Greetings Pioneers!

Polish, lots of polish, just not the typical kind you apply to cars and surfaces you care for the most. There’s been a real push to get destruction effects for designer placed items (which also drop related items and resources). 

Most exciting is the vastly improved appearance of the AI behaviour, which is starting to come together. We’re continuing to make steady progress towards showcasing these improvements in the form of moving images for an upcoming blog!

Matt – Art Director

My primary focus has been helping Melissa get the new build wheel and buildables up to scratch. It’s required some slight system changes, and visual polish and tweaking. We’ve unified the iconography for all build items so that every utility and block are now represented by a stylised icon. Which is far more readable on a menu system than something fully detailed and squished into a smaller space.

On the other side of things there has been a big push to get particle VFX more varied and interesting for rocks, and metal destructible objects. This has really helped add to the illusion of things breaking apart, which we feel goes beyond most destruction in other games, helping to elevate the quality of the whole scavenging and mining experience.

Tom Whittemore – Lead Designer

This week I have been focusing on whiteboxing areas of the dam for gameplay testing. With the AI and combat coming along nicely we can start to test them in an encounter settings. A knock on effect of this was adjusting some of the level design in the dam to accommodate our new play space. Other than that it has been mainly cleaning up our levels and blueprints so things will run a bit smoother.

Melissa – Technical Designer

I’ve been working on quite a few different elements of the game recently including UI for the new melee system, implementing further destruction elements and various bug fixing throughout.

My primary focus thus far has been continuation on implementing the new build wheel. 

New artwork has gone into the wheel (courtesy of Matt Clark) to improve the overall aesthetic and make it much clearer as to what you are building and selecting; as well as this a lot of animations have had a second pass and we have some much better transition animations in the works. 

The finishing touches are still being worked on and hopefully the wheel will be completed soon! (Here’s another teaser though)

Ryan – Designer

Hey! Recently I have been going over the terrain around the Dam to continue my work on the landscapes and ensure we maximise buildability, while maintaining an interesting environment. 

Katrine – Senior Artist

Hello Pioneers! These last few weeks has been very exciting as we have been updated the destructibles and PFX throughout the game. Anything from flashy electrical explosions to runny toilet waste is coming soon to your game, near you… I have also been updating the visuals in and around the drop pod.

And last but not least I have made goo, guts, blood and intestines. Skipping lunch for a great cause!

Ellis – Environment Artist

Hey guys! In the past month I have been mainly working on destructibles for the environment. I have made a variety of different assets that can be smashed with a swing of the axe, they look well cool when they break! I have also delved into some of the levels in the dam, especially the canteen room. Finally I made a new makeshift flare for the game which looks really cool and can be made from drop items. Im looking forward to posting some gifs in the next blog post!

Hannah – Environment Artist

Hey everyone 🙂 This past month I have been creating some more drop assets, including a makeshift bandage which can be utilised by the player to gain extra health, and some simple wiring which can be used for crafting various electrical items in Pharus 7. I’ve also had a lot of fun making some destructible props, including an air filter and series of wall pipes that break into pieces when shot at or hit with a melee weapon. Watch this space for some images and gifs in the upcoming blog post.

Lauren – Lead Animator

Refinements and fixes have been the main focus these past few weeks, animations for the axe are nearing final polish level and we’ve been working with a new animator Chen who has been hard at work updating our third person locomotion and spear animations.

John R – Developer

I’ve been working on the melee combat system to improve the feel of the weapons and fix some bugs.  Attacks and blocks now flow together more smoothly and are more accurate too.

Leon F – Developer

Since my work with Ricky on the Build Wheel from last month is now complete I’ve been spending this month developing the Gamepad Implementation for the inventory and crafting menus working off of Melissa’s designs and making exciting improvements to the player experience with a controller. 

In addition to gamepad support additional contextual short cuts are being added to the tab menu which includes double clicking weapons and armor to equip them with ease as-well as some other shortcuts I’ll hopefully be able to show off in the next blog post!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix