Greetings Pioneers!

More goodies to show this week with new stalker animations and attacks being tested, this creature will be a more formidable foe. The speeder bike has also undergone its material pass and now has two pairs of stirrups for seating two Pioneers comfortably…

John – Lead Designer

It’s been another kick ass week at Flix HQ. I’ve been going over Crystal consumables with our crack-team of technical designers.  We’ve also taken a crack at the Oxygen system, balancing the rate of depletion so it becomes a fun challenge, but never overbearing. You’ve also seen our hero and heroine on the new speeder bike which is looking dope!

Matt – Art Director

Voila, finished what will be one of the quicker ways to travel around the island. The speeder got the paint treatment along with damage models. We’ve worked it so the bike can seat two people as well, which better suits our multiplayer mode! I’ll be moving onto creating some of the new ‘makeshift’ weapons, and helping to organise the rest of the level design and artwork passes.

Lee – Technical Director

Investigating the dreaded tick rate assertion! After some serious investigation we’ve found out that objects with tick rate optimisation applied to them were causing problems with stability. This is in the progress of being fixed should largely help with overall stability as the game runs for longer periods of time.

Joe – Lead Artist

Lots of meetings and organisation this week – I’ve been looking over the progress the artists are making (spoiler: everything looks amazing) and giving feedback on various bits and pieces with level design and visuals. I also went over the systematic side of the new HUD markers with someone named Tom.

Captain Tom W – Designer/Artist/Cinematographer

I’ve had a wonderful time working on door panels, wall panels and floor panels. On-top of that, there’s been the usual terrain work, smacking rocks together, and coming up with clever new ways to blend things together. Not having access to texture-arrays makes me a sad panda.

Marcin – Designer

I’ve been reviewing the state of a bunch of Eden Star systems. The artists have been hard at work putting together new assets in the world over the past few weeks and they looks really good, but now it was time for me to step in and review whether they work as well.

The environment has to interact properly with the building holograms, no matter what you project them on. It also has to provide suitable ground for AI and the player to move. We don’t want either getting stuck anywhere. Additionally I’ve been looking at animation data for AI, which I wanted to organise and make easily accessible from various systems that need to use it.

OG Tom W – Designer

This week I have been continuing to implement the first stages of our new crafting and building system. We hit a few snags in the code but those were quickly fixed by our developers allowing us to start adding new items and schematics.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been constructing a new shiny security outpost for the Dam. This outpost will be where checks are made for deliveries in and out of the Dam, now abandoned and overrun, it will provide a short respite for you guys on your journey up to the Transmitter. You will be discovering secrets that lie in the outpost along with weapons left behind by the guards. All in aid on your journey though Eden Star!

The new crafting has several stages for the player to progress through, starting with what we’re call ‘ Makeshift Crafting’ and ‘ Emergency Building’. These will be first steps into the crafting and building aspect of the game so we are getting those schematics in so we have a better idea how to balance our mining nodes and loot drops.

Sam – Concept Artist

Hi! Been working on a few things this week, including developing the design for the makeshift spear further. We now have a set of colour and shape variants – we just need to decide which combination we like best! I’ve also been doing some behind-the-scenes design work and visualisation for an important part of the game’s opening minutes.

Next up for me is the fabricator bench, (another makeshift item) which will act as a means of crafting on the go. It shares this purpose with a second item of a similar name, which may be a more expensive and high-tech version that you likely won’t see until later in the game. So far we have some silhouettes for the former, and line and detail work will commence next week!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been working on more animations for the stalker including several attack varieties to keep Pioneers on their toes. They will have both melee and ranged attacks, throwing projectiles towards players as well as getting in close and slashing at you with their claws. The movement we wanted to keep fairly quick and agile, and intend to have them be able to jump between points as an alternative traversal type.

Andy – Lead QA

I have been helping Sam with the progression of the concepts for the spear, working through the opening section of the game and giving feedback to help refine it.

I have also been investigating the stability of our multiplayer build and testing the crafting features that have been added recently with multiple players.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix