Greetings Pioneers!

We have been hammering away at the memory leak issues, giving the new map some TLC and refining the Juggernaut attacks this week. If you want to get a taste of what these beasts are going to be about we’ve released some test footage which you can watch below!

We have also been getting the gamepad controller to work with the menus and working on a capturing system that once complete, will allow empty bases on servers to be ‘claimed’ by placing your own Eden Kit.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Spreadsheets, production planning, biome and creature behaviour designs with the design and art team. And last but not least, cracking the brutal but delicious licorice whip.

Matt – Art Director

Working on rock placement and several feature areas which should really start to make the new map come to life, some of which will remain a secret until release. However it’s worth letting everyone know that some of these feature areas will eventually act as pivotal points for telling snippets of story throughout the world.

Also been planning the Biomes with Simone, John, Tom and Joe for behaviours and food chain structure of the creatures within said biomes, to ensure it all comes to life when they are implemented fully.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been fine tuning the Juggernaut attacks to make sure it feels good. I’m also trying to iron out any last remaining bugs before we release this to the public. I’ve also been planning some group behaviours for creatures we have planned further down the line.

Tristan – Senior Developer

I have been working with Marcin on implementing player interactions with the Juggernaut to make sure it’s as fun as possible (and that you can actually kill the thing).

I have also been looking into another rather major memory leak we discovered. We have been working to track it down with the help of some you awesome community members. Thanks everyone and hopefully we can get this one fixed up and ready to go soon.

Marcin – Designer

This week has been all about the Juggernaut: debugging and fine tuning. That’s pretty much the size of it, but it’d be boring if I just left you with that, so let me give some more details:

• Added the ability to shoot the legs down, in addition to being able to smash them.
• Added the ability for the Juggernaut to regenerate armour.
• Added so-called ‘Melee Points’, fixing the issue where Melee Lunge would get you stuck inside the Juggernaut.
• Implemented Smash direction clamps to legs, fixing the issue where you could smash legs underneath the Juggernaut and it looked pretty bad.
• Fixed an issue with the Juggernaut’s Flame Breath attack, which made objects by its “chin” to be immune to it.
• Fixed an issue, which caused the Juggernaut to block its own Navigation Mesh.
• Fixed an issue which caused the Juggernaut Armour to hide him from turrets.
• Fixed a few issues which allowed for the Juggernaut to be permanently incapacitated.
• Added new death effect.

Unfortunately I don’t have any new images of the progress, but I have a funny gif of one of the tests. Enjoy 🙂

Yves – Senior Developer

The two areas I’ve been working in is optimisations and features. For features I’ve been working on capturing logic, so that placing an EdenKit in proximity of blocks not already surrounded by another Edenkit’s bubble makes them yours. The second feature is the gradual decay blocks not surrounded by another.

When I test my code I push it with extreme cases, with a decay that would inflict 6000 damage a minute to every block a performance issue with structure evaluation was revealed, meaning a massive slow down for planned items that feature mass destruction of building blocks (the juggernaut, grenades, etc), so I’ve been working to further optimise that area.

Ricky – Developer

I’ve been adding the first stage of very basic gamepad support throughout the game this week, with the implementation of a Gamepad Cursor. This also entailed cleaning up the configuration files since they’ve not been altered to reflect the changes in weapon systems such as having build as a permanent Module assigned to Q.

I know alot of games don’t bother with changing onscreen Prompts between mouse/keyboard and gamepad in realtime, but I felt it would be a nice touch and so shall it be forevermore.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I’ve been working the new map mostly, refining and improving the landscape and onyx placement to make the world more interesting (and challenging…) to explore. I’ve worked on finalising the gameplay components such as tweaking loot numbers, fixing hive placement, testing mechanics.

There are a fair few issues that require working towards before we can responsibly release this to you all 🙂 Lastly I’ve made a few minor improvements to Swamp foliage, and enemy ground hives – they should look more gruesome at higher levels!

Tom – Character Artist

Planning for native Biome creatures and how their behaviors and interaction will influence their visual design. Working on blockouts for additional enemy creatures!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been jumping between finishing off the animations for the ‘Elephant’ movement and its various attacks if you manage to enrage it enough. I’ve also been tweaking the juggernaut animations as and when needed and helping out with the testing of fixes and new features.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been working with Matt and Tom on the creation of environment biome paintings to help the team understand what creatures will be together in each environment and whether there are any holes in the food chain and creatures necessary to fill them.

This is a long process but great fun to do! By the end we should all have an understanding of what each creature does/lives/looks like and how each one will behave around the others.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve been ribbing Matt about him not making me a cup of coffee. If you see him have a quiet word because if nobody says anything he’ll never learn. I also got to test the new Juggernaut enemy type and even though it completely trashed my base, it added an entirely new feel to the game.

Also a massive thank you to all the guys and gals who helped us out with the Flix Dev Memory Test server, we managed to get a load of data which we are hoping will lead us to fixing the memory leaks and stability problems we have been having in multiplayer.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix