Greetings Pioneers!

When the large scale ‘important hero’ assets start getting the texture treatment, you know we’re happy with them. This is a very good thing for progress, as we start to lock down the location designs for the beginning area. Nice amounts of progress this week with character implementation, and collision cleanup for some of the new environment work as well, more details below!.. keyboard fingers at the ready, Go!..

John – Lead Designer

Like a mighty samurai or fearless knight I have once again charged headfirst into the battle field that is games development and vanquished my foes! I stand before you a changed man, a humbled man, a wiser man. And now looking back over the week, I know that my life will never be the same. So to paraphrase my favourite Harry Potter character “Johnny is a free elf”

Matt – Art Director

Doing some real scrubber work, making more accurate collision hulls for some of our newer rock assets (which need to be accurate so we can mantle and climb them properly). Earlier in the week I managed to finish up the prep work for the updated male model so he can be skinned and put into engine.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I’ve been completing work to allow the designers to give the AI scripted instructions to follow for in-game events and such. This will interrupt its normal planning behaviour and go and execute the event before returning back to its planning. Hopefully this will only add to the player experience.

Alex – Designer

I’m back on the relay this week! Working on the textures for it though now, as we have made some big new changes to the overall look and feel to the world. Some changes had to be made from the original concept piece, but it’s really starting to look like an ancient piece of tech left behind a millenia ago.

It’s also been a great excuse to explore a cool new workflow I’d been wanting to try out using projected normals using decals which is giving me a lot of freedom to make changes and tweaks really fast after a bit of initial leg work.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been helping an old lady make a cake. Cause I really fancied a nice spongy treat. Turns out, the old lady was evil and gave me none so ended up doing more ground work for localisation instead \o/

Yves – Senior Developer

I took this week off work as I am in the process of building my Duck Dynasty Tribute act and was scouring the countryside for fellow avid fans who wished to follow in the footsteps of legends themselves.

Ricky – Senior Developer

BOOM! Grenades. (Sorry for those of you with heart conditions, this post may contain LOUD explosion text, also sorry this warnings a bit late).

This week I’ve added the consumable weapon classes so our Hot bar can be filled with 10 grenades or multiple other puny weapons insignificant to the almighty grenade. I’ve also added in some little quality of life perks like auto adding picked up weaponry to the players hot bar for quick use if there’s an empty slot.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I have been <MISSING STRING TABLE ENTRY>

Tom W – Designer

I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!

Jokes aside, I’ve spent this week reworking our lighting system, starting with the ambient skylight found throughout the game. Two major tweaks were needed, the first being to allow us to blend through four different cubemaps for the various times of day, Night-Sunrise-Day-Sunset. The other, was to stop the skylight from bleeding indoors, as it clashed with the dark spooky dungeon feeling we’ve been working towards.

In other news, I’ve done some performance tweaks on our new terrain materials, tripling their performance in-game.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been skin weighting our shiny new meshes, starting with the female. This is a process that enables the new mesh to work with the current skeleton and animations. It’s great to finally see her running around!

I have also been experimenting with more groundwork in place for customisation such as morphing the mesh to get variants on different proportions but this is still at early stages so far. Suggestions are still very much welcome, let us know what character options you would like to see and we’ll see what we can do!

Andy – Lead QA

I spent the week pestering Ricky bout getting the grenades in and auto populating the hot bar and it paid off! You can now pick up items and they will automatically be placed into the first free slot of your hot bar meaning you can equip and use it much faster.

I’ve also been testing multiplayer with Jamie and admiring the changes Tom has made to the lighting and the skybox.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix