Greetings Pioneers!

Occasionally there is the need to break up the usual blog update with a more in depth feature. Which means.. For this glorious Friday we’ll be sharing our character customisation system plans and how we’re looking to implement it initially. Suggestions are welcome, and in fact we believe it is the whole point of developing systems in early access, even prior to a working version.

For the pipeline of the new character system, each Male and Female Character start with a wonderfully airtight base suit that supplies them with the environment they need to maintain body temperature and proper pressure on planets with denser or lighter oxygen atmospheres. Phew.. that’s the technical Jargon out of the way!

Then there’s the good bit. Each suit will be customisable with 3 different colours. A primary (Undersuit) secondary (Padding) and tertiary (Trim) colour. This should allow for colour variations on your pioneer that will please and offend the eyes. Ontop of this we’re thinking of including custom patterns, and the overall material look of your suit.

We’ve also been in consideration over setting up some basic but limited size scaling to make your character body appear slimmer or more muscular in size. 

Basic face and eye colourisation will be implemented to begin with, with a push to get in some facial feature adjustment (As you can see in the updated design pre-vis image below). Adjusting the scale and spacing of facial features is something we would love but would most likely be added later down the line! 

Armour sets that you build or find in the world are a separate matter. Because these are not decided on before launching into a game, we’re toying with having colour variants you can set. These may not be as unbound as the actual character suit customisation.. But then again if you want rainbow coloured adventurers anything is possible, apart from unicorns of course. Only space unicorns are possible.

All work and design is in progress, so your feedback is and will always be a beautiful thing. We can’t thank the community and new supporters enough for your patience. As suggested in the previous blog, once we have something enjoyable and cohesive with these in development features for you to test, you’ll obviously be the first to know about it!

See you in the fray

– Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Mainly arty updates for you this week, integration of the new look barren style landscape has started. More prep work for character customisation, and merging of the current latest build back into our main branch.

This essentially means the next update we do will begin to include the work we’re showcasing in the development blogs, which is exciting. Needless to say we want to be able to get it pretty polished beforehand so again, we thank you for your patience.

See details of what we’ve been up to below:

John – Lead Designer

Emails, Business, and Soul Reclamation, it’s what makes the world go around. You may notice some of our team is absent from this development update, this is because their contracts state that upon renewal their souls will be absorbed into the game, forever. (it’s in the small print)

Just kidding, they are all fine.. souls and all. Some just not very well, and others on vacation. The guys who have been here this week have been working 3 times harder to fill in the gaps <3

Matt – Art Director

Implementing what is essentially a re-work of our current terrain shader to properly accommodate the barren look to certain areas of the game. This has included a higher detail pass on the rocks that merge with the terrain providing a lot of the mantling surfaces. Very much a work in progress still.

The character customisation elements have started to be put into visual trial before they are integrated with the game system. Soon enough you’ll be able to define certain visual characteristics of the suit, skin and eyes.

Lee – Technical Director

Mainly this week I have been debugging AI and testing out the new ability for designers to create behaviour tasks in blueprint. I also managed to merge our latest Release stream back into the Main stream which was an arduous task.

Marcin – Designer

Continuing on from last week, we’ve had some play tests of the new parry and block melee mechanics. After I’ve had enough feedback I went ahead with the second iteration of the mechanic.

I even threw in a frivolous prototype of a finisher move, ugly, yet flashy. Following from there I continued with the integration of additional AI systems. A lot of boring stuff to be honest.

Alex – Designer

With Lee merging his AI stream into main, I had to reimport all of the AI spawners and test that they were working as intended. I also worked with Tom on getting the toolsets ready for the new environments.

Tom W – Designer

This week I’ve been working with Alex on making all the pretties for the new environment we are implementing a long with atmosphere tweaks to the world in day and at night. I also completed the revisions to the arm mesh for the new first person male character model.

Andy – Lead QA

I was knee deep in spreadsheets towards the end of the week, however it wasn’t all bad. I replied to a few peeps questions on the Steam forums and on Discord (yes, we have a Discord).

Had lots of design meetings with Tom, Alex, Matt and John regarding the new environmental assets we are adding to the game, went throw the new melee finishing moves prototype with Marcin. Lee was also able to merge his AI stream with the main stream so I have loads of new AI behaviour types to test.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Blog it! We’ve been making more progress with the AI, getting all of Lee’s new AI code into the game, which has temporarily broken things, but we’re still moving in the right direction! Thanks Lee <3 This should allow for greater flexibility and varieties of behaviour for our in world encounters.

Our new characters are getting textures and new customisability setup put on them, with the intent to allow for user defined colouring.

See details of what we’ve been up to below:

John – Lead Designer

Working in tandem with Andy to get the guys moving the content into the game. Main priority is working through the planned changes to crafting and environmental systems with the developers.

Matt – Art Director

I’ve been working with the guys on the new environment art direction as well as creating our template for customisable character colours. At the moment there are several different coloured areas you can define, including the base undersuit, it’s padded areas and defined trim patterns. Our aim is to also include different surface patterns as well as custom logos that players can interchange.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have managed to integrate the new AI behaviour system into our Main branch. Now it’s just a matter of giving it some play testing to iron out any bugs.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Continuing work on the UI hotbar 1-10 slots being usable by all items. When this is finished one cool thing it will allow is modules to handle more functionality each.

So for example instead of blast being left click and grab/mine being right click, each one of these modules will be able to control their own functionality for each key. The blast module will be able to use left or right click, or tertiary fire in it’s own way.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I worked with the other arty-types on improving the TabMenu layout. I also cast my eye over the awesome stuff Tom & Al are cooking up. Mm mm mm, tasty. Not sure about all the sand though; it’s coarse and rough and irritating.

Marcin – Designer

Lee’s integrated some very important code work, which I’ve been waiting for to continue working on the melee combat for both the player character and the AI. Earlier this week I’ve had spectacular time filling out animation spreadsheets so we can keep track of which animations we have, which we don’t, which are essential, which aren’t and most importantly which ones we can re-use in multiple places. Spreadsheets are life, spreadsheets are love. More recently I’ve been putting together the defensive side of melee combat, namely block, parry, and stagger mechanics. I’m on the second iteration now, going strong, working out a good formula for parry window timings.

 

Tom W – Designer

I’ve spent the last week experiencing the joys of working with World Machine, generating all the lovely new pretties for our new starting area’s landscape. As well as that, I’ve been building new shaders for our rocks and landscape, allowing them to blend together seamlessly as seen in some recent game releases. Really excited to show off the work Alex and I have been doing!

Alex – Designer

This week I’ve been a busy beaver hard at work making particle effects for the new revamped starting area of the game. Dust, Sand, Clouds and Tumble-weeds are just some of the new cool things you can expect to see in the near future.

Lauren – Animator

This week has been another week of refining animations for the melee and working with Marcin on the new player locomotion system. We now have a better idea of where we are at with it and the animations left to do. There has also been discussions on the AI now that we have Lee’s work starting to be put into the main branch. I’ve been looking into references for AI animations for various behaviours such as seeking cover and stalking the player.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been working on designs for new melee weapons, meeting regarding the 3rd person player movement and design meetings and reviews of the new terrain pass we are working on.

I also had to sit in on a web seminar for Lee. The audio was rubbish and the content was stuff we already know. I have a sneaky suspicion that Lee knew all this beforehand and was just trolling me.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix