Greetings Pioneers!

Oh we are indeed perfectionists, there’s a certain level of polish that we’re aiming for here before we unleash these changes upon the world. The quality of the experience and atmosphere is important to us, purely because it needs to be as immersive as possible to be the most enjoyable, even in its incomplete state. Once again everyone’s doing a top job of pulling this together for everyone, and a lot has been done this week, including a fully finished model for our Huntermite creature!.

Here’s what the team have been up to:

John – Lead Designer

This week I have been reviewing the game for priority and prepping to take the latest build (with a number of bug fixes) to the Epic Games Center on Monday for 45 people to blast through it and give it a good playtest!

Matt – Art Director

So I’ve gotten to the stage where I’m adding embellishments to certain sections of the drop Pod, Venting atmosphere when you open the airlock, certain ambient sounds etc. Really helping this come to life. There are still a number of things like the players cutscene exit from the chamber when they spawn that need more love, but essentially it’s working as designed at this stage.

Breakable glass has also been added to the storage areas around the airlock to add another element of interaction. On another note me and Tom H are starting to add our wreckage areas to the world which make exploring significantly more interesting.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have completed the stagger/reaction work for the AI. I’ve been trying to work through the bugs with the help of Lauren too. I think we nearly have it bug free. My next steps are to start reviewing the combat with the AI so we can start to put some polish to it

Jon S – Developer

I have been working on a Join via IP interface to allow players to enter an IP to find and connect to specific servers a little easier!

Tom L – Character Artist

Sculpting the Huntermite has come to a glorious end. I’ll be moving onto a zombie style character next!

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve been helping the designers out by working on the interaction functions so that they can carry out actions on the foliage and rocks, we have a system for swapping out static mesh actors with normal ones and the interaction function needed to trigger it.

Ricky – Lead Developer

Started work on Deterioration for designers to start setting those up. Fixed some additional bugs with consumables when picking up a matching item that would unequip the old one, and a bug where modules refused to be equipped at all, preposterous.

Captain Tom – Designer

I’ve had a pretty busy last few days, but have finished off my implementation of the destruction system, so players will be able to hack apart my wonderful creations, as seen below:

Ontop of that, I’ve been breaking down our AI behavior by behavior, was well as continuing to review our current animations 🙂

Marcin – Designer

My job for the past few days consisted mostly of reviewing and improving our existing game systems. I’ve looked into oxygen balancing, marker positioning and visibility, and the airlock mechanics for our doors, which we’re going to be tweaking next week.

The current implementation of the airlocks feels a bit clunky and unresponsive so we want to improve that flow. Additionally we have started testing on the first implementation of the personal campaign, which is also going to keep us pretty busy.

Charlotte – Concept Artist

This week I joined the team at Flix and have been working on some different pieces of concept art featuring small, medium and large med-pack designs including iterations for a water container.

JT – Environment Artist

First time shower! Taking on a lot of the interior design for the sets and bringing them up to scratch for the game update. Mainly been working on a maintenance set that can do us proud to in comparison to Doom and rest of Eden Stars quality.

OG Tom – Designer

This week I have been taking a look at our melee weapon damage and balancing the amount of damage certain weapons do to both minables and enemies. Also I have been adding the buildables back into the game so you can construct bases but it’s now part our narrative progression.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been fleshing out Points of Interest around the base of the Transmitter down to the silo. This means filling the world with interesting rock structures, small camps, ship wreckage and some enemies and loot, to make sure there is enough for you Pioneers to experience in this world and make sure there is no way you can be bored! As well as this I have been making small design changes to areas such as the Dam, Transmitter and the terrain, all to make these sections the best they can be!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been working with Lee on the new AI stability system which will improve the feel of how you hit and interact with the AI. For this I have been working on creating new stagger animations along with improvements to what we already have and balancing the stability and attack force values together.

It still needs a bit of work but its getting there! The new system allows for thresholds of stability, so that when you wail on AI they will play proportionally bigger staggers. Next steps will be adding counter attacks so that there is a risk for staying too close for very long…

Along with the stability, I have skin weighted and added in the new Huntermite mesh which is looking awesome.

Andy – Lead QA

Jamie and I were tasked with getting all the issues, both small and large, listed and prioritised this week which has involved lots of Trello work, assigning tasks and bugging the developers in order to ensure that these are addressed.

Will H – 3D Artist

This week has been a continuation of the bridge assets. I have been designing and creating bridge barriers as well as debris and sand piles to help break up the modular look further. Metal railings on the barriers have been kept separate in order for the players to break them and gather resources. As for the debris and sand piles, we can add random items and resources on top for players to grab if they spot them.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix