Greetings Pioneers!

Lots of new stuff to show off this week, from pretties to creepies. There’s been plenty of good ground work on the survival mechanics as we’re well into testing the initial stages of balancing.

We’re proud to say we have a dozen new creatures to add into the game in the upcoming release with an all new flocking behaviour for certain fauna types. As you may of figured out already, we’re very excited to see the world come alive once we have everything in place!

Here’s the breakdown on exactly what we’ve been doing this week:

John – Lead Designer

SO… this is the long wait… We are working really hard to get the Alpha of the new world out to you within the next 4 weeks.

The Survival system is now in and beginning it’s 1st balancing pass, the new Modular Weapon System is now being implemented (remember, it’s taken a long time to prep for this with the procedural animation system and getting all of the weapon parts working together as we wanted – I for one and seriously excited about this!)

The initial 3 armour sets are now in the game and are just having their 1st pass on their unlockable abilities placed on them, and finally, the first (4) group of new creatures are going in next week to breathe life into the new world. I’m really excited.

I’m just working through the current objectives that we want to place into the game and have been organising the designs of the Loot system that will also be started next week. Excited/stressed = the same thing!! 🙂  

Matt – Art Director

After getting one of our colony bases working for testing at the start of the week I’ve been dedicated to finishing off two new utilities which are essential for the break down of our craft-able components and items. Here’s the work in progress results so far:

Lee – Technical Director

I have continued with the work I was doing last week to do with group behaviour/movement. It should be finished by the end of today and ready for testing next week. I’ve also been taking a look at the new creatures I will be working on from next week too.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been catching up with the dev team and working on production with John after being away. Dev wise I have also been finishing off some dormancy work to help improve network performance as well as started looking into the implementation side of the modular weapons system to try and integrate it with the current logic we have.

Marcin – Designer

Items, items everywhere. I’ve spent pretty much the entire week putting together armour piece items for 3 starting sets, as well as doing another pass on food and consumables.

The armours still need their crafting recipes added and actual stat bonuses tweaked, but they can already be worn and are quite comfy. The consumables require a lot of balancing so that’s what I a doing right now, but I am fairly happy with the way they feel already, minus a few bugs. I’ll have to keep it short today, plenty to do.

Joe – Environment Artist

More UI stuff this week – specifically I’ve been finishing visual concepts for the new HUD (thanks for your feedback by the way!), the Structure details panel, Build placement panel, Interaction pop-ups, Armour/equipment and the Progression/Unlocks screen. Not all of that will make sense quite yet but rest assured we’re working hard on supporting some exciting upcoming features with a clear and concise User Interface 🙂

In between all that I’ve fixed a few issues with the level and helped with getting it ready for all the new exciting mechanics that are on the way…

Tom – Character Artist

The vulture is coming! Kakkaaa!

Ricky – Developer

Player avatar/Armour column on the UI Menu. I made it so, similar to weapons along the bottom of the menu, you can drag drop armour pieces into relevant slots. Started work on the  redesign of the HUD to achieve unicorns… I mean unification of the systems and visual style, aswell as creating more modular systems where possible. Squished a few bugs along the way too.

Lauren – Animator

This week I’ve been continuing work on the creature animations for our new world. This other critter we have needs a proper name. I’ve already imported him in as Crusty3 (as he’s one of the three neutral crustaceans we’re working on putting in for the next release) so please help me find a more suitable name before Marcin unleashes his rage!

Thank you for the suggestions on the first crustacean we previewed the other week. Click here to vote on the name suggestions you like best and add your own! Crusty McCrustyFace here we come 😉

Yves – Senior Developer

I have continued on with implementing our new armour system with Marcin as well as a new save system to go along with it. I have also been debugging our base spawning logic for Matt. Hope you enjoy it all when it’s released.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working on multiple things as well as making final changes to the crocodile design. One of the concepts that I’ve been working on with Matt this week is a portable Fabricator that will allow the player to fabricate some objects while their out and about exploring!

We wanted a concept that is small enough to be placed on the table inside the base as well as placing it on the floor and we have created a final design, it just needs a little bit of colour! The other task this week was to continue work on the consumable icons and with the feedback so far I will be working to narrow down what concepts are right for each consumable – now to add in some sweets!

Andy – Lead QA

Monday to Thursday we had a lad going work experience with us so I got a little help with the testing, and according to John he made a mean brew. I’ve also been working some more with Marcin on the survival stats. We’ve attempted to strip them back a little to get them to an MVP pass sooner. It’s difficult as we kept coming up with cool new things we wanted to add.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix