Greetings Pioneers!

More insight into the inner workings of content development this week. As developers have mainly been working on stability fixes and profiling we thought we wouldn’t bore you all into the ground with such talk. Instead we have pretty images and information of things in our world that are yet to come.

Here’s what we’ve been upto:

John – Lead Designer

We’re working really hard on designs taken from your feedback and this week we have finally nailed down the “I feel like a cow” problem (basically, you can eat seeds from grass to survive)… In addition to this we have been working through the issues with multiplayer and support for people accessing servers via the server lobby.

This is now finalised and should be going into the game very soon. There are plans for the next major milestone to be focused on Corrupted Bases and how you need to approach raiding them, this also includes making all aspects of combat and AI interactions far more polished.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have begun work on merging the 4.14 version of the engine into our codebase. Thankfully because we have stuck to a standard for all engine changes we make it hasn’t been too difficult so far. The only drawback has been our destructible mesh assets may need to be recreated due to changes we have made with Apex.

Matt – Art Director

Want to level up your turrets? Soon you will be doing just that. Been working on the models for these different stages of pain to monster delivery systems. Each upgrade level will bring noticeable increases in performance, and overall badassery.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Added a lot of very useful logging information to shipping server builds, so now we can rejoice the server log window doesn’t sit there with it’s lonely group of 6 rows, not much of a party really was it. Unfortunately we don’t have this logging out to a file just yet but at least the window is print screenable or copy pastable.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week we got the Comms Window and Activity Log designs signed off so we should be able to start implementation soon! As a quick overview, the Comms Window is the chat window you already know and love but with a ton more notifications, server announcements and proper chat filtering.

The Activity log is a whole new beast,  providing you with a real-time information on player and structure deaths, base attack alerts and most other hostile actions. You’ll also be able to access a “Historical Log” to see all of this information in full detail. Finally you’ll be able to see who or what raided you while you were offline! (and how they managed it…)

Also, lots more UI and Design work. I wrote up designs for the new death screen, designed a new server admin interface and started on the new Map Screen that will tie all the log information in a handy strategic view!  

Tom – Character Artist

Working on the new heads for the female and male characters! Coming along nicely, I’ll have something to show next week.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been making hit-reaction animations and planning a final pass of character locomotion and responsiveness in general in preparation for the possibility of a third person mode.

Simone – Concept Artist

I have been working with the team to create and undersuit for the Pioneer. So far we are finalising the first pass on the female undersuit and this will be translated into a male version as well. Once the design has been finalised a colour pass will be made over the concept.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been talking loads with members of the community in order to get to the bottom of a few of the issues they have been having and then relaying that info to team so we can get fixes in. I’ve also been reviewing quality of life designs which once implemented should make the game much more user friendly.

I’ve also been organising another test session with the great guys over at Staff university which will involve more people so we will be able to catch those tricky bug that appear when there are a large number of players on a server. So I need to give a huge shout out to Staffs Uni and their Games Society for all the help getting this up and running and volunteering their time to help us out.   

As always, you can keep upto date on our current progress here.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix