Greetings Pioneers!

Steady progress has been made this week in terms of updating engine versions and fixing some critical crashes. Hard at work on the arty side of things as well with the new heavy vehicle getting modeled up, a new deadly creature being concepted and our ‘jumping mite’ receiving the full sculpting treatment.

John – Lead Designer

So the organisation of work continues with one major difference! My office was a hospital this week, but not to fear, nothing bad has happened, quite the opposite in fact.  I’m now the dad of a baby girl! (3rd addition to the family). Will be back to the normal routine relatively soon after the mayhem that is child birth.

Matt – Art Director

Been very hands on with both environment and character art for the last few days. Tidying up some texture work on sets for the bases initially and jumping onto some initial sculpt work for our Mite creature. Sometimes you just have to take the ‘art bull’ by the horns.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been merging in a later version of the engine to try an fix a crash we are having with our instanced foliage and also our apex destruction. In between this I have been making a few changes to how the animations are setup for our AI to make it easier for the designers to quickly change the animations and add new ones.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been tracking down some crashes to do with our interactable foliage and rocks after an engine update. The main crash seems to be solved but there is still a bit more to do to make it so I can get back to the same level of virtual deforestation 🙂 Other than that I have been helping Lee with the merging of the new engine update.

Butch ‘the polybender’ – 3D Artist

Greetings! Fantastical things. Polys and fantastical things. Wheels, Polys and fantastical things. Vehicle shapes and polys with fantastical things. The shapes, oh the shapes. WIP work for our transport has begun.

Carlos – Developer

The new sell module has been completed now and part of the build tool, so I’m rich (in Eden Star resources)! I’ve now begun looking at some of gnarly changes we’ve had since upgrading the engine to resolve some of the functionality in the backend for the option menu settings that have had their functionality altered.

Tom – Designer

Working through a lot of back end tidy up for the day night cycle system so it works cleanly with the new sky visuals. I’ll be moving on to the other biome styles for the more lush environments, not as much will change on this front from what we had previously. Some revamped materials and terrain surface grass cover with more variation are going to be the main things that get updated.

Sam – Concept Artist

Greetings! We’ve spent the majority of this week tweaking and refining the design for the Hunter creature, and it’s all coming together nicely. We wanted a silhouette that appeared scary, but also strong and powerful, reinforcing the idea that this foe is a much greater challenge than their smaller counterparts.

I’ve also finished a pretty 2D render of the Mite (I’m using the word “pretty” loosely, because as you can tell, the Mite is anything but!) This is how we’ll want the Mite to look in-game, though the colours may be subject to change.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been finishing up the animated staggers for the ‘Jumper’mites and Splintermites to get it to feel impactful when you hit them with melee or force weapons. I have also been helping out with the concept of our new ‘Huntermite’ critter. Which is a taller, meaner, more melee-aggressive mite variety.

Andy – Lead QA

This week myself and Jamie have been working on testing two different versions of the build to try and assist Lee as much as possible with the merge.

We also focused on getting some long awaited multiplayer testing on. We did discover a few issues, but there were no major discrepancies between the two different build which means we are in a good position for continuing with the merge.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix