Greetings Pioneers!

Testing, testing, one, two, three, our creatures shall not be allowed to path into any tree.

Our latest content update is approaching fast! The testing phase has had to be lengthened over this week to help eliminate some quite major navigation bugs that we’re not happy with currently (The kind that break the fun times). These will be ironed out as soon as possible so thank you for your patience <3.

Here’s a quick recap showing some of the major features you can expect in the next update:

Replication units (Spawn pads) – No longer will the Eden Kit alone be enough for you to ensure you spawn in a safe location when death strikes you down with his Scythe. At least one unit will need to be built for you to rejoin your game in a desired place.

Pillaging of offline Pioneers – Soon when you log out in Multiplayer, your body will be vulnerable to others unless you happen to log out in a safe place. And even still, there’s no guarantee you will be perfectly safe behind your armored walls..

The Juggernaut – This beast and future large creature classes, are purposefully designed to be tough to tackle as an individual, and challenging to take out as a group. Manic chaos will erupt during the battle to take one down.

Lastly our individual rundown of what we’ve been working on this week:

John – Lead Designer

Been looking at the A.I. pathing with the developers this week, getting a solid grasp of how we move the system forward to work properly with the design and convincing behaviours and movements that we want from our creatures. Probably one of if not the most important aspect of our creatures is having them able to move as desired, and more importantly as expected by players encountering them.

Matt – Art Director

So I’ve been catching up with everybody today after a short break from Flixland. I’ve been on the feedback train to keep the environment development on track (pun intended). We’ve re-jigged a few Biome visuals and started transforming some areas into ‘Marshlands’ to make more sense within the environment. Otherwise I’ve been helping out with visual bug fixes and begun developing much large (than previously featured) pre-built structures for several feature areas within our 8km world.

Lee – Technical Director

Navigation issues abound, but needless to say most of the issues we’ve been facing with pathing are now under control. The fixes I’ve been working on need to accommodate large creature types such as the Juggernaut, so there has been a fair amount of extra work just taking the creatures scale into mind. targeting refinement in general is something I’ve had a chance to look at this week too.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been finishing up a cave environment concept and started work on a Marshland environment concept. For the cave concept we wanted it to feel more ‘hellish’, as if the player is descending down toward the center of Pharus. The sinkholes in the ceilings connect the over-world of Pharus 7 with the inner caves and tunnels allowing natural light to flood the upper sections for the player to see the environment easier. The Marshland concept is still being worked on and so far it’s gloomy and moody…with pools of water! You will need high boots to walk around that area!

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been finishing off the sleeping pioneers logic, tweaks to the mantling and muchos bug fixing. I have also been working on production for xp, progression and survival systems which are the next set of goals we want to power through.

Yves – Senior Developer

Fixed freeform foundation height mechanics that will be added soon, amongst several other bugs that had persisted with the build placement system. Will be gearing up to work on the base survival mechanics next week.

Ricky – Developer

Looking into certain keyboard key binding issues which might be dependant on language settings on the pc. A few minor issues have been looked into too and some extra technical designing with the exp and levelling systems ready to be put through it’s paces hastily next week.

Marcin – Designer

Implemented a revised Ram for the Juggernaut and added a death effect. I’ve also been helping Matt out with visual fixes for the ‘spawn pad’ aka replication unit.

Joe – Environment Artist

I’ve had some time to improve the edges of our new map’s island this week, introducing a new work in progress Grassland biome variant. This has required quick a bit of work to refactor our landscape/rock shaders to get the visuals we’re after. I’ve also been working with Simone on the initial visual direction of the Cave and Marshland biomes.

Tom – Character Artist

Starting the work on the Seiger and other Biome creatures soon!

Lauren – Lead Animator

Apart from deciding on which lovely dress to wear to a wedding this weekend, I’ve been working on cleaning up skin weighting and poses for our Pioneer character models. When I return on Monday I shall share all the gold I’ve found in a pot that was strangely located at the base of a magical rainbow.

p.s. I love weddings and dresses, it’s almost as fun as making games. Almost.

Andy – Lead QA

This week we have been dealing with a rather big overhaul over the AI pathing so most of my week has been geared towards debugging that. I have also been testing the new additions to foundations, players having persistent bodies on multiplayer servers and keybinding fixes. All in all it’s been a busy week and with Matt being on holiday until today I was able to get a peanut butter KitKat Chunky drama free.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix