Greetings Pioneers!

Bam! We’ve got something more special for you to dig your eyes into – we’ve landing a couple of video features showcasing some of the new gameplay we have been focusing on in the early game stages.

We’ve focused heavily on making interactive pick up items that you can now find throughout the level, placing ambient sounds, refining meshes, setting up AI to spawn and distributing cool loot for you to find, it’s really coming together!

You can find a walkthrough preview here –

And an actual in game preview here –

We hope you enjoy!

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Well, call me Mr flexible, all over the shop today.. I’ve been filling in doing a bit of testing as well as organising task progress and where people should be spending their time to be most effective. It’s really ashame I don’t have 5 arms, or something, which sounds like it might make things easier.. but probably would just freak everyone out instead.

Matt – Art Director

Well, you can now see items for what they are in the world as it stands. This means lots of epic loot will be coming to the world, mainly useful stuff, but also expect to see some easter egg items hidden around… Been focusing on a lot of in world meshes and setup for their use as items. Also – check out the surprise preview videos we’ve included, as a bonus you get to listen to my lovely voice.

Lee – Technical Director

Ok I won’t lie, stressed up to the eyeballs with the issues we’ve had lately. Mainly due to updated engine build merges as everyone following will know. But the light at the end of the tunnel is showing as we’re gradually eradicating a lot of the issues slowly through some rigorous testing. Big thankyou to Epic for the feedback keeping us moving forward to a stable release with some huge changes.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been continuing on helping out with the crashes in multiplayer. After fixing the last load it appears they multiplied so we are trying to track them all down and fix them. Some of them are quite difficult to reproduce which is always fun 😀

Yves – Senior Developer

Working through some bugs, mainly to do with with the Axe and our new melee, currently it’s been doing very little damage to certain object types and enemies so this has needed a bit of work to get working right.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Implemented crafting on player basic functionality so we can see where this stuff can take us and what changes we might want to make before doing a more full pass on it.

I’ve also helped all over the shop looking into bugs and tweaks of mine and others. The E to interact is misbehaving occasionally and will get the second most sternest talking to, but it’s not yet at the stage of an angry e-letter or ringing it’s parents so we can rejoice at that at least.

Marcin – Designer

Wish Marcin a happy Birthday! He’s taking some time off to celebrate his coming of age. Happy Birthday Marcin <3 We love your face, and your (presumably) large logical brain.

Joe – Environment Artist

Mainly working on creating meshes for the new locations this week and planning ahead for nailing that new-player-experience! Can’t wait to show off all the awesome stuff the guys have been working on!

Tom L – Character Artist

I’m back! Working through bakes for the characters, so we can get them into the big new exciting changes that are going into the game.

Tom W – Designer

This week I’ve been having a bash at the AI encounters, starting by creating a nice way for us to place and script encounters, allowing for them to change based on the various decisions the player makes approaching these combat areas. As usual, I’ve also been working on sprucing up the Dam’s interior, squashing any bugs I can find and generally livening the place up a bit.

Alex – Designer

Still hard at work on the transmitter area, I’ve been tweaking AI spawns and types, setting loot locations, and just overall making sure it plays well. On top of that, making updates to the big relay piece, creating secret paths to cool locations and testing them out too. It’s all coming up to a pretty playable piece of game now. So then we just need to make it pretty.

Lauren – Animator

Early this week I have been working more on the opening sequence to the game with Matt, more recently I have been putting together some audio cues for placement in the new areas and with interactive objects.

Andy – Lead QA

Off on the old Jolies! It’s a rare thing that I take breaks of longer than 2 days, it’s also rare that my grammar is spot on. That’s why it’s not actually Andy writing this. Love you all, Andy will be back to harass you with details about his daily happenings very soon.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix