Greetings Pioneers!

Today we’re bringing you a rather extensive update on what the team have been working on this past week as we push towards multiplayer.

We’ve transitioned to Unreal Engine 4.8 this week as well, which should help us bring improvements to the game through more streamlined tools.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I’ve been working on implementing our new flying fauna and trying to tweak the pathing so it looks right. I’ve also begun work on introducing our new reactive flora to the world, so beware!

Tristan – Senior Developer

My main task has been to continue on with foliage optimisation because as you can see every one else in the team seems to want to make more foliage stuff. Oh and writing Ricky’s development update.

Carlos – Developer

This week I’ve been working on our first pass of the multiplayer lobby system UI! In addition to this I’ve also laid out the first set of graphical options for all you Pioneers to toggle at your delight!

Chris – Designer

I have been working prototyping the feasibility of adding propagating fire into the game. I have also been looking into external tools to aid us expanding the world within a short turn-around period.

Ricky – Developer

Ricky is not here to write this himself so I (Tristan) have taken the time to do it for him. Kind of me I know. Ricky has been working on a new construction user interface to allow you to navigate our new build system. For all you builders out there. We hope you will like it.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I’ve been working on creating the final art assets for one of our new Interactive Foliage prototypes (lovingly named the Exploding Sac Plant). I have also been working on creating initial concepts for future biomes and other weird and wonderful Interactive flora.

Please note: This is a work in progress and as such the visuals are subject to change.

Matt – Art Director

Through most of this week I’ve been throwing together an example of the possible structures that can be made from the new build components to set a precedent for the final quality we are looking for, and to verify all the pieces make sense and work well together.

This has taken the form of a multiplayer map which we’ll be using to test some of the basic and more complex interactions that take place in Eden Star.

Please note: This is a work in progress, visual benchmarks for game systems are only representative of what we would like everyone to eventually be able to build in game.

Yves – Senior Developer

This week I’ve been working on more super complex multiplayer stuff, namingly hurting people remotely… with guns! And making their bodies go all limp. I’ve been working on other stuff too, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise! I’ll let you know next week 🙂

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working hard on multiplayer weapon animations, setting up directional aiming and turning on the spot, as well as fixing some blending issues. It’s no where near perfect yet, but it’s getting there.

Not happy with how characters turned on the spot in many other games, I wanted to try and get it looking better in Eden Star, without the feet sliding around. So far so good, now I just need to get it to replicate…

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been working on the bugs that arose from updating our UE4 engine along with working on some of the bugs the community have been posting on the Steam forums and our public Trello board.

Gav – Concept Artist

This week we’ve been conceptualising a huge variety of creatures ranging from new apex predators to roaming, neutral faunas which will gradually begin to inject more life into the environments.

As always you can keep an eye on our more immediate progress with our Public Trello Board.

Happy hunting Pioneers!

 

Greetings Pioneers,

Following on from last weeks blog update we are pleased to announce the release of our next update to the game which adds the Missile Turret to your defenses. This turret will wreck havoc on unsuspecting ground and airborne enemies, as well as destroying anything that gets in its way.

You can view the full change list on trello.

Today is also a good opportunity to update you all on the exciting new features some of the team have been working on…….

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve recently been working on implementing the new missile turret which you will be able to test in this new release. I’ve been debugging some of our own multi-threaded pathing code we use for our flying creatures trying to iron out remaining bugs and crashes. At the moment I’m just about to begin work on the flying fauna creature, which you should see in game very soon.

Marcin – Game Designer

I have been focusing mainly on implementation of the finishing touches to the fresh, new Missile Turret, making sure that it’s in working order, fun, and even maybe slightly overpowered. Moreover, I have been designing some of the upcoming interactive additions to the world of Pharus7, including the combat with the Juggernaut by grabbing and smashing of its legs.

Yves – Senior Developer

Last time I insisted they use my title “King Developer”, but said request was ignored, you just cannot get the staff these days *shakes head*. Anyway, I have been working on super technical multiplayer stuff, namingly replication of our destructible assets which is a combination of nVidia’s APEX destruction module and our own home brew stuff. We’ve had to get our hands dirty with engine code to (low-level unreal networking code) implement the APEX part. I hope you appreciate that this is all very hard work and now my fingers are bleeding, alas we suffer for our passions.

Chris – Designer

This past week I have been helping the dev team test new tools to aid in the expansion of the world including the ability to add more dense environments without compromising on performance. I have also been prototyping new interactive foliage which allows the player to pick them up and smash them causing havoc to the surrounding environment and any enemies unfortunate enough to get in the way.

Tristan – Senior Developer

I have been working on making the foliage in the world much more efficient to allow the artists to splash out a little. If all goes to plan we can have nice dense forests and plant life without reducing the framerate to that of a flipbook. Virtual trees were destroyed in the making of this system. Its ok though I just press B and they come back.

Carlos – Developer

This week I’ve been working on optimization of the game. I’ve been looking at how to implement some scalability settings, adding new shiny options to it as well for all of you to play with! 🙂
These changes should hopefully mean that the game will run smoother if you turn these settings down.

Ricky – Developer

Working on new video options for the menu
Working on Upgrade to shiny new engine version
Continuing work on the new build Menu/System
Beginning designs/work on the multiplayer UI’s

Lauren – Animator

Recently I have been working mainly on animations for the fauna creatures, specifically the upcoming flying fauna (Nahmar). I have also been tweaking the Missile Turret animations to fit with the chosen firing type and refining character multiplayer animations.

Andy – Lead QA

Since our last release I’ve been testing the Missile Turret, taking a look at some of the multiplayer implementation and working my way through 17 peanut butter Kitkat chunkies Kyle bought me. You’ll be happy to know I finished the last one today!

Gav Li- Concept Artist

This week we’ve been working on a VERY exciting backlog of creatures – more than you can count! (so long as you’re incapable of counting very high)

Matt – Art Director

All of last week and this week I’ve been designing, iterating and preparing an update to the build assets. This is being done in anticipation of re-launching build with a tonne of extra variety when Multi-player is launched. I’ve also been working closely with Gavin and the rest of the guys to make sure the additional flora and creatures that we have planned feel and work believably in our world and new biomes.

That’s all for now folks! For an up-to-date view on all of the features being worked on please visit our Trello board

Also please continue to keep us informed of any feedback and issues on the Forums

Many thanks,

– Team Flix

 

And the Winner is…

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention! I’ve just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. I need all of you, to stop what you’re doing and listen…MISSILE TURRET!

So our next update will see the inclusion of the shiny new Missile Turret to your arsenal of defences. You may remember a few weeks back we asked for your feedback on which fire type we should use for the initial release. And, drum roll please, the winner is……..

The Continuous Fire Type!!!

A HUGE thank you to everyone who took time out and voted for their favourite. Stay tuned for more new feature announcements and updates over the coming weeks.

We are looking to get the Missile turret to you guys as soon as possible so you can start reigning havoc on the inhabitants of Pharus 7.

As we move progressively towards multiplayer, we’ll be pushing out further updates to critical systems of the game. Build is one of the major systems that is getting an overhaul.

We’ll leave you with some development images of the updated assets which will provide a much wider variety of structure configuration.

The intention for multiplayer is to give players the ability to customise their bases as much as possible. The preview displays what would be considered the ‘base’ primitives for building. However there will eventually be more expensive, more heavily armored looking build pieces on offer.

Happy hunting Pioneers

-Team Flix