Greetings Pioneers!

This week more AI balancing and refinements have been under way. This includes many individual small tweaks that, while small individually, really work together to in order to provide the best experience when fighting the AI. Also this week the visual final pass has been completed for the Dam area with the new maintenance set and lighting passes. We have also been designing the opening sequence UI to give the player more information at the start of the game as to their current stats, status and story.

John – Lead Designer

Voyaged down to Develop conference for the most of this week. Caught up with a lot of the awesome people that we know from a studio perspective. In between and whilst travelling on the train, I’ve been triaging tasks that we have in the backlog of the game to better suit our evolving crew!

Matt – Art Director

Been pushing to get our process a bit more concise this week as well as drive some of the level placement work. Excited to say we’ve had a few new artists come on board which has given me a chance to spread the load a little in terms of producing the artwork itself. This is only a good thing as we can have more awesome artists working on important stuff all at the same time, instead of loading it all on to one really awesome artist.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been working to iron out more bugs with the new combat reactions for the AI. Lauren has been playing it to death to find bugs and tweaks which are still needed, but it’s starting to look very good indeed.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been helping out with some of our new devs get up to speed and ironing out some of the third person camera issues with them and reviewing code and more code. With some extra code.

Joe – Lead Artist

I’ve been going over the new HUD/UI “boot sequence” with Charlotte, which will add some nice world building and tutorialisation to the start of the game. I also finished the optimisation work for the first area, which is helping claw back some valuable frames!

Carlos – Developer

I have finally hunted down our gnarly inventory crash! I am victorious! Anyway… yes, I have restored the inventory which happened to go missing whenever the Pioneer died.
I’ve also been hunting down some of the other crashes which we seem to be getting on a regular basis.

Lastly, I’ve begun work on one of our new tool weapons, so you all have that to look forward to 🙂

Jon S – Developer

Moved a bunch of stuff that i’ve been working on for the player customisation over to development review this week. The character customisation feature displays during game setup giving the player complete control over how their character will look in the game world,
from body size to space suit colours and gender, the player is able to view a live model representation of their character in the menu and see these changes carried over to in-game. All changes pending review.

Charlotte – Concept Artist

So I started the week by finishing the lift concept art I was working with last Friday, then moved on to creating some storyboard images for the opening sequence of the UI that will display when you enter the game. Think of a computer booting up, that’s the effect we want to recreate! In addition to this, I have also concepted some simplistic designs for different crosshairs/reticles and more realistic for destructible rocks you will be able to find like Silicon, Silver and Gold.

James Brady – Environment Artist

Started working on a console which one of our talented concept artists created. It will be featured in the Dam interior. The console will be featured in events and interactive through it’s fancy holographic display.

John T – Environment Artist

Finished the full pass of lighting improvements for the depths of the Dam interior. I’ve moved onto some minor improvements for the other base locations. A lot of light sources needed to be more obvious with brighter more contrasted fall off areas to create the long abandoned rundown mood that we wanted.

Katrine L – 3D Artist

Hello everyone, I am new at Flix and very excited to work on Eden Star! Today I started creating a scrap pickaxe from some awesome designs created by one of our talented concept artists. The axe is currently in highres, the next stages will be to bake it down and plug it in the game.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been refining the Stalker and other AI, balancing their attacks while testing them in multiplayer, reporting issues for Lee and smoothing the experience where I can. I have also been working on the physics for death ragdoll and setting up syncing of animations during locomotion so that the directional animations blend better from one to the other.

Jamie – QA

This week I’ve been doing lots of bug retesting and I’ve been looking closely at some new problems that have cropped up to do with multiplayer. Me and Ryan have been looking at ways to make our bugs board more accessible for the team to help identify and find bugs that have already been made.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix