Greetings Pioneers!

It truely is amazing how much the feel of gameplay can change when things start coming together, we have some great progress to share as always, here’s what we’ve been smashing this week..

John – Lead Designer

This week I’ve been helping to organise the new workstations that the team require. I am happy to say that they have finally been ordered.

I’ve also been planning out the pipeline for Eden Star and helping the team stay on track for our next release.

Matt – Art Director

A heap of collision work and placement has been going on between myself and anyone who happens to fall into my clutches. This basic re-work is enabling us to structure the world around a changing environment, which while looking barren at the moment will transform to support a variety of organic resources.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been implementing the new spawners. We changed the spawners over because we had a few different versions. The new version is a lot easier for the level designers to use and they are very versatile.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been working with Andy to get the new machines finalised and ordered and getting some tasks set up for the devs as well as many meetings which are less fun than Eden Star but must be done.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week the new male character mesh is up and running (quite literally) we’ve been making polishing tweaks to the 3rd person animations and blending systems to get them moving and rotating more realistically (the smash is looking pretty good too). Still some work to do but it’s getting there!

Ricky – Senior Developer

This week I have been < MISSING_STRING_TABLE_ENTRY >. It’s spreading SAVE YOURSELVES!!

I’ve continued debugging the grenades, and been giving them an ammo count, they are going to work a little different to standard guns, because when the ammo is out, the consumable weapon will be gone. Plus you don’t actually throw a gun.

Marcin – Designer

The work on the new AI with Lee continues. We’ve done quite a lot but there is always more. This week we’ve focused on perception, and behaviour bugs, such as:

• enemies recovering from ragdoll upside down,
• enemies dying as soon as they ragdoll for no reason,
• enemies trying to attack you while they are being held up,
• enemies being able to damage you through walls or when you are behind them or too far away,
• enemies not recognising they cannot reach you and getting stuck trying,
• enemies not recognising you as a threat after they’ve been picked up and dropped down,
• enemies not being able to see over over their comrades,
• Etc.

Getting rid of bugs like these is quite important because they can easily obstruct visibility of whether or not the actual Artificial Intelligence component working properly, so I am happy we finally got around to it. The next thing on the agenda is the implementation of the “investigate point of interest” behaviour.

This one is important because it will allow us to have the AI react to events happening around them, such as gunshots or doors opening or food being present nearby, without having them go directly into combat or using clairvoyance.

Joe – Lead Artist

I’ve been updating the Tab and Clan Menu UI, making it look nicer, run smoother and work better! I’ve put in the visuals for allowing the player to have 10 hotbar slots, within which they can place whatever they like 🙂 I also fixed up a bunch of issues with inconsistencies to hopefully make our UI help (not hinder) the player. I’ve started on optimisations too as we noticed our UI is using a little more memory than is necessary.

Yves – Senior Developer

I spent a large part of this week in design meetings regarding the new parry system. There was lots of planning regarding “stagger” distance, parry timing and parry window. Once all that was complete I was able to start converting the prototype to code.

Tom W – Designer

I’ve been busy working on procedural foliage systems this week, taking inspiration from Guerilla Game’s Horizon Zero Dawn. This should allow our level designers to focus on composition and gameplay, rather than tediously placing every blade of grass in a 16km square area.

Alex – Designer

I’ve been painting and texturing and setting up materials for the relay hero piece this week. Making sure the colour palette suits the environment, and the level of wear is consistent with the what we want the piece to feel like and what the rest of environment will eventually look like. The relay tower is very nearly in it’s final form now after more transformations than a bad anime character, i’m just making some LOD’s for optimization and it should be signed off.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been in design meetings with the guys working on the new section of the map. I also able to get into the editor for the first time in ages. I mean I just did some basic  asset placement, but it’s fun.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix