Greetings Pioneers!

It has been another week of integrating and fixing this week, RMD – Tool modules with the build systems being the main focus. We want to be sure you can still work your way up to be the badass with the kinetic cyborg arm, even if you now start off with little more than an axe pulled out of somebody’s dead face…

Regarding the pending release…

Our initial anticipated release date was pointed out as the ‘end of July’, which is fast approaching, however as we said, it has always been a target estimate. We are super busy at the moment working on multiple projects and so we still feel we need more time to benchmark an enjoyable experience with the core mechanics, making them fun, functional, logical and the major game/fun-breaking bugs, fixed. This is unfortunately not looking likely for the end of July but John is assessing progress this weekend and will update you up with progress on outstanding tasks as soon as possible!

Some of the core links for progress are still flakey at this stage, we need more “wiring” in the world currently as a salvageable resource (for example!) in order for you to then easily craft the Repaired Emergency Build Module. In addition to this we need the new Kinetic Manipulation Module in the game to perform the functionality of the previous Kinetic Blast and Energy Harness modules (mining tool + Fuel as ammo), once you gather the materials and workstations to build it. Smash will now be the final upgrade to this rather than being available from the start allowing us to overpower it a little, balanced against fuel use.

The changes we have made to the progression, crafting and build modules are extensive as we shift the starting configuration to be more ‘left defenceless’ and less ‘left slightly damaged but still a supersoldier’. We hope this will lead to a more intense experience as you battle creatures in hand to hand combat with makeshift melee weapons being the staple for the start of the game; from survival to domination.

On the art and level design side of things, it has been all hands on deck to populate the world with clusters of material nodes and points of interest ‘jackpots’ for Pioneers to explore, discover and loot.

Multiple AI fixes have also been achieved, but in the process of fixing one of the core bugs, some of them have been temporarily broken, we’re working on it! They are really starting to come together now otherwise. The player customisation screen has also been in development this week, with new options for selecting options for the visuals of your character available at the start of the game.

Some of the major things left to fix:

Crashes in multiplayer
Broken AI
Hit reactions bugs
Not attacking – Some of the planners are currently broken + Balancing needed
Build tool
Picking up items being unforgiving
Player movement needing balancing
Player animation bugs
Player weapon and AI balancing
Cleaning up Build Tool so that it works as it does in the current Steam release

Major Features remaining:

Radiation zoning
Fuel in Utilities and Defences
Fuel in Tool Modules

There’s a new gameplay video coming soon… For now here’s what we’ve been up to this week in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

I’ve been running around in reviews all week, attempting to grab a spare minute to organise the remaining tasks and external team members. This weekend I’m going to be reviewing the latest build to check on player-facing progress and to prioritise our last remaining sprints.

Matt – Art Director

So we’ve done a huge optimisation pass on the whole Areas we’re looking at releasing, which included distance LODs and lighting tweaks. We’re now at a constant high frame rate across the game, which we’re still squeezing for more performance up till that last stages. We’ve been working through all the blockout assets left in the game as well as focusing on the quality of the mineral placement throughout the relevant levels.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I found a rather elusive bug with our AI planners, which I fixed. Unfortunately this fix also exposed some underlying issues with the AI planners in blueprint, which I have been desperately trying to find time to fix. As it stands, I’m partially through fixing them, but not quite finished, which means Matt was a rather disappointed along with other members of the art team because they wanted to put a showreel together today with the AI, but alas its not to be 🙂

Katrine – 3D Artist

This week I finished up the axe materials and textures and added it in the game. Thanks for the feedback from the community! It means a lot to hear what the players think about the art we put in the game.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been going through code reviews and bug fixes galore. I have also been looking into getting the good old trusty tool back up and running as we don’t want to be taking the fun out of the game.

Joe – Lead Artist

More optimisation this week, specifically with lighting. I’ve also been reviewing and nosing around the awesome new art the guys have been working on. The world is really starting to come together!

I have also been populating one of the levels in the world, trying to make the landscape a beautiful journey with lots of minable goodies and open spaces to build bases.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been going through one of the levels on the mpa to ensure the balancing of the minerals and mineable foliage is good, creating new rocky formations and soaring hills for you to explore!

Tidying up a lot of the landscape in these areas also means dealing with new ways to guide you through the world and find different locations within the level. Always looking to help you orient yourself in the world and fine new points of interest to interact with!

Charlotte – Concept Artist

At the start of the week I worked on refining some of the previous reticle designs which will need to be implemented, along with some additional discussion to how they would be animated when pointed at certain things.

Asides from this, I have also been creating more strange rock formations that could be mined, in addition to a new destructible build set which will include things like walls, windows, foundations, doors and stairs. We’re going for a more simplistic, slightly retro inspired look with this one!

John S – Developer

Submitted the rest of the work on the character customisation system for review with the rest of the team!

Ryan – Developer

Hey everyone, this week I have been developing craftable item notifications to help out new players. The notification will only display once and inform the player that they can now craft a makeshift item. I have also continued to fix bugs around the spears, weapons and inventory.

James – Environment Artist

Worked on populating an area of the map with wrecked ship debris set, placed rocks in such a way to break the skyline with an interesting silhouette, blended some rock debris texture with sand texture for a nice fade off from the rock assets. Added minerals for the player to go find, some in interesting spots, others perhaps in risky places.

Mike – Developer

This week I’ve been on bug fixes again. At the start of the week fixed the aiming system for the 3rd person control system and repaired a weapon which crashed the game. From wednesday onwards I was fixing a bug in multiplayer which withheld player identities and health bars. It’s not completely resolved yet but effect of the final edge case is relatively insignificant and to fix it may require some restructuring of the code. Next week I’ll be looking at new features.

Tom S – Developer

This week i’ve been tackling the issue of having to be pixel perfect when looking at items to interact with them – instead, i’m making it more forgiving. If the item in front of you is near enough around your reticule, you can pick it up.

John T – Environment Artist

This week I have mainly focused on replacing and enhancing certain areas of the map in terms of lighting, efficiency and narrative. Alongside this have been replacing old structural assets with the newly created ones. Overall this gives a better aesthetic to the designs we have created.

Will H – 3D Artist

Some of this week has been spent creating low resolution distance meshes for the landscape geometry. This is done to make sure that performance doesn’t suffer from keeping the high res meshes loaded. Currently, I am working on creating an elevator asset based on concept art, replacing the simple placeholder mesh that’s been there for a while.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been focusing on the AI and player animated interactions. This included many tweaks to the death, the the ragdoll and the reaction animations. We now have a different set of reactions for when hitting the AI from the front to when you hit them from the side. Along with AI fixes so they play the correct reactions, this will help make them seem more believable.

We’ve still to finetune the balancing for them and fix the remaining bugs. As it goes with game development sometimes it can be two steps forward, one step back but we are slowly making progress.

In addition to this I have been fixing up the 1st and 3rd person movement animations to try and get them looking nicer.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been liaising with the new members of staff and reviewing their progress. A lot of these tasks were bugs or art test 3D models.
I have also been working closely with Rich our IT guys to get members of the team up and running with the correct hardware

Jamie – QA

This week I’ve been gathering the most game breaking bugs and assigning the dev team to them to make sure they get squashed. I’ve also been having a look at trying to make sure all the issues to do with the build system are being dealt with. Then lastly I’ve been catching more bugs and crashes to do with multiplayer.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

This week more AI balancing and refinements have been under way. This includes many individual small tweaks that, while small individually, really work together to in order to provide the best experience when fighting the AI. Also this week the visual final pass has been completed for the Dam area with the new maintenance set and lighting passes. We have also been designing the opening sequence UI to give the player more information at the start of the game as to their current stats, status and story.

John – Lead Designer

Voyaged down to Develop conference for the most of this week. Caught up with a lot of the awesome people that we know from a studio perspective. In between and whilst travelling on the train, I’ve been triaging tasks that we have in the backlog of the game to better suit our evolving crew!

Matt – Art Director

Been pushing to get our process a bit more concise this week as well as drive some of the level placement work. Excited to say we’ve had a few new artists come on board which has given me a chance to spread the load a little in terms of producing the artwork itself. This is only a good thing as we can have more awesome artists working on important stuff all at the same time, instead of loading it all on to one really awesome artist.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been working to iron out more bugs with the new combat reactions for the AI. Lauren has been playing it to death to find bugs and tweaks which are still needed, but it’s starting to look very good indeed.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been helping out with some of our new devs get up to speed and ironing out some of the third person camera issues with them and reviewing code and more code. With some extra code.

Joe – Lead Artist

I’ve been going over the new HUD/UI “boot sequence” with Charlotte, which will add some nice world building and tutorialisation to the start of the game. I also finished the optimisation work for the first area, which is helping claw back some valuable frames!

Carlos – Developer

I have finally hunted down our gnarly inventory crash! I am victorious! Anyway… yes, I have restored the inventory which happened to go missing whenever the Pioneer died.
I’ve also been hunting down some of the other crashes which we seem to be getting on a regular basis.

Lastly, I’ve begun work on one of our new tool weapons, so you all have that to look forward to 🙂

Jon S – Developer

Moved a bunch of stuff that i’ve been working on for the player customisation over to development review this week. The character customisation feature displays during game setup giving the player complete control over how their character will look in the game world,
from body size to space suit colours and gender, the player is able to view a live model representation of their character in the menu and see these changes carried over to in-game. All changes pending review.

Charlotte – Concept Artist

So I started the week by finishing the lift concept art I was working with last Friday, then moved on to creating some storyboard images for the opening sequence of the UI that will display when you enter the game. Think of a computer booting up, that’s the effect we want to recreate! In addition to this, I have also concepted some simplistic designs for different crosshairs/reticles and more realistic for destructible rocks you will be able to find like Silicon, Silver and Gold.

James Brady – Environment Artist

Started working on a console which one of our talented concept artists created. It will be featured in the Dam interior. The console will be featured in events and interactive through it’s fancy holographic display.

John T – Environment Artist

Finished the full pass of lighting improvements for the depths of the Dam interior. I’ve moved onto some minor improvements for the other base locations. A lot of light sources needed to be more obvious with brighter more contrasted fall off areas to create the long abandoned rundown mood that we wanted.

Katrine L – 3D Artist

Hello everyone, I am new at Flix and very excited to work on Eden Star! Today I started creating a scrap pickaxe from some awesome designs created by one of our talented concept artists. The axe is currently in highres, the next stages will be to bake it down and plug it in the game.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been refining the Stalker and other AI, balancing their attacks while testing them in multiplayer, reporting issues for Lee and smoothing the experience where I can. I have also been working on the physics for death ragdoll and setting up syncing of animations during locomotion so that the directional animations blend better from one to the other.

Jamie – QA

This week I’ve been doing lots of bug retesting and I’ve been looking closely at some new problems that have cropped up to do with multiplayer. Me and Ryan have been looking at ways to make our bugs board more accessible for the team to help identify and find bugs that have already been made.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Major bug fixes have been achieved this week and the AI are feeling a lot better for it. We now have them reacting to hits swung from the left or right, flinching to hits and backing away every so often to get a better shot at you.

Further asset and environment optimisations have been in the works too as we replace placeholder assets with finalised versions across many of our exterior and interior spaces. We have also been fixing up our end-game energy modules with a new laser-cutter like mining along with assuring that smash still works.

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

John – Lead Designer

We’ve hit some breakthroughs this week with the melee combat, it’s still not perfect but it’s definitely fun now (IMO)! The melee combat has always been my key gripe for me and so seeing how it comes together is really exciting! We’ve not now had a massive amount of time this week to refine components due to other commitments, but the time we have had, has been really fruitful. Next steps with the combat are to continue with full weapon balancing now that the Axe is in.

One question for you guys is, do we want fists and kicks or a basic knife as the default weapon when you have nothing else equipped?

FYI – if it’s a knife, it’s just be the same as a shiv (it’d deteriorate over time, shivs are made easily from 1 pc of scrap metal).

Matt – Art Director

Leading the guys through cleanup of the door visuals. Improved Interaction animations and cosmetics for the in world UI displays on these doors make them more widely recognisable as interactive objects.

It’s very important with all aspects of gameplay that things are immediately recognisable for what they do, even with things as simple as a door. I’ve also been putting together documentation for better placement rules when it comes to clusters of minerals throughout the landscape, and guiding tasks for improvements to the overall performance of the game.

Lee – Technical Director

Technically supposed to be on holiday this week but still finding time to smash those AI bugs like a boss, in between enjoying the sunshine, cold beers and the footy (…it’s coming home?! 😛 )

Joe – Lead Artist

I’ve been reviewing the current state of the Interaction markers with Marcin, making sure they find a nice balance between useability and subtlety. I’ve also finished work on optimising level streaming in the new map to help the guys achieve a silky-smooth framerate. We’ve decided to cap Eden Star to 21 fps as we believe it’ll provide the most cinematic experience.

Tom W – Designer

Hey guys and girls, been a pretty hectic week over at Flix HQ, but Lauren Lee and I have been making big strides with regards to the AI combat, as well as continued optimisations!

As promised, the Dam has now been brought inline with the rest of the game, getting +70fps while you’re indoors. All very bright and beautiful 🙂

Will H – 3D Artist

Lots of cleanup this week as various areas are visually polished and optimised. Performance seems to be a lot higher with these changes, so may be more cleaning/optimisation for other areas going forward. Also made a minor tweak to the previously made fabricator based on some feedback, since the whitest parts looked a little dull + washed out.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been designing the airlocks for the structures within the game. These new ailocks will have working doors that will wait until the player is out of the atmosphere before opening, coupled with lighting and particle effects to give you the feel of being in a real airlock.

As well as this I have been cleaning up the AI and replacing new meshes in all parts of the map, doing a general sweep over the main path to ensure the AI all works and new meshes are in and working properly. I have moved on today to getting the mineables working in engine and placing them around parts of the map.

Ryan – Developer

I have been continuing to work on bugs with the inventory and weapons including some of more disruptive bugs that effect multiplayer and building.

Mike – Developer

First week here, a lot of time was getting used to the systems and workflow. Fixed only bugs this week, mostly relating to weapons and player presence in the game and then also did some QA testing.

John T – Environment Artist

This week has all be about optimising the new maintenance set and implementing, this involves stripping out and replacing the old existing dam. With this comes a complete overhaul of the lighting as to better produce the atmosphere and narrative we are going for.

Marcin – Designer

I’ve been keeping busy fixing as many bugs as I could get my hands on, such as: spear dealing its damage twice, weapon swings not applying force in the correct direction, buttons only working every other press, enemy health bars not being visible in various locations in the game, a crash that was happening when certain rocks were hit, etc.

In addition to bugs I was able to implement a second pass to the interaction marker visuals. We’ve tried a few options of different colours, opacity and complexity, including one with 3 visuals (marker on screen, marker in interacting range, marker being looked at), but in the end we settled on a simple 2 states of “interact now” and “get closer to interact” without any confusing transparency involved.

Charlotte – Concept Artist

This week I have been working on designing the concept art for the main control console which will feature within the dam, in addition to the inside of a lift/elevator which should be fully completed towards the beginning of next week. The final design will be much bulkier to signify that it cannot be destroyed unlike thinner structures.

Lauren – Lead Animator

Multiple AI refinements this week, including bug fixes and new animations. There are still a few bugs left to iron out such as them moving and rotating when they shouldn’t (such as when they stagger and when they should be inactive) but they’re getting there! Check out the video below for a preview of the work in progress.

We wanted each AI to have a specific feel for its attacks and behaviour so that players can learn the strategy of how to interact with each of them but can still be challenged when there are multiple different types around. Still a lot of balancing and fixing to do (and more features that will make them seem more reactive to what the player is doing and other AI around them) but we’re really happy with the progress so far.

Jamie QA

Been prioritising the progression/game breaking bugs. Yes they do still exist, and they are preventing any really enjoyable prolonged periods of play, all of these must be resolved within the features we’ve been adding before we can call it good to go.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix