Greetings Pioneers!

We’re very close to nailing down the last issues in preparation for the next release. Whilst the coders work their wizardry the art chaps have been revamping some of the current PFX, adjusting animations and adding damage materials and effects to utilities and defences.

So, we hope you like explosions with more of a punch! because this is all in preparation for the addition of more things that go bang..

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Mainly been focusing on production tasks for our next sprint with Andy. Grenades and new buildables are high up on the list! Just a few pesky issues with the change over to the new engine version are holding us off this current release, but it’s looking very positive at the moment. Particularly excited about the features we’re adding during Spring time.

Matt – Art Director

With our imminent update just around the corner, I’ve been focusing on polish for visual damage on utilities. Where as before you could hardly tell what utility or defence structure was damaged just by glancing over at it, now you should notice when something is in a bad way.

Heavier smoke effects, sparks and a singed appearance all lend towards making the health state of utilities easier to identify at a distance.

Lee – Technical Director

I have continued working on the changes to do with the behaviour planners, in readiness for the new creatures we have planned.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been helping out with some debugging after our new engine update. Hopefully we will have all those ironed out soon.

Tom – Character Artist

Re-working the character suits so they are more visually appealing as well as suitable for 3rd person views.

Carlos – Developer

Since the last blog, I’ve been working on Steam integration for the game, the work on this is almost complete, however, we’ve encountered a few bugs within the engine when it comes to ending sessions, this means we now have to think of a way to successfully de-authenticate users from Steam.

But this work has been put to the side for now as I have been getting stuck into some debugging! Currently we are trying to chase down some of the really horrible bugs which you guys have sent to us!

Ricky – Developer

Debugging Turrets and their levels, EdenKit and levelling then onto collisions of Eden Kits set wrong.

Joe – Environment Artist

Most of what I’ve being doing this week has involved hitting things. I’ve also been working on Eden Star har har har. Impact effects, decals and sounds have been totally revamped and reworked – it’s a small change on the surface but I think it’s the attention to detail that will help bring our world to life. I’ve improved and implemented effects for various combinations of surface types and weapon/tool types (bullets, blast, mine, melee, energy blade, kinetic laser…)

Also we’ve also got some fancy new fracture effects for mineral mining and I did a few more Laser Turret fire PFX tweaks. To top it all off there’s new explosion effects for structure destruction, dependant on what kind of structure it was. Volatile structures such as the Eden Kit/Power Generators definitely go out with a bang.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working more on the 3rd person animations and camera, refining movement and blending from ragdoll to a recovery animation for when you are blown off your feet. Next up will be addressing the 3rd person weapon poses and aiming and creating some more variants for death animations.

Marcin – Designer

Hello everyone. I have had a look at the water again, this time around at how it interacts with building. As cool as underwater bases sound, we are just not there technologically yet to make it a thing at this stage, but we knew the current implementation did not make a whole lot of sense, so I decided to streamline it.

From the next update forward, primitives can be built in water safely, but utilities and defenses cannot. In other words you cannot have underwater turrets but you can have bridges. I am also currently looking at improvements to the attack system that should give us more control over what the AI does between swipes, so we’re able to make the melee less relentless and more fun.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been working closely with John on production planning, tirelessly organising our backlog board and grouping tasks together which we are hoping will help with the implementation speed. Which basically means we are trying to get all the new goodies to you faster.

Also, I have been testing and re-testing the potential fixes for the issues that arose from updating the engine, some good, some not so good, but the team have been working hard to find solutions.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix