Dev Update – October

31st October 2014

Hello again and Happy Halloween from the Flix Studio!

The team here have been very busy packing the game with awesome things! Here is a quick update on what we have been hard at work on this past month:

Huge landscape and environment development
Equipment, Construction and Eden Kit menus
Making Splintermites tougher and creepier
Further weapon development
Material shard spawn logic and balancing
Visual and efficiency Improvements to trees, rocks and destruction
Improvements to build module snapping
Foundation and support system for built structures
Implementing audio

We will be ramping up the update frequency in the next few weeks as we get more of the core features we want in place and move on to bug squishing. Next week we will be revealing the Pistol with a brand new video!

In the mean time here is some in-game eye candy:

In-Game screenshot of one of the forest areas under development in UE4

Over and out, Pioneers!

MATA-Tool Upgrades : The Gauss Gun

26th September 2014

Hello again from the Flix studio!

We’ve shown a lot about the environment of Eden Star, but very little on the really cool stuff such as MATA-Tool Upgrades…

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing your new best friend, the Gauss Gun.

We want you to feel like the badass you are when you step out into the wild lands of Pharus 7, and we thought the best way to give you that feeling was to put a rapid fire electromagnetic cannon inside your arm.

Watch the video below and see it in action! Please be aware that development is ongoing on this, so models, animations, materials, PFX, and sound may change.

Your MATA-Tool on your arm can equip a variety of modules that extend and augment its capabilities. The Gauss gun is one of those modules, which you may construct at your Eden Kit.

The Gauss Gun fires a hail of tungsten flechettes that are electromagnetically accelerated along its extended barrel, powered by supercapacitors included in the base of the magazine.

The best thing about the Gauss Gun is that unlike other weapons (yes, there are more weapons!) you can continue to use the MATA-Tool’s secondary and tertiary functions without needing to unequip it! This means you can do cool things like pick up an enemy and unload a barrage of flechettes into it and then slam it into a wall to finish it off!

There’s no thrill like overkill.

See you again soon!

Dev Update – Environmental Destruction

29th August 2014

Hi, guys. It’s Marcin, Technical Artist here again with a shiny, new update for you. It’s been a while since we showed you any of the new gameplay systems and so we thought we would give you an update on the reimplementation of the environmental destruction in the world.

Our main aim with destruction has always been to create a fully interactive environment. That doesn’t always mean that everything can be fully destroyed, but instead we make sure that you can make your mark on everything within the world. This includes rocks and foliage, varying from little clumps of grass to massive trees.

As the world of Pharus 7 is a terraformed landscape, it is a merging of both familiar Earth-like terrain and alien landscape, where anything not fully destroyed will grow back over time. Everything you ‘mine’ in Eden Star provides you with resources in one form or another. Rocks, mineral deposits, or crystals contain alien mineral materials, while foliage and trees provide more organic substances such as rubbers or fibers, which you can use in the construction of outposts and equipment. Smaller foliage will not produce materials but can be absorbed as energy to power your kinetic MATA-Tool abilities. In essence, when you finally land on Pharus 7, we want you to know that everything you see can be used.

The art direction allows the destruction to feel fluid, natural, intuitive, and make you feel powerful. As you will spend a lot of time deconstructing and farming the world to survive we want it to look and feel awesome as you do it. There are a lot of firework-inspired particles put in place to reward every interaction.

The making of this system has been a lot of fun, but we definitely hope that it will be even more fun to play it. In any case, we are very happy for you guys to see our early progress on this and we really hope you like it. As always, everything you see and read here is a work in progress and as such is subject to change. Thank you all so much for reading and continuous support and see you next time.