Greetings Pioneers!

The pole, shiv, spear and our makeshift crafting system have been taking shape this week, we wanted players to be able to pick up metal shards and poles from looting bases and be able to use them right away as the shiv and pole to bat away or stab at enemies. Combine them together on your person and you get the throwing object, the spear with a bit more range.

John – Lead Designer

Working through design shops with the guys, pumping their brains full of ideas! Really proud of the design progress made by the team this week, finalising ideas and completing documentation in order for us to push forward with implementation.

Matt – Art Director

Throws spear into completed assets list* Finished our first makeshift item that you can hurl through the air. The spear is made up of a series of items you can craft, which can also be used to make more simple tools and defensive weapons such as a Shiv and Pole!

I’ll be moving onto other weapon types soon, but for now there are quite a few art issues that have been raised through testing that need tidying up.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been moving a lot of functionality that was created in blueprint over into code which was to do with the AI attacks. The main reason for this is so we can squeeze every last bit of performance out of the AI. I’ve also been working with Lauren the last couple of days trying to organise all the AI animation data into a format in a datatable which she is happy with but also works easily with the way the code expects it to be formatted.

Joe – Lead Artist

More UI work this week, figuring out how we want to communicate degradation of items to the player. I’ve also been setting up inventory icons for our new makeshift items!

Marcin – Designer

I’ve been mostly finishing off leftover tasks this week, little bits of design and/or implementation that got omitted for one reason or another. I’ve submitted all my work on the AI’s turning, so we’ll be keeping an eye on how that’s performing over the coming days.

Also we’ve had a discussion about how exactly are we going to handle stacking of damaged items, which was an interesting problem to solve. Additionally I’ve fixed a bug that was causing the jumping mites to launch themselves into space if your face happened to be too close for comfort, and lastly the team and I have had a few more discussions about the flow of animations for our melee weapons, now that we are looking to expand the armoury.

Captain Tom W – Cinematographer/Designer/Artist

This week I’ve been working on some terrain tools for our lovely designers to work on. Chief of which being a spline tool that tiles cliff meshes along it’s length. If all goes well, this should massively speed up our environment production!

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been showing some much needed love to the Transmitter area. This has been completely revamped with a new shiny interior, complete with staircases, airlocks and elevators, as well a new maintenance area outside the transmitter tower for you to traverse any way you see fit.

The transmitter is such an important area for the game and as such extra care has been taken to make sure the gameplay pacing, tempo and tone is correct for this section. As well as Splintermite hive battles and facing some flying IKA’s around the top of the tower, you guys will be platforming your way up to the top of this tower to activate the signal. Happy travels!

Sam – Concept Artist

Ahoy everyone! Lately I’ve been doing some work towards the design of the “low-end” fabricator bench that the player will use to craft items. Below you should be able to see a few of the sketches I’ve done for this, lined up in order that they were produced. The design itself has gone through many changes over the course of the week, as the sketch derived from the original silhouette was generally too substantial and large for the rudimentary and bare-bones style we were looking for.

In this way, it’s quite similar to when I was designing the junk spear, as I had to sacrifice prettiness in favour of basic functionality. In a way, it’s “trying to make a good concept for something that’s meant to look bad”. The earlier designs won’t go to waste, however, as they possess many good traits which can be repurposed for the “second level” fabricator bench – a much more high tech and purpose-built version that I may soon begin work with.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been continuing with the stalker, focussing on the attacks and the animations involved in those attacks. We want to make it obvious when creatures are about to cause you damage with exaggerated movements to give players the ability to dodge, block and parry incoming attacks.

I have been working on a few varieties of charging towards the player into an attack.

Andy – Lead QA

I have been testing the build as usual. Focusing on the AI movement, axe iteration and spear implementation. There are a few issues that testing has been able to bring to the developers attention and amend before they become bigger issues.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix