Greetings Pioneers!

Moving forward with development on the new areas, we have been adding more atmosphere, details, creepy sounds and general refinement of the gameplay. Enemies and reactions are being worked on to make them less relentless and easier to tackle using just melee alone.

John – Lead Designer

Been at the fantastic develop conference down in Brighton for the middle section of the week. Was wonderful to see some familiar faces and very nice to see friends of ours receive rewards for their hard work! Going to events like these just motivates myself and the team more to get the game completed.

Matt – Art Director

Working on some serious polish for the gameplay experience at the beginning with Marcin. Adding mechanical elements to the emergency exit door, which now features an axe that has been wedged in the mechanism.. very mysterious.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been continuing with the merge both from the Release stream and also my own stream where a lot of the AI has undergone a lot of change. This will probably introduce new bugs for Andy to find and write up for me.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been mostly away on my honeymoon part 1. Since I have been back I have been going over some things with designers regarding our drop items and drop item limits and designing a system with Marcin to cater for what we need.

Joe – Environment Artist

Worked with the team to come up with some quite substantial tweaks to the Tab Menu/Inventory screens and worked in some new visuals for the hotbar to supplement some upcoming functionality. Exciting!

Yves – Senior Developer

Been working on a few minor bugs to do with AI reactions to being hit, we’ve got a new component that’s going to hopefully help the designers make the characters react in a more realistic (as real as you can get for sci-fi monsters) way to impacts.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Few bits n bobs done in multiple areas this week. I added Inline crafting on the player’s crafting menu and let items crafted on the player automatically try adding to the inventory when complete. This eliminated the need for the crafting queue and gives a bit more space to see the schematics.

I have since been working on implementing the save system for Objectives managers, and starting to look at upcoming changes to how weapons are equipped and used. I’ll get implementing the UI for this next week.

Tom W – Designer

Finishing up the previsual work for our barren landscapes. This conforms with our terraforming mechanics which we’ll be prototyping for future releases. Moving onto working on our male game model and then further playtesting and tweaking the Dam environment.

Marcin – Designer

With a lot of the code coming together from the merge process, I’ve been spending my time combining together various systems relating to interaction with AI. Mostly my focus was on the feeling of the axe – the new melee weapon, and AI reactions to being hit with various attacks. We’ve revamped the physics reactions of enemies into a new system called a “stability component”.

Currently as the work is still in progress, it’s represented by secondary bar below health. We are saying goodbye to the “ragdoll or nothing” reactions. Now creatures can flinch, have their attacks interrupted, be pushed back, and eventually also “ragdoll” when all of the stability is gone. Some attacks are better at damaging, some at interrupting multiple foes at once, and some at sending enemies on a one way trip down off the edge of the world.

Alex – Designer

Working on unwraps and textures for our large antenna array asset, quite a lot of work has gone into making the detail match up with the rest of the transmitter area. Quite difficult when you’re working on something that is over 100 feet tall!

Lauren – Animator

Refining the impact audio has been satisfying, I never thought hitting different things and hearing different sounds could be so fun. Also, more creepy creature sounds and ambience have been put together this week, these will hopefully give players more warning when there are enemies about or approaching. Video coming soon!

Andy – Lead QA

Lots of back and forth for bug testing with the beginnings of our merge from our release stream. This basically involves us moving the bug fixes we’ve included on our previous steam release into our new work for the encounter locations.

Also we’re coming to the end of an internal sprint which means I’ll be busy organising up coming and continuing tasks going into next Monday!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix