Greetings Pioneers!

Good news everyone! Carlos is back on the scene and helping out with some critical bug fixes this week along with the rest of the team. Testing, optimising and polishing have been on the agenda this week, the roads have had a good tidy up and the introduction is looking sweet. We’ve beefed up the wolves to make them 150% more terrifying and have been planning tweaks to mineral distribution in the grasslands to create more variants in types of rock and clusters of rocks.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

We’ve been encountering difficulties with our designer based spawn system for bases which has created a headache for progress on this front. So while the developers chip away at debugging that aspect I’ve been reviewing the way that the player will interact with creatures, as well as reviewing the material balancing and distribution. Next week we’ll also be looking at food and sustenance mechanics based on peoples feedback. We don’t want players to feel like cows 🙂 Moooo.

Matt – Art Director

Managed to finish quite a large cleanup pass on the level, which involved removal of ground and interactive foliage from the roads. Cleaning up collision issues with said roads and working on visual polish for the single player introduction.

Both myself and Joe have moved onto a second pass of the mineral assets in the world, reworking the visual ruleset for rocks to better communicate the types of minerals you’ll discover in lesser or more dangerous areas/biomes.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been reworking some of the network functionality to do with Turrets because we have been in the process of optimising the way networking happens for built structure to ease the load on the server. I’ve also been trying to address a few more AI bugs when they have been flagged up.

Yves – Senior Developer

Fixed up a bunch of major blockers for designers such as the loot crate system not spawning crates. Mainly tackling major bugs that those dastardly testers keep finding.

Ricky – Developer

Fine tuning the in game server setup menu and fine tuning some optimisations which needed reeling back a tad. Fin…ally (not tuning) got chance to look into some issues we were having getting the HUD Armour Avatar to work and look right when it wasn’t in some situations.

So the World Setup menu in general has been the focus. I’ve made some tweaks to the Build Menu and worked on the intro too and aside from all that, hardcore fugbixing.

Carlos – Developer

I’m back! It’s amazing to be back working on this amazing game!

This week I’ve jumped in to help debug the Multiplayer side of things (essentially playing online on my own :P), resolving some regeneration issues with some of our buildables as well as looking at ways of ensuring that we detect any server crashes and how to best handle them!

Marcin – Designer

Corruption and Treatments designs. Flaying Zombies right in the cervical, all in a days work… I’m totally working…

Joe – Environment Artist

A lovely mixed bag of bits this week – I started with polishing and tweaking the build menu output window and and scanner windows before getting back up to speed with the Intro progress. It’s looking great! We need to look at some final-quality audio before we get it out to you all. I fixed a bunch of bugs with the intro including AI attacking during the cutscene, fixing missing on-screen prompts, and the time of day progressing before the player gains control.

In terms of new stuff, we’ve made some changes to the Cerberus! (Wolves!). They’re bigger, have more health and have been visually tweaked to fit into their environment a little better. I have also tweaked spawn locations with Multiplayer in mind – Verdant Pass now has more spawn variety and we’ve removed Onyx Shelf spawns that were unbalanced. Me and Matt are looking to do a pretty important pass over Material distribution and placement – specifically in rocks. We’ll have more to share soon 🙂

Lauren – Animator

This week I’ve been continuing working on adding some knockback and stagger animations along with sounds for some of the ground enemies to make hitting them that much more satisfying.

Andy – Lead QA

It’s incredible the amount of bugs we’ve managed to log in the last week alone. There’s a lot of reproduction steps that I’ve been attempting to detail. So much so that I’ve had to take a break from it, I’ve gone back to my roots in the old mines, fighting Goblins in the depths to unwind. But never fear! I will be back to sqaush those pesky bugs next week.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix