Greetings Pioneers!

We thank you for your patience so far, this week many more bugs have been fixed and we are ever closer to a release into the experimental branch! From there, those taking part can give us some much needed balancing feedback for the upcoming gameplay expansion. We hope to start this testing process next week.

Please note that this will not be a full public release to start with, only to those who have registered their interest in helping us out at this stage and opt into the experimental branch. If everything goes to plan we will roll it out to everyone soon after.

This week the new 4km2 map has been populated with more outpost bases and feature buildings to explore and loot, weapon stats and effects have been tweaked and debugged, more critical issues have been sorted… PROGRESS!

John – Lead Designer

This week has been filled with exciting meetings for me. You’ll be glad to know we’ve been planning the final details for our experimental release build as well!

Matt – Art Director

I’ve been back at creating props for existing locations within the world. Specifically for a communication relay station and observatory. These locations can be found and inhabited or raided by players currently if they can capture that locations Eden Kit. I’ll be moving onto creating assets for a more fleshed out game tutorial that will better help introduce the basic elements of the game.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued with the debugging of AI. I’ve also had to make a few engine changes to get the group behaviours working the way I want. You may not notice much difference at first but once it is fully functional we can start to do some cool stuff with groups of AI.

Tristan – Senior Developer

Bug, Balance and Polish pretty much sums up this week for all the devs me included. We have been fixing crashes, game breaking bugs, save breaking bugs, ai breaking bugs and any bugs in between. On a non-bugs note I have been planning out the tasks for replication optimisation with Yves for our structures. It should give us a BUILDING (because no boats are featured in this game) load of frames back 🙂

Yves – Senior Developer

Yves is not available to write this for himself as he is feeling under the weather today. There’s only so many bugs anyone can absorbed into one’s body before illness ensues. That’s right, this is Yves’s prefered method for bug fixing.

Marcin – Designer

Bits and bobs mostly for me this week. I was working on AI bugs, mostly technical stuff like lost references and feet placement, a bit on the decorators and doors, some on the navmesh, and a tiny bit on the balancing. But I did spend a day prototyping the way an Area of Effect Blast would work.

It’s a challenging mechanic especially due to how many different thing it can hit in a single frame, so there is a very delicate balance to strike between accuracy and performance there. In any case, even in its current rough state, it’s already pretty fun to play with, so it definitely feels like the right direction to go.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week has mainly been full of polishing and tweaking in anticipation for our biggest release yet. Seeing it all come together over the past few weeks is super exciting and I hope you guys feel that it’s worth the wait once it arrives.

Specifically this week I’ve been tweaking PFX for the new weapons and balancing weapon stats and tidying up various parts of the UI (including new visuals for player damage).

The highlight of this week has definitely been getting to work on some new outposts and colonies to help populate the new map – a mining facility and an abandoned, overgrown lookout post.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working on more bug fixes and tweaks as well as improving the interactions between AI so that wolves perform kill moves against small critters if they manage to catch them. I have also been continuing animating some “dragon/vulture-like” aerial attacks and a couple of small fish for underwater shoals.

Ricky – Developer

Is not here right now but if he was he would tell you that bugs are exhausting so I’m going on holiday

Simone – Concept Artist

I was away at the beginning of this week and have been catching up on what needs to do be done and continuing work on the female armour sets.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve been mostly focusing on the balancing of the new modular weapons, AI spawning and general tweaking of the game.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

We’ve fixed a number of critical issues this week and have been continuing with polishing AI behaviours and animations. We’ve added in a new fish that poops explosive pink eggs (why not?) as well as glass walls and purely decorative buildables. We have also been optimising the construction assets for better frame rates and faster load times and have been discussing how to group them into managers for less strain on the server with replication.

John – Lead Designer

I am currently reworking the building elements and materials into something that resembles real world items in order for players to be able to draw upon familiar real-world references when building or crafting. This includes copper deposits, aluminium ore, titanium ore, quartz and more. This is feeding into a new design for the start of the game where the player will possibly mine differently to how they do currently – it’s still in limbo and so your feedback is appreciated! Either way, we will be starting to get the prototype for the start-game established this week coming so it’s an exciting step forward to getting this next release out to you!

Matt – Art Director

I have been working on merging mesh components within our build primitives to optimise performance. It has already lowered the load time for the game and given us a few frames back to play with so definitely worth doing. I have also been working on destruction meshes for our decorator items so they can be destroyed in a satisfying way, smashy smashy! I am currently in ‘murica meeting up with an online friend who I hope is a real person.

Lee – Technical Director

So I think we are getting to the point where a lot of the major bugs have been caught and dealt with now. This week I’ve been concentrating on a number of minor AI bugs and working closely with Lauren to see if we can try to make the animation runs smoother with a number of AI, which in itself is quite time consuming. One aspect has been to make creatures come to a stop gracefully instead of a dead stop, and also how we can integrate the animation system and AI system closer together.

Marcin – Designer

By the looks of things, everything is shaping up nicely and after the next release there is only a few major components of the game missing. That means the full picture is much clearer than ever before and so we can focus on those parts of the game that need the most attention. This week we’ve had a good push on the quality of our neutral AI, and also John and I have been looking at the future of the Pioneer’s non-combat interaction – mainly mining and building. We believe we can make these processes much more interesting and understandable to new player, while at the same time making them less grindy.

Joe – Environment Artist

All sorts of different bits this week! Tom kindly provided me with some awesome high poly fish models which I’ve given a slick new paint job and finished all the game-ready artwork for. I’ve also been helping Ricky with designs and art for the new loading screen as well as materials for Armour integrity display. The bug-squashing has continued and I’ve also fixed a load of (mainly level-related) issues this week, including highlights like Fish spawning in Forest biomes. Towards the end of the week I’ve been looking at adding additional Outpost bases for players to explore in the new map.

Tom – Character Artist

This week I’ve created a bunch of different smaller fish in high resolution form ready to be worked up into in-game models. Glub glub.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week the whole team has been working on squashing as many bugs as possible to get things stable and finally fixed up the last remaining issues stopping us progressing with multiplayer. There are still more left so I am currently working on some mantling issues to prevent pioneers ending up inside rocks. I mean if you’re stuck you should at least have the option of a hard place as well.

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve spent most of the week fixing crashes, some caused by memory stomps. @PabloZurita (Twitter) contributed a memory stomp allocator to the UE4 engine, which has helped massively in tracking down some very difficult bugs.

Ricky – Developer

Implementing a shiny loading screen – that may sound a simple task but it’s been riddled with bugs and crashes along the way. No pain, no game right? Also added some extra handy features to the UI so Armour and Modular Weapons will display armour integrity and attachment icons respectively on their slots so you can tell at a glance what’s going on without having to hover over or select them.

Also bugs.

Lauren – Animator

Polishing and debugging has been the agenda for this week, we’ve been trying out a new implementation for fast AI turning which looks to be working and looking a lot better than the last. Alongside this I had a couple of days to work on a new big fish including prototyping its toxic egg attack which was pretty fun. Here’s some work in progress with the underwater creatures below:

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been continuing work on the female armour sets for the game – making sure that the sets have a back view and the armour piece that need to be separated out for the modelling/equipment system for orthographics. Still a lot to do but getting there!

Andy – Lead QA

This week has been business as usual. The entire team has been working really hard on debugging the latest build. We’ve had new creatures implemented, AI tweaks and balancing of the stats and new modular weapons. All of which has kept me busy.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

We are steaming ahead with bug fixes this week and everyone has been making great progress. We’ve fixed over 100 in the past four days so we’re getting there! There are still issues left remaining and balancing to do but already the initial 15 gun combinations are looking and feeling great so far. Thank you for your patience with this next update, we really want to make sure it is as stable, optimised and as relatively bug-free as we can get it.

John – Lead Designer

I have been working on ideas for an introduction component to the game that we hope will really help players when starting out while giving initial objectives and direction that make sense from both gameplay and story perspectives.

We’ll be aiming for story and objective driven play to be introduced over additional updates if it doesn’t make it into the initial release of the large map, so watch this space!

Matt – Art Director

Probably my favorite part, the polishing stage. Where everyone else is debugging, the cogs of the art machine are still turning, fixing minor visual bugs and cleaning up effects. My main focus has been further development of outposts and optimising the building system so we can start to allow players to assemble more at a fraction of the cost on the graphics processor.

Most of this involves refactoring and clever smoke and mirrors art and design. Using the culling and LOD system to it’s full extent is essential to making large structures work well across our target system specs. Especially when you have a game that is pushing the envelope for large levels of dynamic destruction, where numerous components/meshes can be onscreen at any one given time.

Lee – Technical Director

This week has been totally devoted to debugging of the new AI. I’ve also been looking at some of the older bugs we have had lying around for a while. Things are coming along very nicely now, hopefully I can turn my attention to doing a bit of optimisation with the new creatures.

Tristan – Senior Developer

Back packing around my local swimming pool. I realised I spend too much time doing actual hiking and adventuring. Although strangely I am drawn to the water, like it’s talking to me, telling me to wade through it’s glorious and cooling liquid.

Then it dawned on me, I must of been a fish in my past life, as memories of my fish brothers and sisters flood my consciousness, I try to express my realisation vocally.. Glub glub.

Joe – Environment Artist

Lots of hardcore bug fixing this week, I’ve mainly been looking at Level and AI issues. I managed to find some time to do a balancing pass over our Flora and Fauna numbers and also started on an initial implementation of in-world ammo counters on the new weapons.

It needs more work though so this will be going on the HUD for now. I’ve also reworked all of our spawn locations in the new map – my aim is to make each start area balanced, provide drive to explore and, of course, be visually awesome 🙂

Yves – Senior Developer

While everybody else is working to make sure weapon models are the right colour, interface lines are just the right thickness, and creatures know which way to turn, which is all very important, I’m sure you’ll agree, it falls down to me to tackle the ground-shattering and game-breaking bugs, such as game crashes, save and load compatibility issues, or major system failures.

We’ve sorted most of them, but there are still one or two that need fixing before we’re all comfortable with the stability of the game.

Ricky – Developer

Lots of excellent progress fixing up sooo many bugs, like, yer or boom or whatever you kids are into nowadays.

Marcin – Designer

What else can I say that the header has not already covered? It’s been pretty much a proper bug fixing week for us all, sponsored by long hours and a lot of hair pulled out. It’s not all doom and gloom however, since this is also a time for finally seeing everything falling into place and experiencing the gameplay as it’s meant to happen, which is extremely satisfying.

We are not looking heavily into balancing at this point, so certain elements are still a bit wonky, but you might be happy to know that I managed to squeeze in a pass over the overpowered Kinetic Laser, which plagues our last release. It’s still powerful but now much more in line with the Gauss Gun.

Tom – Character Artist

The creatures of the deep! I’ve been working on this monster.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been mostly on testing the new level with Andy and fixing bugs where I can. Making a few tweaks to get the animations and reactions of the creatures feeling better. It’s been great to watch the wolves chasing other creatures in the level, it really helps make the world feel more alive.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working on translating the Male armour into a Female version of the same armour set. There are small changes to make it sit better on the female figure but otherwise it will be the same as the current sets down to each layer.

Andy – Lead QA

This week we have really been pushing the debugging and I am happy to say that the entire team have smashed it. It’s been a few weeks since the guys have had any time to really concentrate on fixing bugs in the new Pharus 7 map so to see the fixes going in and the game coming together is really exciting.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix