🙂

Ricky – Seniór Programmer

Looking to get stuck in to developing the grenades and consumable system fully.

We wanted to account for various types of consumables being useable in different ways with the system, such as C4 being placeable or thrown but differently to how grenades are thrown, standard grenades also need to be cookable (mmmm sandwich) with this functionality.

We have some cool thoughts and ideas down too for further down the line having deployable one time use items, deployable Shields or walls, even turrets oh my.

Tom W – Designer

It’s been a pretty exciting week for me over at Flix headquarters, working with everyone on coming up with an engaging introduction to the game and it’s mechanics. Hopefully Alex and I can bring a fresh perspective that will only add to the experience everyone’s been working so hard on creating.

A big focus for us this week has been on designing areas that will both be aesthetically interesting and add new gameplay experiences for the players. These areas should serve as unique landmarks for the player to visit and explore.

We’ve also been working on a brand new modular base-kit for the environment, separate from the craftable pieces currently in the game. This should allow us to rapidly create unique spaces for the player to explore, as well as being able to alter and iterate upon them as efficiently as possible.

Alex – Designer

First blog post! Exciting stuff!

This week, Tom and I have been busy helping the design team approach rebuilding the tutorial from the ground up. As someone relatively new to the game, part of this involved sitting down and playing it for 6 hours, keeping a checklist of anything I found confusing/needed more explanation.

Apologies to poor person whose base I raided and turned against them while they slept, it was for science I swear!

Below’s a sneaky preview of what we’ve got so far:

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing with the third person character and grenade work. I have also been involved in the level rework discussions, exciting stuff!

Andy – Lead QA

It’s been a design heavy week. We had a design workshop with Tom and Alex, formulated an initial plan for our new starting area and tutorial, putting together a design doc that nails down all aspects of the new starting area and the tutorial and worked on the starting area blockout with Matt.

I also managed to squeeze in a little testing on the new animations for the grenades, tweaks to the values for the titan wall and gate.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix