Greetings Pioneers!

The development continues with haste. A lot of cool new art assets have been introduced to improve the look and feel of the drop pod area, as well as an entirely new set of ship debris which has been put together to represent the parts of the Eden Star. Or more accurately what’s left over.

Here’s what we’ve been upto:

John – Lead Designer

Been pressing the team to complete their current tasks and move onto some missing elements like our revised scanner. As we enter the summer our update is edging closer, and so the guys here at Flix are starting to really tighten up the quality. You’ll be seeing that quality improvement and more in our coming blog updates.

Matt – Art Director

Focusing my artistic efforts on bringing the airlock area of the drop pod upto scratch. I’ve been pushing the art team to get some quite hefty chunks of work into the game for use as well, such as our Kit for crashed ship debris which will house a bunch of interesting things for you to find and pick up.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been in a few meetings this week as we work out which parts of the AI combat are fun and which parts need improvement. We have also been discussing the reactions of AI not only to being hit, but reacting to what the player does during combat, which I’ve now made a start on implementing.

Tristan – Lead Developer

I have been creating some tools for the rest of the guys for adding new destructibles to the bases in the world. It should keep things optimal performance wise and allow us to make bases a bit more fun.

Tom W – Environment Wrangler

Following a well earned holiday, I’ve been focusing on modelling a new set of tents for our initial encampment, as well as really starting to push the hostile martian planet feeling with our atmospherics!

Carlos – Developer

I’ve been getting stuck in with setting up our melee functionality in code, fine tuning it and making sure that it feels good! This should hopefully allow us to make new melee weapons with similar functionality but with different feels to them!

Joe – Lead Artist

This week I’ve been overseeing some of the new and rather lovely sci-fi warning prompts we’ll shortly be adding to our heads up display. There’s a lot I want to change and improve with what’s in the current Steam build but this bit takes priority as it’ll introduce our players to the world and all the interesting changes the team have been making. Also, icons!

Marcin – Designer

This week I’ve working mostly on the objective system again. We’ve outlined a small campaign for the beginning of the game and I am slowly implementing all the elements and interactions to make it a reality. My biggest focus for the system is the modularity. I want to create simple tools that will allow us to put together missions in minutes, as opposed to bespokely implementing every mission individually.

OG Tom W – Designer

This week I’ve been busy with a lot of different things as many different elements come together. The new tool built by Trist makes placing destructibles in the world much easier for us designers, so we have been reviewing some existing bases and drawing up designers for new wreckage pieces that take advantage of this. Also I have been implementing and fixing the first stages of crafting and building, making sure all the schematics are correct. All this is driving forward the gameplay elements so we can get to a fully playable state as soon as possible.

James Brady – Environment Artist

For Eden Star, I was tasked with creating a modular set based on a ship that crash landed, which could be placed around a wreckage site/point of interest. This wreckage site would contain resources for the player to gather. I created this set in way that allowed for it to be placed manually by the art team or procedurally placed by the engine in random variations. I created a texture set inspired by sci-fi games such as DOOM.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been working hard getting the landscapes in the first areas up to scratch. This includes creating new areas that were previously flat into wonderful steep cliffs with several ways around. This new cliff tool we developed allows me to easily place cliffs and create the edges of the landscape very quickly. All of this coupled with some very artistic rock placements leads to an environment overhaul that is as efficient as it is good looking.

Sam – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working on a small redesign for the shelters that you’ll find scattered around the game, as well as other items such as the transmitter unit and the in-game interface graphics. All three of these elements tie into the first few minutes of the game along the golden path, an area which we as a team have been focusing on quite intently, as the opening moments of a game can easily make or break the initial experience. I’ll likely be doing some similar stuff next week once some decisions have been made!

Andy – Lead QA

I’ll be back on Monday, and oh boy am I looking forward to getting back and cracking my liquorice whip of quality control. The team are going to be in for a treat.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

We are continuing to refine the starting area this week with fields of crashed debris, plus our arena style battle zones are being designed, which can only be described as mini horde survival events. Meanwhile more AI bugs have been fixed and a new tactical map design is taking shape.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

The sun has come out over the studio, it is the beginning of British summer time. Instilling new life and vigor in people, which is a perfect explanation for why the team are glowing balls of sunshine. Achooo, and oh yeah tree pollen.. but no fear, the work to get our update completed continues.

Matt – Art Director

Started modelling some of the block out props we’ve designed into the Drop Pod, hoping to have something to show next week for these pieces.

On another note I’ve been discussing and gathering some ideas/art & design materials for our lootable wreckage components with Tom Whittemore. Most notably our new RMD glove models are now in the game and have vastly improved the feeling of being sealed into a suit to protect you from the toxic air of the surrounding environment.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve continued with debugging some of the recent changes we have made to both the way AI attacks are performed and the way they turn. I’ve also been working with Lauren to try and find a better solution to our ragdoll issues which will also work well for multiplayer.

Marcin – Designer

From next week I will be implementing a new map and player info system. The improvements to look forward to are zooming in and out, panning, various level of detail at various zoom levels, additional information in the form of new icons, waypoints, objective markers, and more.

There will be a lot of work involved with this, but I am really looking forward to revamping that mechanic. The first step will be to create a tool that will let us produce accurate textures representing the world. It would be impossible to manually edit the textures with every world tweak so we’re going to need a clever solution that can do it for us.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Bixing fugs and sorting out some more of the design for the tactical map system and it’s accompaniment to the compass and hud marker systems to boot.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been continuing to design the Silo Horde battle, ensuring that each detail of this fight makes for an intense and rewarding experience. Balancing the key parts of the fight such as enemy spawners and wave timings, I am aiming to create a horde fight that will be memorable and also replayable as you guys explore through the world!

Be sure to check every rafter, corner and hive for creatures as they endlessly spawn and attack you from every angle whilst you protect the Eden Kit! I’ll leave you with some updated lighting work in the upper section of the Silo..

OG Tom – Designer

This week I have been continuing to plan designs for large sections of the wilderness so there are lots of nooks and crannies to explore. In particular I have been planning out how wreckage can be used within the world.

The current wreckage and debris are effectively mining nodes to give the player scrap metal and other components and are generated around the world. The results of this weren’t the best so we decided to add more context to wreckages within the world. I have been planning a wreckage kit so all the designers can start building wreckages as mini levels for the player to explore.

Sam – Concept Artist

I’m back! This week I’ve been working on our level 2 (higher end) workbench, described as “a much more high tech and purpose built version”, which you can see above. Since I had already done plenty of preliminary work for the level 1 version, this design process for this turned out a relatively speedy one, and though this current image is not necessarily the final design, I expect to be designing more new gameplay items like this next week.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been focusing on ragdoll, recovery and death for the stalker with some hurdles to overcome. Our AI have the ability to recover from ragdoll if they are not dead, so we have to use some clever trickery so that an AI ragdolling from being hit by one player, ends up in the same location from other players perspective without creating too much of an overhead for the server.

While our initial system of making the character limbs go floppy and making the (replicated) capsule roll around works fine for AI that have rounded shaped bodies, the elongated torso of the stalker didn’t look quite right. So it’s still going to take some tweaking, along with fixing a combination of bugs, but it’s getting there!

I’ve also been making a start on a new ‘makeshift’ weapon which I hope to show you more of next week…

Andy – Lead QA

Believe it or not I’m on a break ladies and gents, its been a long time since I’ve had any longish period of time off. So as you do.. When you get this very rare opportunity.. You sit in your pants playing games.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

This week there has been more progress in our new areas with cliffs, roads and rocks being placed along with general tidy-ups and further placement of minable assets. The RMD (Remote Manipulation Device) Tool has been getting an upgrade, or rather a downgrade with a visual difference between basic and upgraded meshes on your right arm. Also the AI are being debugged and refined as the new optimised systems get implemented.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

Been making some really exciting arrangements for the guys here at the studio. We’re looking at bringing more people into the fold which should help improve drastically improve the quality of our upcoming content.

Matt – Art Director

Main focus has been getting the different upgraded mesh version of Mata-Tool (RMD) weapon properly fitted to the male and female first person arms, which is now looking the business. In the level itself I’ve been assisting the guys with adjustments and planning design passes of lackluster areas where there isn’t enough to do within a certain distance.

Lee – Technical Director

Debugging and optimisation has been my main focus for this week. After finally moving a lot of blueprint functionality into code, I have been testing it all and putting it through its paces to make sure it all works as expected. I’ve also been able to make a few more optimisation improvements as I have gone along. One extra bonus this week was adding a little workaround to the garbage collector to prevent it from using up lots of memory on dedicated servers.

Joe – Lead Artist

Meshes and icons for some of the new craftable components! These are some early game items, see if you can guess what they are 😉

Marcin – Designer

Implementing the bar for the deterioration bars that will encompass the majority of things you craft. I’m sorry yes, this means things will break in your hands, but that’s ok.. Just make a new one! The good thing with the bar is you’ll at least be able to see when its about to break..

Tom ‘Wahey’ Whaley

Making additions to our rock sculpting tool sets with spline rocks! I’ve been reworking and prettifying our terrain with a tier style system that helps us players better understand  where they can and can’t walk, it also makes for a much clearer understanding of where mineral types can be found.

Also I’ve just about finished a tastey ice material for frozen surfaces!

OG Tom  Whittemore – Designer

This week I have been world building! With our great new tiered terrain layout we can finally start designing and building large parts of the world. I have been drawing up designs for some of the areas out in the wilds to so those of you that are explorers will have plenty of hidden secret to find. Sculpting the terrain and placing in the larger geometry pieces, like rock formations, will allow us to find out how exploration feels and fine tune it.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been making further changes to the Silo area, filling out these sections with more architecture and creatures. The main changes made have been to the large Silo area in which most of the changes have been to do with lighting the area effectively so that players can make their way to this section and explore all the Silo has to offer. I have also started designing the horde mode battle that will take place in the Silo and will be fleshing out this battle more next week!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week has been a bit of a mix of tasks, while continuing to improve the stalker animations I have also been setting up the new Tool meshes. Now we start player’s off with a broken version of the tool that you will need to repair before you can use.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been working with Tom on the terrain tweaks and cliff rock placement. I have also been reviewing the changes made to the placement of assets with in the starting drop pod.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix