Greetings Pioneers!

“In a distant sector of the Milky Way… on a planet that was thought to be lifeless… A native entity and its ecosystem thrives, stopping at nothing to protect it’s domain from interlopers who wish to make it their own” 

Whilst the updates have been a little less frequent (waiting patiently for the cool stuff to land) Development has been at a steady pace! Overall improvements have been focused around our new progression curve, build system, AI engagements, and visual improvements to mining and inventory items which are all geared towards improving gameplay immersion.  

Matt – Art Director

Tech Art is the order of the month. Lots of organisation has been going on with our in house testing team to get mineral rocks, drop items, and physical materials (which control sounds and effects on surfaces) all covered off to make the experience as nice as possible with our coming updates. 

The decision to make this world more Alien to begin with has come with a large responsibility on the Art side to make the world feel a lot more dangerous. It’s nice to see that feeling come to life even with the smaller bits of cleanup that we’re doing. That said, there’s still atmospheric work to do along with finer tuning of sound that will make the experience really come together.

Lee – Tech Director

The new Planner Graph is now finished as far as version one is concerned. The design team are in full swing with it, putting new behaviours together and reporting back any bugs they find with it.

I’ve also started making some enhancements to our Octree to enable the storing of any objects, which will enable us to write some very fast EQS generators by using the information stored within it.

Joe – Lead Artist

After lots of planning and prep we are finally ready to start piecing together our interior kit work into a cohesive whole!

As well as consolation the team’s art into placeable assets, I have put together a basic system for to get them in game which should make the creation of these interior spaces much quicker!

John T – 3D Artist

Being the hero that I am I have been fixing bugs mostly this recent week. I also took the opportunity to implement the new particle effects for our new alien tree! Some fleshy goodness for sure!..

Charlotte – Concept Artist

It’s been a while since I created some work for Eden Star but I am back on it and have recently been focusing on creating some new concept art! Firstly for some pioneer hand VFX which will be visible while building various different items, selling them and while currently idle within the build wheel.

Not only this but I have also been creating some environment concepts for a new silo facility area, where I have started with the lab section which has been abandoned and taken over by all the creepy.

Lauren – Lead Animator

Player animation bug fixes has been the focus these past few weeks, also revisions to several motions to better align with revised design goals for player and enemy combat.

Alongside this we’ve been developing better enemy IK solutions (this makes the legs of enemies touch the floor, to get them to feel more grounded in their environment) and look-at solutions (because everything looks creepier if you can see it watching you…)

Matt W – 3D Artist

“Its ‘Life’, Jim, but not as we know it” Spock mused cautiously…

“It looks a bit like  some sort of tree, but with H.R Giger Peperami inside it if you ask me…what shall we do with it – eat it!?” Kirk replied, wincing slightly as he recalled those Excalbian Meatballs Spock had rustled up whilst on routine patrol in the Delta Quadrant all those years ago. The Vulcan may be many things, but a chef he was not. Needless to say the Captain’s Log that day did not bear thinking about.

“I’m not sure…”, Spock  replied icily, ignoring his captain’s light-hearted jibe; “Perhaps we should just put it on Space ArtStation with the rest of the specimen’s and see if anyone actually ‘likes’ it?”.

“Hmm…I’m not sure anybody will, Spock – but sod it, we probably should at some point”, agreed Kirk.

“Yes – and the sooner we can get back to playing Eden Star, the better – its bloody awesome”, Spock urged “and I reckon there’ll be a new update soon with some strange-looking alien tree thing filled with pulsating, glowing meat by that incredibly talented, but also extremely humble 3D artist chap – ‘Matt Wilkins’  – that’s what I heard anyway…”, he continued – ears now quivering with excitement….

Katrine L – Senior Artist

After a long, terribly sad break from Eden Star, I am back!
I am currently updating the look and feel of the drop items in the game. I have also placed new rocks and cliffs around the Dam as well as giving the terrain a fresh paint. (In other words: giving the QA team lots to do).

Tom Whittemore – Lead Designer

Recent I have been reviewing lots of designs to make sure we are making progress in the right areas and also going over plans to make sure all our ideas are documented and ready to be prototyped and put into production. Thats all I’ll say about that so we don’t give too much away about where we are taking certain areas.

In between these tasks I have been working on our Assault Turret Prototype, a turret that the player can quickly deploy in sticky situations, its all going well getting the behaviour together although as you can see from the gif it still needs some ‘tweaks’

Andy H – Level Design

Completed the updated layout for the Dam Interior, as for the exterior the Buildings above ground have now been replaced with a new destructible version that I created. Fixed a bunch of bugs to do with rocks clipping through structures and a floating Prefab building.

Melissa – Technical Designer

The build wheel first pass has been completed and passed over to the engineering team to finalise all the aspects before art implementation! (You can see the first pass though in this GIF below). Since the build wheels first pass, i’ve been working on multiple aspects of the design – looking at the current tools we have, possible upgrades and various UI elements. As well as looking over and reviewing the current control scheme, including gamepad support!

Carlos – Developer

The long road to revamping our respawn system seems to be near an end now! Our respawn logic in the back end has now been put into place. Ricky and I have now started the process of implementing the front end work for this!

I’m currently in the process of adding a few extra tweaks to our respawn blocks that will make them feel that extra bit better but I won’t say too much on this now!

Leon – Developer

I’ve been hard at work tracking down and destroying bugs in the game as-well as working with Carlos and Ricky on some new features. With Carlos I’ve been helping set up a Marker that reacts to our new Respawn Blocks being owned. With Ricky I’ve been optimizing the way we stream assets in to reduce load times.

Dan – Developer

Lots of work has been going in to make sure that the respawning process for players is free of any technical issues. This has mostly been focusing on issues that can arise during networked multiplayer games and allow us to ensure the pioneer is safe to respawn before giving control back to the player.

Ricky – Lead Developer

Getting the new respawn system hooked up and implemented has led to a slightly more embiggened task than first thought, but I’ve been tackling it anyway this week and it’s finally coming together. The groundwork needed for the respawn menu is also going to be used for future menus like the new build menu which has already been in progress.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Post Re-instated from – 14 JUN @ 5:39PM

Greetings Pioneers!

Reporting in.. the team have been in the underground bunker with their focus goggles on. We’re now in the process of working towards our next update where MANY things have changed. Our build system is getting some vast UI improvements. Our AI system is becoming more designer friendly as well, which means more variety with in world encounters, not to mention vehicles on the horizon.

Matt – Art Director

There have been some big ol’ tasks on the horizon for a while which we’ve just started to tackle. A bit of radio silence on our end due to the lack of pretty things to show recently! And let’s face it, you read these updates for the nice pictures 😉

Now that we have layouts that meet the gameplay criteria for this overhaul.. the Art team have been tasked at building a more streamlined way to theme and construct our ‘non destructible’ underground facilities. This has involved some heavy planning from an assembly point of view, to ensure we get the variety needed to produce a number of different and varied structures all using one master kit.

Lee – Tech Director

So I have finally had some time to create a new custom editor for our AI system. It’s something I have been wanting to do for a long time. 

It will allow the designers to quickly put together new prototype behaviours using blueprint tasks which can them be assembled in the editor and tested. This should enable anyone in the office with some basic blueprint knowledge to tweak AI behaviours with ease.

This version of the editor doesn’t include much in the way of debugging, so my next task will be to add a debug mode, but for now people can start using it.

Joe – Lead Artist

A big mix of different (but all equally important) tasks and meetings over the last few weeks. I have mainly been working through pipeline and process changes for our interior spaces. The hope is we’ll be able to create large, visually impressive ‘dungeon’-style areas – quickly and efficiently, once the first couple are complete. Additionally, there have been many discussions to ensure we hit the ground running with new tasks that provide a ton of value for players going forward.

Glenn – 3D Artist

David and I have been busy working on the maintenance kit for the dam. We have made some good progress and now have a new trim sheet so that we can make some interesting rooms quickly and efficiently. I have also finished work on the Transport Vehicle model. The model is complete and looking cool in engine, we still have some implementation work to do on it though.

Tom W – Lead Designer

This week I have been part of a production clean up to help focus the design team towards solving the problems that will allow us to get closer to a shippable build. This has been mainly finishing lots of designs that we had backlogged to make sure the engineers have stuff to implement. Also with this there has been lots of clean up happening with removing old prototypes and refining what we do have so hopefully everything works better and faster!

Lauren – Lead Animator

Animations and rigs for our new vehicle meshes have been the focus recently. The hoverbike aka ‘The Speeder’, and the transport vehicle have been getting some attention after a long time on the backlog.

Matt W – 3D Artist

Plenty of progress made creating an alternate ‘non-terran’ tree that is part of the same genetic family as the local creatures. Moved onto baking this monstrosity at the end of this week.

Katrine L – Senior Artist

Lately I have been helping out with some spring cleaning (yes it is still spring/winter here in England). I have also done some landscaping in Eden Star, placing some new rocks on top of pione.. I mean terrain! It is looking good!

Andy H – Level Designer

The Dam has a lot going on in and around it at the moment as I have been busy making adjustments to the layout to make it feel better from a gameplay perspective, giving some areas a purpose and I’ve been making blockouts for additional areas within the Dam Including a new way for enemies to spawn. Also I have been changing our triggered spawners over to use a more efficient system throughout the world.

Melissa – Technical Designer

Besides lots of meetings this week to discuss various elements of the game, work has been going smoothly on the new build wheel and I’m making a lot of headway ensuring that the new wheel works well with the building system itself. 

This also means that I’ve had to review the structure of the building system itself and have plans to internally improve the flow. 

I’ve also been looking into and planning how we can integrate further gamepad support and controls for the game as a whole which will include both gameplay and any UI / menus; ultimately working towards much better controller support for the future.

Carlos– Developer

I’ve been delving deep into our respawn logic. Our new tent and respawn managers are now in a good place. I’m currently looking into re-working the way we spawn the pawn to make it easier to follow and more robust. This should hopefully lead to more stable respawning logic that ensures our Pioneers don’t go missing below the new lovely terrain!

Tom – Developer

This week I’ve been mostly working with Leon on our new marker system – making it much more expandable so we can mark pretty much anything!  The new system should allow for landmarks to be easily placed on the compass, the world map, or your screen without much extra effort.

Leon – Developer

Hey guys I’m new on the team but have been taking a look at a number of bugs related to the markers placed on objects you interact with, as-well as adding multiplayer functionality to the lift in the tower!

Markers are now cleaned up from the user interface when you open your inventory and I’ve been working on making it so foliage instances behave nicely with these interaction UI elements.

In addition to this I’ve updated the Pioneer armor pieces so they now provide appropriate amounts of shield making it easier for the Pioneers out there to survive the harsh reality of a desolate planet.

Dan – Developer

With changes on the horizon to the respawn system, I’ve been preparing a system to improve the respawning process – ensuring the world has loaded smoothly for a newly respawned Pioneer. 

When finished, this should prevent a few reported multiplayer issues that occur during respawning. In addition, various bugs have been addressed regarding the inventory UI and interacting with lootable items in the world. 

Ricky – Lead Developer

Among the wave of several UI design talks I’ve been creating a weapon holstering mechanic this week. This will coincide with changes to player equipment management and player progression going forward. 

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Post Re-instated from – 18 APR @ 7:23PM

Greetings Pioneers!

There’s been some Worldly changes going on. The team have been making further improvements to UI, world atmospherics and the base/build system. Design have been improving and balancing crafting and resource collection.

Matt – Art Director

Eventful week to say the least! many new elements of development are coming together to improve and unify the visual styling across the board, from the future vehicles to new UI elements. 

There are quite a few VFX and atmospheric improvements that are being made which is pushing up the realism, making a big difference in the dangerous immersive feeling we’re trying to get across to Pioneers when they play this first area.

Joe – Lead Artist

Loads of high-level visual work has gone into ES over the past couple weeks – in particular, I’ve finished an initial pass on our lighting and day/night cycle visuals, and am now working on tying everything together with VFX and atmospherics. 

The UI boot sequence and damage effects have also been improved, and I’ve made a couple of benchmark assets and placement systems to assist with level design.

I also had time to add some more informative, segmented health bars, just so players can see what they’re getting into when they initiate combat.

Davide – Concept Artist

Moved swiftly onto colour concepts and Orthographics for our hostile world tree variant. These trees are more in keeping with the visual language of the creatures. Pictures to come soon!

Glenn – 3D Artist

I’ve been working on the transport vehicle model, getting it closer to the latest concept and making it more functional with some removable parts. We have constructed it in such a way that the back compartment could potentially be removed and other modular assets put there instead, perhaps a trailer for carrying cargo or a gun turret. 

In general it should look and feel more exciting and fit well with the rest of the Eden Star aesthetic due to Davide’s great concept work. It has also been optimised more, so it should perform well when in game. I’m really looking forward to driving it!

Andy H – Level Designer

This week I’ve been playing the early areas of the game to get an idea of how easy it is to gather materials for crafting, looking at item descriptions as I go. Been smashing all of our destructibles to see if they feel right and investigating damaging them with each type of weapon for balancing. 

Some of the interaction markers for some Items were wrong so I’ve fixed that right up too. Also John T has gone over some new shipwreck assets that I’m going to spread around places next week to make shipwrecks look and feel more believable.

Lauren – Lead Animator

We’ve had time this week to delve into fixing up some of the 1st person player gun animation issues, also 3rd person melee animations with the fists and shiv have been getting some love, and are shaping up nicely. With the fixes incoming to 3rd person aiming this should make for a much nicer experience.

Yves – Senior Developer

Spent some time on the traces for 3rd person melee aiming to make bashing AI and picking things up in 3rd person much easier.

John T – 3D Artist

This past week I have looked back at the shipwreck and assessed how we could improve the overall aesthetic. This included breaking up the silhouette with some new panels and rebar. Also the arrangement of these assets better reflects the narrative that we wish to convey. The blending with the new terrain has overall been hugely beneficial to the scene.

David M – 3D Artist

First time joining the blog post and boy do I have a treat for you guys…I’ve been creating collision meshes for our beautiful rock collection! This may or may not have involved me flinging myself at real life rocks to test how collision should work. Either way, it’s been super fun and I hope it never ends.

Tom W – Lead Designer

This week I’ve been getting stuck back into Eden Star playthroughs so we can review certain elements of the game for balancing. This has also been great for spotting little bugs we’ve had and cleaning them up as we go along. The only noticeable change for players will be some animations for the reticles on melee weapons, kinetic tools and build tools.

Melissa – Technical Designer

Jumped onto this project for the first time recently and have been prototyping a new build wheel interface and back end system to make it more user friendly and easier to navigate. This prototype is in the early stages but is coming together well.

Look back here for more updates soon!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix