Greetings Pioneers!

Many a late night of squashing and smashing bugs has yielded some otherworldly progress this week! We’re getting to the stage where we’re very happy with the way the new system changes are working.

There are now very few stability bugs that we need to solve before we can responsibly release the next version to you all.

Update on final issues that we are currently facing before the build will go out to the public ::

John – Lead Designer

This week I have been in editor fixing navigation issues in the new swamp biome and helped the team bug test our latest features whilst organising the tasks for our next sprint. All of the multiplayer menus are also now designed and initially set-up (in the frontend) so that the server setup is ready to be executed via Steam and players can access, favorite, filter and search for dedicated servers via the server lobby.

The Clan/Squad (any name suggestions are appreciated!) governess has also been worked through, allowing for the leader of a Clan to set up all of the ownership and governess of all assets/allied AI/defences etc. for the members. Designs for the Sniper and the Armory system have also been drafted and are ready for prototyping.

Matt – Art Director

I’ve finished off the new Armory asset that we will eventually be using to access weaponry and consumables.

I’ve also been helping to guide everyone through various visual and game bugs for our next release, as well as developing up and coming content for Multiplayer. The Swamp Biome is also nearly ready for release so we’ve been taking some new screenshots for Steam!

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been dealing mainly with a problem we had trying to build a shipping version of our game. Finally tracked the issue down to a couple of incorrect XML files and some missing dll files. In between this I have been testing and fixing new AI ready for release. While also planning out some future AI creatures.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been mostly dealing with bugs to do with Destruction, Foliage, Build, Weapons, AI and anything else in the game. I am not alone in my struggles as everyone here has been pretty much jumping around all over the place to make sure everything is ready for all of you. Starship troopers had it easy.

Yves – Senior Developer

Sampling the fruits of all those lines of code! But mainly destroying bugs in the build system.

Ricky – Developer

I’ve been tweaking the new Build menu to make it more user friendly based on feedback from the test team.

Carlos – Developer

This week I’ve been working on finalising the last few elements of our UI. Along with that I’ve been helping to bug fix any issues that we had remaining, as well as help out set up some of our new assets.

Marcin – Designer

Apart from the massive amount of bugs squashed and effects re-implemented into the new construction and foliage systems, we had managed to finally implement a few changes that have been lying around collecting dust for a while. Among others we have:

• the Eden Kit, Foundations, Laser Posts and Turrets finally adjusting their physical attributes to the material they are constructed from.

• Updated visuals on the Holograms and Snap highlight

And hopefully if we manage to get them in the game, you will be able to see our new Water Impact PFX.

Chris – Designer

This past week my main focus has been play testing the current build, bug fixing and tweaking the game for our next release. I also added the ability to mine the drop pod allowing you to salvage materials from it.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I’ve jumped onto bug testing to help push towards our next release. It’s a huge update so we really want to make sure it’s as fun and stable as possible! I have also fixed a large number of bugs, including shader, asset and level issues to ensure a good level of consistent visual quality across our expanded current level. I’ve also finished the first pass of terrain painting for our brand new map.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been testing the new build system and power system while working on the update to the guide with all of the v0.0.11 additions and changes. I’ve been fixing and tweaking various bits and pieces with the Swamp Walker, building awesome bridges, making gifs and poking the dev team when I find any more bugs.

Gav – Concept Artist

I’ve been working with our other designer Simone on some more concepts for upcoming features in the game including the armory asset Matt’s been wrapping up this week, the enemy hive bases, portable turrets and the micro construction kit from last week. (Also, Andy thinks nobody has noticed him gaming while he’s supposed to be working.)

Andy – Lead QA

This past week I built the biggest base I’d ever built in Eden Star. The new ‘snapping’ function has been so much fun to play around with, so I lost a few hours just playing the game and getting creative (Just don’t tell my boss). New content and new features have kept me really busy (and sometimes really frustrated), but I know all the effort from myself and all the team really really shows in the game.

 

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You can keep up with our progress and latest developments via our Trello boards

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

This week has been jam-packed full of bug testing, fixing, and setting up the new expanded map in preparation for our next release v0.0.11 (coming ASAP!). There are still quite a few issues for us to get through as there are many new features and assets to test. We want to get it out to you as soon as possible, but preferably with as few game-breaking issues as possible! If you have been keeping up with our previous updates, you might be aware that we’ve been working on several chunky features.

These are some of the things you can look forward to in the next release:

Expanded level and new Swamp Biome

While we have been working on our much larger 8x8km map in the background, we have also expanded the current map to include a taster of the new swamp biome in addition to replacing all the trees with our new instanced foliage system (this should improve performance).

This expanded map is now 150% bigger than the previous map, allowing for more exploration and a variety of new areas you can build your base (head behind you when you start the game).

New Construction System with additional Primitives and Utilities

We have completely revamped the construction module to streamline and simplify the building experience, allowing you to create and place items on the fly, without interrupting gameplay. Primitives, utilities and defences are no longer added to your inventory before you place them however consumables, weapons and modules will still need to be constructed via the tab menu.

We have added a number of new primitive blocks including floors, corners, half walls, pillars and windowed walls to enable more variety in base construction.

New utilities include the new Power Generator, with a spiffy new UI to manage your Power Network. This will allow you to increase your power capacity without having to build multiple Eden Kits. Another added useful utility is the Door – which will open just for you).

Bring on the awesome bases!

Important!

Due to the entirely new build system and level, in v0.0.11 saves from 0.0.10 and below will no longer work! Please create a new game in v0.0.11 once the update is released 🙂

New Neutral Fauna creature – The Swamp Walker

This creepy swamp-dwelling critter is better left alone. Unlike our other neutral creatures so far, the Swamp Walker will become aggressive when approached. His attack is… let’s say… different… You might want to keep your distance!

 

New Enemy Hive defence

These little acid-shooting pop-up plants will spawn around enemy hives and behave like turrets, making attacking hives that little bit more challenging… Name suggestions needed! Please comment on our steam post.

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Here’s a breakdown of what the team have been working on this week:

Andy – Lead QA

This week my life has been plagued with crashes and failed cooks. Between the crashes and failed cooks I’ve been testing the new build mechanic and the new save system.

John – Lead Designer

My amazing new nerf gun has arrived this week. Thoroughly enjoyed shooting everyone in the office so far (not really, just Matt- but he asked for it). Otherwise I’ve been helping the level design team, fixing up errors and placement in the revised map, adding sounds, testing and iterating through gameplay to make sure it works properly with the designs.

Matt – Art Director

(Models are work in progress)

Modelling extravaganza! is the only way I can describe this weeks progress. I’ve been making the new armory utility, sniper rifle, and our first grenade type. All of which will be created at the new Armory. We’ll be showing these in game soon, but for now here is a quick preview of the model in progress.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I have been debugging the Juggernaut, SwampWalker and new Hive defence ready for the new release. I’ve also managed to get our new perception component working and ready for the next release, which I hope should help with frame rate.

Tristan – Senior Developer

Integrating the new foliage destruction system into AI and Saving of the foliage.

Yves – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on replicating Apex over the network for multiplayer and integrating and reworking our save system into the brand new Build system. I have also been working through bug fixes for the next update.

Carlos – Developer

In previous updates I spoke about our new UMG HUD, which allows to retain pixel perfect HUD elements and excludes them from post-processing passes.

This I’ve been working on and finalising some of the new elements of the UI that we’ve switched over to UMG. Below is a small demonstration of this.

Marcin – Designer

For myself this week has been all about death and destruction. For various technical reasons all to do with the aforementioned revamp of foliage system we had to rethink the way we handled material drops. I was therefore working with our programmers on centralisation and future proofing of that system.

Moreover with the introduction of the Juggernaut into the game, a creature much larger than any other currently in, it was up to me to figure out how it dies. Clearly the simple dematerialise wouldn’t do it justice. So what if I told you you could mine it?

Chris – Designer

(8km map preview)

Along with Joe I finished the first pass placement of the Onyx rocks for the new world. My focus then shifted to our next release and concentrating on several tasks on the expanded version of the current map including swapping out the old foliage and trees for our brand new system and adding the new Swamp Walker in the world and continuing test and tweak settings to ensure the gameplay remains fun.

Joe – Environment Artist

I’ve completed the initial pass of Onyx rock placement in the new map and moved onto terrain painting, making Pharus 7 more lush and green in preparation for expanding our lovely new jungles! For the upcoming release I’ve also been helping out with placing new foliage and fixing bugs with our Tree setup.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been refining and finalising Swamp Walker and Juggernaut animations as well as finishing up more of the 3rd person animations and blending in preparation for multiplayer. I have also begun work on the rig for the new sniper rifle, which should be ready for me to animate next week.

Ricky – Developer

I’ve split the menus into access points, so now when you visit your Eden Kit and press ‘Tab’ you will be taken straight to the Eden Kit menu. This is also future proofed ready for new Access Point style structures.

User Prompts have been completed in UMG so they look far shinier. Additionally they now work with whatever keybindings you have changed to. Aside from this I have been bugfixing, cleaning up and finalising UMG switchover and setting up various multiplayer features.

Gav – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working with one of our other concept designers Simone on designs for the armoury utility, sniper rifle and micro construction kit. If that sounds vague you’ll soon find out what they’re all about 😉

 

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You can keep up with our progress and latest developments via our Trello boards

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

It’s been one of those satisfying and frantic weeks here at Flix, where many weeks of work starts to come together into something that we can actually look at as a whole. We’re starting our internal multiplayer testing very soon so we thought we would share some more shiny insights into where we are at, and what we’re working on. Go for it John!..

John – Lead Designer

I was at the awesome Insomnia55 event last weekend meeting with some amazing streamers and people to ready up for the launch of multiplayer and slowly start that beast of a PR train/boulder! This week I have been working through production, fighting an evil empire, talking some really good business with peeps and designing all of the multiplayer menus such as the server host screen, the lobby screen and designing the clan/squad system including how clan rules are set for existing assets and new assets are owned and handled by the clan.

 

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been putting the AI together for the new Swamp Walker and some new interactive foliage. I’m making some good progress on putting our new AI perception component together which I hope to have in the next release which should help frame rate issues.

Joe – Environment Artist

I’ve been continuing with asset placement work on the new map. We’re trying to get a good balance between visual fidelity and gameplay, whilst making sure each area of the map is fun to explore and run around in!

 

Yves – Senior Developer

At the start of the week I worked through the new build mechanic tweaks as we had issues with automation where objects were snapping underground in certain situations, once this was fixed I managed to get the new build system save framework in place before nailing down the bugs that Andy posted up. Today we got Multiplayer servers up and working again (like a BOSS) and i’ve been debugging the dedicated servers and clearing out the obvious initial crashes.
After working through the server setup I managed to also get net-relevancy in for Apex destruction, meaning that anything destroyed, replicates for relevant clients and late joiners. BOOSH!

Rickalos – Developers

Finalised the new HUD elements for UMG, and been preparing for multiplayer by adding in a multiplayer UI Lobby System including Hosting and Joining games. Then here have been quite a few crash fixes and a backlog of bugs from the bugs board to sort through which are now looking much nicer.

 

Matt – Art Director

Modelling and importing has been the order of the week. The new style build sets have 3 variants depending on the rarity of mineral you construct them out of. Some stronger than others, the visuals need to represent their strength and it’s important we get the spaces you can create feeling secure like strongholds.

We’re also in the process of designing the visuals for an additional long range weapon and ‘armory’ utility which you will eventually need to create before you can acquire and upgrade weapons and armor types.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on bugs and tweaking mostly. It started off with the new build system before moving back to the new foliage system to get that ready for testing in multiplayer.

Marcin – Designer

It’s been a hard week getting all the building blocks ready for the new upcoming construction system. There is nearly 30 of them now, and they all needed to be set up from scratch. That is a lot of components, snapping locations, collision volumes, materials, effects, multipliers, and functions to go through. It’s all good though, because the result is proving to be quite impressive.

In preparations for the Multi-player we have been moving, simplifying and unifying a lot of code, especially to do with AI mechanics, such as taking damage, ragdolling, turning, etc., which means Lee and I had a lot of debugging on that front too. We are definitely at the end of that hurdle now, but it definitely felt somewhat like this:

Hal fixing a light bulb by hal16

Chris – Designer

This week I have returned from commanding 300 Spartans in Cyprus against the might of the Persian army even though ancient and modern Sparta was/is located in Greece!

But back to reality, I have been working with Joe on placing a few (thousand) rocks around the world with a focus on ensuring the new map is fun to explore using our free running mechanics.

Tom – Character Artist

We now have a finished Viper ready for the game!

 

Lauren – Animator

I’ve been hopping around a few different tasks this week including rigging up the IKA Viper ready for animation, debugging and setting up the attack for the Swamp Walker and working on more 3rd person animations and blending in preparation for multiplayer.

Animations are a work in progress and are subject to change
 

Gav – Concept Artist

This week we’ve been working on some designs for the base MATA tool which players will in the future be able to start with, gradually upgrading the mechanics and visuals as they progress. I’ve also been working with one of our other concept artists Simone on establishing another utility piece aptly named the ‘armoury’ and a sniper to add to the player’s arsenal; both of which we will hopefully reveal soon 🙂

Andy – Lead Tester

Working on asset placement in the new map and testing all the new lovelies we have in store for you guys!

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You can keep up with our progress and latest developments via our Trello boards

-Team Flix