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