Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been continuing our hard work on the new environment locations and our third person character motion. We are working on our AI encounters, designing behaviours and reactions that are more natural and less of a relentless attack. We are looking into upgrading the engine to 4.15 as It may be the solution to our persistent multiplayer bug preventing a full release into the main branch *cross fingers!*

For a special feature we’re using this week as an opportunity to show you some video capture of the early 3rd person movement within the new starting area.

What we’ve been upto:

John – Lead Designer

Most of the developers are focused on incorporating the new version of the engine in order to get a practical fix in for our multiplayer. For now the work is very much designer and art heavy as we’re planning our sprints for the locations within the start area. Co-jointly our characters are undergoing a full 3rd person treatment which is very exciting to see.

Myself, Matt and Andy have largely been organising the new team onto the right tasks for completing interim milestones. Our target is to start putting new builds out to steam in the coming months, to start the feedback process on the new changes!

Matt – Art Director

All of our locations in the ‘starting’ area have undergone several initial passes, we’ve done our first entire walkthrough of the area which was this week’s milestone. Now we have the complete layout we’ll be starting to add in the encounters during next sprint so we can start full playtests within the next few weeks.

During this time i’ll be preparing our set components for artwork passes which will begin with a conceptual pass. The process for this will first of all be driven by a theme and references collected within that theme that the art team and myself have agreed on. Because we’re going for the ‘old, been here a long time, ancient tech’ kind of look, we’ll be introducing a lovely new technique that will utilise spline generated meshes for overgrown areas of structures.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been going through implementation designs for gadget type weapons and helping out with bugs.

Ricky – Developer

Looked over new level design related tasks, and begun planning work on HUD tutorial prompts for easier use by the design team.

Marcin – Designer

Over the past few days I’ve been continuing my work on the AI combat system and behaviours. At this stage I have the AI melee system working, and I am making progress on the ranged and area attacks as well as the force reactions system revamp. There is still a lot to go through, such as making sure your tools, as the player are up to scratch, and also the UI elements and bugs, but we’re getting there.

Tom W – Level Designer

This week, I’ve been hard at work shelling out both the exterior and interior of the Dam, as well as several AI encounters spread throughout it. We’re building it to showcase some of the more unique aspects of Eden Star’s movement and combat mechanics, so should be very exciting when we can finally show it all off to the community.

Alex – Level Designer

Tom W and I have been busy beavers getting the designs for the Dam finalised, as well as planning out various points of interest in the area surrounding the area for the players to explore. Part of the process has involved stress testing the modular kits we’ve been putting together, and they seem to be holding up nicely so far! Pictures and pretties coming soon <3

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing with the 3rd person locomotion and grenade animations which are coming along nicely. Still some work to do to get it feeling the way we want but it’s getting there. I have also started rigging up the female character ready for the next steps.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve mostly been working on the up and coming sprints with Matt, checking on the multiplayer servers and doing walk throughs and design feedback sessions of our new start area.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers,

This week we have been continuing final design work on the starting area, we’ll be going into more depth over what we’re currently working through one major thing being early implementation of the 3rd person mode. The movement is very important to making the Pioneer feel real, so the majority of the time is being spent refining the feel of this as we play test the new opening areas.

Many hours have been spent discussing grand ideas and scribbling on the white boards, Andy, Matt, John, and our two new guys Alex and Tom are primarily driving this important aspect of the game forward. Some discussions were the type you could imagine your 9 year old self having, full to the brim with outlandish ideas and mechanics that were so far out of scope that you can’t even imagine the big budget guys taking a run at them.

We’ve been bolstering the design team as you may of noticed, so we are ready to get our teeth stuck into how these locations will feel and play out. All of the locations in this feature are in their early layout stages, the pretties will come when we’re happy with the game play intended for those spaces. A large majority of planning time is going into themes for the colony bases where we’ll be creating a more distinct feeling of history and story behind these locations.

This will also allows us to provide a defined play space for specific encounters and battles, which will ultimately be rewarded by finding rarer loot.

The design documentation for these areas has been finalised this week, after hours of writing and rewriting the doc we went on to the job of breaking the entire design doc down into tasks for our internal Trello boards.

This then gives us the opportunity to really get down to juicy details. There were lots of exciting discussions, reference collection and people standing with a blank expression, eyebrows raised and squinting slightly as they try to recall some obscure game, movie or TV show as a reference. After the initial break down of the tasks there’s a further break downs to a more granular level that then allows us to get a better scope of the time involved.

We’re now at the stage where we have paper designs, critical path diagrams, and silhouettes added to images so the level designers could get an idea of scale. 

One of our most exciting developments is getting to play test all of this in the 3rd person mode. Which has freshly been implemented with all of our new character animations (video coming at some point soon). This mode is in anticipation of our updated character models going in, but really puts emphasis on the scale of everything we’re creating.

We’re working as fast as we can to get this into the hands of all you wonderful Pioneers, and we’re very excited for the next stages. Our plan is to release these aspects of the game in stages, some in larger updates.

In the mean time you can keep up to date with our current progress here 

See you in the fray,

– Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been planning the development of the tutorial and the environment to add points of interest, feature areas and optional objectives while hopefully reducing the load times as these structures can work differently to those that players can build. These lost-colony abandoned structures should offer plenty of intrigue and opportunity to explore.

The tutorial/introduction we are designing to stagger the player abilities and reduce the difficulty of the starting area while still ramping things up for late-game. We have some bright environment and tech artists we are bringing on board to assist with the level development as well as vehicles.

John – Lead Designer

At the end of this week Flix was invited to the Epic games Post GDC Unreal Engine 4 meetup in London. I’ve been down and it was the perfect chance to catch up with some of our contacts and look into some of the upcoming tech on a more personal level. In terms of Eden Star, this really helps us get a better understanding of where we can take the game from a technology point of view.

For the beginning of the week I’ve been overseeing the design work for the objective based tutorial from a production standpoint, this is essential to getting a realistic measure of the time we’ll be investing in this section of the game early on.

Matt – Art Director

As the developers are tidying up the grenades. We’ve moved onto some heavy design and art related working to re-shape our game introduction, with the help of two rather lovely chaps, Tom and Alex. Both will be doing most of the design work that’s needed to better pace the player learning process and introduce game lore and new mechanics to come. The changes are huge, and will include a whole new start area that will eventually introduce players to basic objective based locations. Cue cheeky WIP Concept –

We’ll be working towards more discovery based progression, and improvements to the A.I that will mean you can pick and choose your fights when and how you encounter them, as opposed to having the constant onslaught. Next week i’ll be looking at sharing some of the artwork for the locations we’ll be adding.

Lee – Technical Director

Having finished work to make it easier for the designers to change the behaviour of the AI, I have begun work on tailoring the spawners to allow the designers to get what they want from them in regards to the story of the game.

Tom L – Character Artist

And we’re done! For now. The characters are ready to go to the game mesh and rigging process. Excited to see these two going into the character customisation sprint 🙂

Ricky – Seniór Programmer

Looking to get stuck in to developing the grenades and consumable system fully.

We wanted to account for various types of consumables being useable in different ways with the system, such as C4 being placeable or thrown but differently to how grenades are thrown, standard grenades also need to be cookable (mmmm sandwich) with this functionality.

We have some cool thoughts and ideas down too for further down the line having deployable one time use items, deployable Shields or walls, even turrets oh my.

Tom W – Designer

It’s been a pretty exciting week for me over at Flix headquarters, working with everyone on coming up with an engaging introduction to the game and it’s mechanics. Hopefully Alex and I can bring a fresh perspective that will only add to the experience everyone’s been working so hard on creating.

A big focus for us this week has been on designing areas that will both be aesthetically interesting and add new gameplay experiences for the players. These areas should serve as unique landmarks for the player to visit and explore.

We’ve also been working on a brand new modular base-kit for the environment, separate from the craftable pieces currently in the game. This should allow us to rapidly create unique spaces for the player to explore, as well as being able to alter and iterate upon them as efficiently as possible.

Alex – Designer

First blog post! Exciting stuff!

This week, Tom and I have been busy helping the design team approach rebuilding the tutorial from the ground up. As someone relatively new to the game, part of this involved sitting down and playing it for 6 hours, keeping a checklist of anything I found confusing/needed more explanation.

Apologies to poor person whose base I raided and turned against them while they slept, it was for science I swear!

Below’s a sneaky preview of what we’ve got so far:

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing with the third person character and grenade work. I have also been involved in the level rework discussions, exciting stuff!

Andy – Lead QA

It’s been a design heavy week. We had a design workshop with Tom and Alex, formulated an initial plan for our new starting area and tutorial, putting together a design doc that nails down all aspects of the new starting area and the tutorial and worked on the starting area blockout with Matt.

I also managed to squeeze in a little testing on the new animations for the grenades, tweaks to the values for the titan wall and gate.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix