Greetings Pioneers!
The team have been working through more gameplay and interaction improvements across the board this month, including advancements in gamepad support and new animations.
The new build wheel is looking sharp after receiving fixes and polish, new effects for impacting with melee improve the feel of all hits and distinguish more clearly when things are getting damaged vs not damaged, and an awesome new portable turret has been taking shape…
Here’s what we’ve been up to in more detail..
Matt – Art Director
The team have been pushing to improve quality of life with the interface by fixing gamepad and crafting issues, both visual and input driven. The updated build system is close to being in a working/presentable state after being quite.. ‘broken’ whilst we were improving asset and UI visuals.
I’ve also had a hand in directing an update to player built doors which will replace the old shutter style door.
OG Tom – Lead Designer
From a design perspective we’ve had to go back through some of our key game system logic to help improve and speed up our workflow. Our next focus is working the improved A.I into our base designs so they can help us shape improved player enemy encounters.
Melissa – Technical Designer
The build wheel has had even more love this month and now looks very polished with new animations and artwork as well as new prompts to ensure you know how to use it!
A new addition to the build wheel is also Modifications, so now you can fortify your buildings, add lights and add doors.
Ryan – Designer
Hey! This month I have been working on keeping the game looking and playing perfect, by fixing up any issues we uncover along the development process. Along with this I have been adjusting some parts of the landscape around Pharus 7 to get it feeling just right.
Katrine – Senior Artist
Hello! I have a few exciting things on the game this month. I’ve been reworking all of the Visual FX. Making explosions, impacts and destruction!
Lauren – Lead Animator
This month I’ve been working with Chen to get our 3rd person animations up to scratch, finally replacing some of the placeholders that have been in there for a while. With improvements to both the motion and the blending method, It really is looking a lot more natural. Adjustments to the first person meshes have also taken place and I’ve been smoothing out the weighting of the first person arms along with making further alterations to various animations including the flare and axe.
John R – Developer
We’ve been creating a Turret weapon, which provides a cool twist to the set of weaponry the player can equip. The Turret can be carried in your inventory and then placed whenever you want something defensive to watch your back or you just want a bit of extra fire-power when battling the enemy. And once you’re done, you can pick up your Turret again and take it with you.
Leon F – Developer
This month work on the gamepad support for our Player Menu has continued with functionality added to allow us to select and highlight empty slots allowing us to extend our functionality for gamepad specific actions.
You can now navigate around the menu with just a gamepad with the essential functions such as equipping and consuming now coming together.
In addition to gamepad support I’ve also been hard at work adding the icons to the Build Wheel system that correlate to the resources you’ll need to build various structures and utilities as you create your colony.
See you in the fray!
-Team Flix