Greetings Pioneers!

We thank you for your patience so far, this week many more bugs have been fixed and we are ever closer to a release into the experimental branch! From there, those taking part can give us some much needed balancing feedback for the upcoming gameplay expansion. We hope to start this testing process next week.

Please note that this will not be a full public release to start with, only to those who have registered their interest in helping us out at this stage and opt into the experimental branch. If everything goes to plan we will roll it out to everyone soon after.

This week the new 4km2 map has been populated with more outpost bases and feature buildings to explore and loot, weapon stats and effects have been tweaked and debugged, more critical issues have been sorted… PROGRESS!

John – Lead Designer

This week has been filled with exciting meetings for me. You’ll be glad to know we’ve been planning the final details for our experimental release build as well!

Matt – Art Director

I’ve been back at creating props for existing locations within the world. Specifically for a communication relay station and observatory. These locations can be found and inhabited or raided by players currently if they can capture that locations Eden Kit. I’ll be moving onto creating assets for a more fleshed out game tutorial that will better help introduce the basic elements of the game.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued with the debugging of AI. I’ve also had to make a few engine changes to get the group behaviours working the way I want. You may not notice much difference at first but once it is fully functional we can start to do some cool stuff with groups of AI.

Tristan – Senior Developer

Bug, Balance and Polish pretty much sums up this week for all the devs me included. We have been fixing crashes, game breaking bugs, save breaking bugs, ai breaking bugs and any bugs in between. On a non-bugs note I have been planning out the tasks for replication optimisation with Yves for our structures. It should give us a BUILDING (because no boats are featured in this game) load of frames back 🙂

Yves – Senior Developer

Yves is not available to write this for himself as he is feeling under the weather today. There’s only so many bugs anyone can absorbed into one’s body before illness ensues. That’s right, this is Yves’s prefered method for bug fixing.

Marcin – Designer

Bits and bobs mostly for me this week. I was working on AI bugs, mostly technical stuff like lost references and feet placement, a bit on the decorators and doors, some on the navmesh, and a tiny bit on the balancing. But I did spend a day prototyping the way an Area of Effect Blast would work.

It’s a challenging mechanic especially due to how many different thing it can hit in a single frame, so there is a very delicate balance to strike between accuracy and performance there. In any case, even in its current rough state, it’s already pretty fun to play with, so it definitely feels like the right direction to go.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week has mainly been full of polishing and tweaking in anticipation for our biggest release yet. Seeing it all come together over the past few weeks is super exciting and I hope you guys feel that it’s worth the wait once it arrives.

Specifically this week I’ve been tweaking PFX for the new weapons and balancing weapon stats and tidying up various parts of the UI (including new visuals for player damage).

The highlight of this week has definitely been getting to work on some new outposts and colonies to help populate the new map – a mining facility and an abandoned, overgrown lookout post.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working on more bug fixes and tweaks as well as improving the interactions between AI so that wolves perform kill moves against small critters if they manage to catch them. I have also been continuing animating some “dragon/vulture-like” aerial attacks and a couple of small fish for underwater shoals.

Ricky – Developer

Is not here right now but if he was he would tell you that bugs are exhausting so I’m going on holiday

Simone – Concept Artist

I was away at the beginning of this week and have been catching up on what needs to do be done and continuing work on the female armour sets.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve been mostly focusing on the balancing of the new modular weapons, AI spawning and general tweaking of the game.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix