Greetings Pioneers!

Despite Storm Emma and the bitterly cold ‘beast from the east’ hitting the UK and making ‘irl’ driving practically impossible, progress has rapidly continued on our new vehicles this week with the six- wheeled ‘Heavy Transport’ receiving the rigging treatment and the ‘Speeder’ hoverbike taking shape in the modelling phase.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Design meetings! Many of them. Crafting and progress flow graphs are being loving built and updated, plus we’ve had some quite in depth reviews of the Dam surface area which will become our initial ‘battle’ arena style play area.

Matt – Art Director

Revs bike handles* Vroom, Vroom. Whilst going over some pretty cool level changes with the guys I’ve been focusing most of my core time on our hover bike. Looking to complete the modelling early to middle part of next week so I’ll be able to show you the finished product very soon. The fun bit was working out the mechanism for the thruster wings which is now looking pretty sharp!

Lee – Technical Director

So at the beginning part of the week I was dealing with a temporary fix for the tick assertion we were running into. I then had to track down a rare bug where AI once killed would still continue attacking, which I think I finally fixed. The last couple of days I have been working with Lauren to try and get a first implementation of our vehicles into game. It has meant a bit of digging into the engine because we need vehicles which are not just four wheels, but six and possibly eight.

Ricky – Senior Developer

HUD Marker system revisions to update how it looks and behaves. I’m looking into what backend requirements need to get sorted for the changes planned.

Joe – Lead Artist

Remember that exciting new HUD Marker system we teased a while back? No…? Oh 🙁

Well we’re working on it anyway, I’ve been working on getting an early version of it ready so we can at least make interacting with our world that much nicer.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been completely overhauling the surface of the Dam! New asset placements, new enemy placements, new areas to explore! All of this redefining of this area comes with more options for you to take when approaching the infested dam. Will you take on the hunters first hand and run and gun? 

Or will you take the lower path around the side of the dam but risk being swarmed by Splintermites? This new design means a much more immersive and strategic area for you guys to enjoy. Have fun!

Sam – Concept Artist

Hi there, been all over the place this week! As you can see, our “hover bike” has begun its transition into the 3D realm, and with that I have been putting together some designs for specific areas that the orthographic views don’t cover, such as the dashboard console, steering mechanisms and seating. Now that the Zombie is finished, we also have two other variants with different deformities – one with a cocoon-style growth hanging from its left arm, and another with a lower jaw more similar to the original design.

Now for the new stuff. I’ve been given the task of visualising the appearance of the junk spear, which you may have seen in-game in a blog post a few weeks back. As it is quite a basic and futile weapon compared with the many others in Eden Star, we wanted to show this through the way it looks and give it a very cobbled-together kind of feel. So far I’ve produced some basic silhouettes to start off with, and this is what I’ll be continuing with next week.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I’ve been putting together the heavy vehicle blueprint and skeleton with all its moving parts articulating. This is very much still work in progress, the handling needs a lot of work but the wheels are moving up and down mostly as expected.

I have also been working on refinements to the block and parry animations with the axe.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve been helping with the critical path work that Tom has been looking into. We are really trying to refine this area and ensure that it is both believable and fun.

From there I have looked into animation tweaks with the Axe, oxygen volume placement in the level and audio implementation.

Lastly here’s a quick shot of the situation from the front of the offices! Have fun and we’ll see you in the fray!

-Team Flix