October Development Update 3

Greetings Pioneers!

Progress is developing nicely as always! We’ve made a choice to move to a new sky system that allows us to be more dynamic with weather and atmospherics. Vehicles and AI and still at the top of the list, and we’ve been testing our new modular behavior structures, where we have created three variants of the ‘mite’, each of which with a different attack type, more about that below…

John – Lead Designer

This has been another hectic week of balancing the materials and crafting with Mr. Whittemore, hashing out the finer details of the multiplayer designs with Tristan and Andy, and looking longly out of the window waiting for Matts return.

Matt – Art Director

Back in action, mainly catching up with the team and getting focused on the additional vehicle design work that has been done, a lot of which is focused around getting a scale that feels good set in stone.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued to work with identifying bugs we have with the new version of the engine. I’ve also been working on some designs for controlling AI so you can command them to work for you.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been working on tweaking the interaction systems with Eden star to make it so that we can interact with the world easier. I have also been fixing up some multiplayer interaction issues as well as helping to design our new multiplayer experiences and systems.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Continuing fixing bugs from the engine update. I’ve potentially found a network replication mismatch and a problem with getting stuck on the loading screen which looks so far like we have to optimise the game to fix it fully, though I found a temporary fix for the time being so the rest of our fair and growing team can continue unhindered.

Olly – Junior programmer

With the help of Tristan and Tom I have continued my work on the vehicle system. More specifically moving our initial prototype into code.

Tom – Designer

I hate sand, it’s coarse and rough and gets everywhere. It’s also been a lot of fun working on some lovely new sand dunes for our more arid sections of landscape. The next stage is working on nice, natural looking transitions between the areas, which should be an exciting challenge! Really looking to showing you guys the final results!

Marcin – Designer

I’ve spent the week fixing bugs with the new AI behaviours and attacks, such as:

an attack would immediately get performed again after it was interrupted. The interrupt, it does nothing.
If an attack was performed that allows another attack to be performed immediately after, all future attacks would be performed without delay. Rapidfire mode.
some attacks would cause the creature to float, sometimes far into the distance. Super-disengage.
Some behaviours had the creature suddenly turn away from the target and stay that way, looking very upset but claiming everything was fine.

Additionally, I’ve started working on the stalker creature, reworking it to fit the new system. Right now I am expanding how we are manipulating the Ai speed for various behaviours and how more complex attacks, such as ones involving custom movement can have additional conditions between phases. For example, a running attack can skip a telegraph phase if the creature is already running, but include it if it’s not.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been helping Marcin out with some of the AI locomotion animations and their native speeds. I have also been continuing with the finishing moves and 3rd person animations for the Axe.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been continuing with the multiplayer design documentation, making sure that all aspects have been considered and accounted for.
We also got a new merge for the updated version of the engine so myself and Jamie managed to get into a multiplayer game and test and report issues that we found with Multiplayer.

Sam Russell – Concept Artist

A single seater vehicle is pretty much a must for an exploration survival game, this is where I’m at with some of the basic shapes.