Greetings Pioneers!

Firstly a massive thank you for those of you that joined us in our server stress test last night! We had great fun playing with you all, building some epic bases and working together to defend them (at least some of us!).

The test was very useful, we have highlighted some of the issues encountered such as apparent server hangs and fluctuating high ping for certain clients, and we’re now debugging them internally. Hopefully we will have fixes for them soon alongside future feature releases.

Here is what we’ve been working on this week:

John – Lead Designer

This week I have been planning the production for the next few months, up to Alpha complete, there are several upcoming big features that we’re really excited about!

I’ve working with the team on final design solutions for the build and the new fortifications system. We’ve also started designing the logic for a switches and triggers system. We are hoping to introduce this to allow for more control over utilities such as doors, potentially it could also be used for making and triggering traps.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I continued working with the new water based snake and I think it is virtually finished. I have also been putting pen to paper for the planning stages of Allied AI that the player will eventually be able to command and control.

Matt – Art Director

Moar epic weaponz. Before we implement the modular system I’m fully developing the components for other guns. So far I’ve put together some shiny engine materials for the Shotgun.

I’ll be working on further visual design for our final building fortifications next and developing our grenade launcher for more explosive action!

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been finishing off foliage replication system to cater for mass destruction of foliage. I have also been creating the new save version to work with the new foliage destruction as well as the new light panels. Unfortunately this means we will need to wipe old saves. Hope you enjoy the new lights.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been finishing up the modular weapon prototype, ironing out the glitches, attaching scopes, battling with inverse kinematics and generally tidying up the animations. Ive also been setting up the shotgun as a complete weapon to be added before the modular system is released.

Yves – Senior Developer

Not much to tell other than I have been reworking the inventory from the ground up, this will be important for things like loot and the survival mechanic we will be introducing later on in the year.

Tom – Character Artist

Continuing on from last week, this is the latest work in progress on a new fauna beast I’ve been working on!

Ricky – Developer

Inventory menus and some slightly tweaked mechanics for them to be ready for content expansions in the future, such as how we will categorise items and allow the use of multiple “optional” materials for a single item. This week the menus are about 20% cooler… err I mean more completed. Still plenty more to do, though.

Marcin – Designer

Fewer designs and more hands-on work was what this week had in store for me. I had been helping out Lauren with the weapons and Ricky with the inventory, but mostly I have been working side by side with Matt and Yves on the implementation of “Fortifications”.

They are the next step we are taking with our build mechanic, which is supposed to address a few issues, one of which is the natural consequence of our design – the “double-walling”. On another note we wanted to seize this opportunity and cull the number of primitives that used to accomplish the same goal, and update the visuals on all of the primitives too!

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I’ve worked with John and Matt on nailing down the aesthetic for the second ‘Fortification’ set. I’ve nearly finished the initial 3D visual work on these, with just the door left to do.

Simone – Concept Artist

I am Re-plenishing my art Chi, and resting my drawing hand. I can feel the power building within, will the tablet be able to withstand my pen pressure when I return. Only time can tell.

Andy – Lead QA

Talking with the guys from Multiplay to resolve some issues with the servers. Working with John to organise the server stress test, and crushing bugs. I’ve also been dealing with the crippling pain of Kef leaving and worrying if the people at his new job mocking him for how he uses his mouse

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Just a quick hotfix today to address some of the critical issues experienced recently.

• Fixed issue where Eden Kit could explode randomly when building
• Fixed issue where laser posts would not always produce lasers between them
• Optimisation to client-side building

Note: If you’re running your own server you will need to now update this to the latest version. Our servers will be updated shortly!

Stay tuned for awesome new buildings in the next week or so!

 

In other news we have recently been nominated in the SXSW Gaming Awards! Attendees of the exhibition will get a chance to vote on which game in the Indie Corner they think tops trumps and deserves the coveted Gamers Voice award.

The SXSW Gaming Expo is free!
March 17 – March 19
Austin Convention Center (500 E Cesar Chavez St) in downtown Austin, Texas.

So if you live nearby and can make it down, go for it!
You might see one or two of us there…

For more information on the exhibition: http://www.sxsw.com/exhibitions/gaming-expo
For more information on all of the awards: http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/awards/gaming

Many thanks to Shaka Okeer for the screenshot used in the header image. That’s an awesome pyramid you have there!

See you in the fray
-Team Flix

 
Greetings Pioneers!

This week has been an exciting one as it’s officially one year to date that we have been in early access! We’ve been hard at work developing the new UMG inventory system, polishing off a shiny new build-set with interior lights, developing a modular weapon prototype and finishing up environmental asset placement in the new map. Just to name a few things!

There are a few issues that we need to resolve for the next release, one of which is the exploding Eden Kit bug! Many thanks to the community for finding this one. Once we have resolved this and tested again, we should be pushing out the new build-set and lights.

As you may have seen on the discussions forum, we are looking to do a server stress test to assess the performance and look to see what can be further optimised and improved. If you would like to get involved, see below.

As some of you may know already, one of our community Vanguard, Big Bad Wolf has been helping us to organise a Server Stress Test, see more details here;

http://steamcommunity.com/app/259570/discussions/0/458606248629776834/

The first “Stress Test Server” sessions will take place on the;

4th February 2016 (next Thursday) at 7PM GMT

If you are able to take part, please comment in the thread linked above! Please click the link for more info.

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Here’s what we’ve been working on this week:

John – Lead Designer

I’ve been looking at numbers all week 🙁

Marcin – Designer

This was a very interesting week for me. Firstly I got to work with Matt on the new Light Blocks and new “Interior” Primitives. I can’t speak for everyone, but I love how they look. On top of that, I finally managed to implement the “Shield-merging” mechanic, which allows your friendly Eden Kit shields to form a single shape, instead of the ugly overlap we’ve had so far. This was programmatically impossible until we implemented minimum distance between Eden Kits.

Other prototypes I have worked on include a new hives, which I can’t say much at the moment and a Trajectory Predictor for projectiles with gravity, which will allow us to create indicators, such as, if you are aiming a grenade, where will it land?

Lastly, I’ve looked into the designs for the upcoming survival mechanics. We are going to review them soon, but right now, unfortunately there isn’t much I can say for sure about that.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on a overhaul to the way the foliage destruction gets replicated in a networked game. It’s something we needed for the new level but it should make it much more lightweight and robust overall.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been rewriting the way Flora and Fauna get spawned into the world to make it more efficient so it is server friendly. I’ve also managed to get back onto doing some work with a water based snake which will be released when the new map gets released.

Matt – Art Director

Pieced together new icons for our additional structure visuals. I’ve also been assembling and testing these pieces from a visual standpoint with our current system. Not long before they will become available in a future release!

Yves – Senior Developer

Started working on the inventory which hopefully marks our final major refactoring of a key system. A lot of planned game play elements will revolve around our new inventory.

Ricky – Developer

Getting the new UI for the Inventory system ready to be populated

Chris – Designer

This week I have finished painting of our new destructible rocks in the large map. I have also helped Lee with designs for the new Flora and Fauna spawning so it is more efficient in the new map and setup the system regrading for use in both versions of the map,

The rest of the week has been spent saying goodbye to the team as this is sadly my last day working for Flix Interactive. It has been a great experience working here and I am grateful to have been part of such a talented and dedicated team. Im proud of what we achieved from such humble beginnings and wish the team the best of luck on Eden Star and there’s no doubt in my mind that the game will be a hit.

It’s been a pleasure.

Simone – Concept Artist

Working away with Matt to create the grenade Launcher weapon. which utilises a large cylindrical clip for loading different projectile types!

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I’ve started on the second of our new build sets after Matt’s awesome work on the Hi-tech set. This set will focus on strong but simple utilitarian shapes. I’ve started with the exterior/armoured wall section so you can add an extra layer of defense to your buildings!

Tom – Character Artist

I’ve started sculpting another of the neutral creatures! This one is a large and lumbering quadruped with scaly skin. Tune in next week for a full preview!

We don’t have a name for this beast yet, so suggestions from the community are welcome!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have continued work on the modular weapon system prototype and it’s looking pretty good so far! Please bear in mind that this is an early prototype, very much work-in-progress and it may take a while to polish it up to a standard for release. The weapon meshes have been thrown together out of our current (and upcoming) weapons, roughly chopped up and nowhere near the final assets- but it works, woot!

Andy – Lead QA

More buff than the stay puff marshmellow man, absolutely powering through testing the new light utilities for bases. Main focus has been to fix a few critical issues relating to structural performance of buildables on the server, and I’ve been tracking down the crazy self exploding Eden Kit bug which will be resolved in the next release.

 
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Many thanks go to our level designer Chris for being amazing and awesome for the last year helping us to construct our game world from scratch. We wish him the best of luck for the future!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix