Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been fixing up the newly integrated 4.14 engine version update and re-fracturing rocks that were broken (that is, broken in the wrong way!). The full design for the top down game map has been completed, and to get you involved more we’d love your feedback on it (please see Joes post below to get involved with this).

Male and female heads are coming along nicely and the turret upgrades are starting to be set up ready for the game. We’ll be implementing a simple level based system similar to the Eden Kit for now, so with increased levels the turret will look 33.3% cooler, that’s 33.3% cooler per level people!!!.

Here’s what we’ve been up to in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

This week i’ve revisited the initial gameplay loop designs and have looked into revising how we do mining in the game. We may remove the ability to mine indefinitely without the need for power, doing this may be a big leap away from what we have currently and so we are discussing this a lot internally. If the designs are well received here we’ll share them with you for feedback.

Matt – Art Director

Moving on to texturing and setting up new turret level meshes ready for animation. I’ve been working with Tom, John, and Simone on our full character system. This has involved modelling custom faces which will be set up with basic customisation parameters to begin with.

The full extent of the system will be implemented in stages, colour customisation for the suits and skin colour being a few of the basics.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued the work of integrating the 4.14 version of the engine into our main stream. A couple of our art team are now trying to fix up the Apex issues that it has thrown up.

Tom – Character Artist

Been working away at through the female and male heads. Getting the base sculpt and game resolution meshes done along with some initial shader setup for the eyes. Aiming to get these finished for next week ready for skin painting!

Ricky – Developer

I’m a rebel, for I haven’t updated to 4.14 yet while I continue on with features and bugfixes along with optimisations.

One of the big bugfixes and optimisations we now hope is solved is the multiplayer desync issue. For those of you not in the know it’s the one where you could go flying or teleporting back huge distances in what first appeared to be a massive lag spike, but was actually caused by a mismatch between client and server.

As a result of this fix we’re checking over impacts of this change, the change actually has performance benefits too for both single player and multiplayer.

I’ve also been putting in our Turret Upgrade system and giving it a run through, they look pretty darn badass and I have plenty more ideas for additional upgrades in future. Join us on Discord if there’s any suggestions you’d like to add.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been working on the male undersuit designs with the team. We have gotten the first pass down and are now working on a second pass including finer details and some changes. I will be looking to create orthographics for both the male and female undersuit once the second pass has been completed.

Carlos – Developer

For most of this week I’ve been working on authenticating users on our servers. It has been a long process but now we have Steam servers updating our player counts.

When this goes out you may notice an additional delay in the joining process as we have to wait for callbacks from Steam API in order to fully authenticate users. Last step remains to cancel the authenticated session, which is proving to be a slow process.

Joe – Environment Artist

For most of this week I’ve been cracking on with the Tactical Map design – there’s not too many more pretty things to show – most of it has been writing things up and figuring out how all the different systems will go together!

If any of you guys want to check it out you can find a link below. Feel free to leave comments if there’s anything in particular you want to see in Eden Star’s map!

(disclaimer: this design is NOT final and there may be inconsistencies!)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GuLIpLkW70O-Bvfbj_efDYk_5e73dpFTINeTVj4mElg/edit?usp=sharing

I’ve also re-setup all our destructible rocks – needed to be done thanks to the shiny new engine updates but it was a good excuse to tweak settings in order to hopefully minimise slowdowns in Multiplayer when mining larger rocks… and as usual I’ve been monitoring the Steam screenshots for level bugs and fixed a bunch up. Keep ‘em coming! (Handy tip: Ctrl + Alt + J to show your current world coordinates!). Last but not least I’ve put together a UI layout for the server admin manager.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I’ve been working on some of the issues the community have been posting on the steam forums and our discord channel. I’ve been working with Ricky on fixing the issues that arose from implementing the desync fix. I was able to catch a few crashes this week and get them over to the dev team.

John also showed me the new character designs for the Pioneer which I had mixed feelings about. I’d love to hear your feedback about it though to see if I can reclaim my credibility in the office. Lol

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix