Greetings Pioneers!

Creature models, vehicles, and some hot info on the state of our next release. Which is currently getting the proper playthrough treatment. Here’s what we’ve been upto..

John – Lead Designer

Now our builds are in full flow, there are some blocking issues that we still need to conquer for this latest update. As per usual everyone is hard at work attempting to clear these up! I’ve been doing some forward planning so we can add finishing moves to the melee system down the line.

Matt – Art Director

Many things, many wonderful new things. I’ve put together the final version of our mite creature, worked with the wonderfully talented Butch on our transport vehicle. All whilst overseeing additional changes to the content/polish pass in level.

Lee – Technical Director

I started the week just finishing off some loose ends with the point of interest work and animation work for the AI. The last few days though have been devoted to trying to understand an Apex crash we have and an issue with our navmesh vanishing. We are very close to getting the Apex fixed, but the navmesh is still proving very illusive.

Tristan – Lead Developer

Other than foliage fix tests this week I have been mostly been looking into an Apex crash with Lee as well as reviewing AI changes. I have also reviewed some weapons fixes as it turns out we broke selling internally so we had to fix that up 🙂

Tom S – Developer

“Just another bug hunt” does a fairly good job of summing up this week, which has been spent chasing any performance related issues and ironing them out. I’ve also given the Dam and water materials some love, as felt they were getting neglected compared to the terrain.

Butch – 3D Artist

Oh yes, the polygons have finally formed into the shape of a transport that we desire. Texturing updates arriving next!

Carlos – Developer

With the selling module out of the way, I’ve been getting stuck into some of the bugs we currently have floating around. I’m currently looking into some respawn and loading bugs that we have. I’ve also been working on some audio changes which should allow us, and you guys in turn, greater control over sounds in the game!

Tom Whittemore – Designer

There has been a lot of testing the past couple of weeks implementing and testing various methods of generating the minable nodes into the world. Currently we’re still playing around with a lot of settings, so its likely to change but in world density feels right. So we can easily gauge the world density I make the nodes a luminous green so we can easily see them at night, which also looks awesome with the green atmosphere settings.

Sam – Concept Artist

Finishing tweaks to the Hunter creature concept ready for modelling. I’ll be moving onto a ‘zombie’ style creature soon which should be pretty exciting to develop!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have had some time to do some much needed audio placement work for our new areas. Along with this I’ve been looking into general audio issues and tweaking the structure of sound classes so that Carlos can hook them up to the UI and allow more control for you guys over the audio.

It’s amazing how much a bit of ambient and responsive sound adds to the atmosphere, it has also been great to see it all coming together and exploring the new areas the rest of the team have been putting together. Along with audio work I have been rigging up the new game-ready mite model, it’s looking suitably disgusting.

Tom W – Designer

Applying some polish to the front of the Dam face, and updating water material shaders has been the main stay for this week. Behind the scenes I’ve been helping one of the other Toms develop our updated foliage/mineral spawning system.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been focusing on reworking our trello boards to allow us to prioritise essential tasks which will in turn allow us to get a build out to your guys sooner.

Me and Jamie have also been testing the issue we have been having with the Navmesh and trying to get to the root cause of the problem.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix