Greetings Pioneers!

We’ve fixed a number of critical issues this week and have been continuing with polishing AI behaviours and animations. We’ve added in a new fish that poops explosive pink eggs (why not?) as well as glass walls and purely decorative buildables. We have also been optimising the construction assets for better frame rates and faster load times and have been discussing how to group them into managers for less strain on the server with replication.

John – Lead Designer

I am currently reworking the building elements and materials into something that resembles real world items in order for players to be able to draw upon familiar real-world references when building or crafting. This includes copper deposits, aluminium ore, titanium ore, quartz and more. This is feeding into a new design for the start of the game where the player will possibly mine differently to how they do currently – it’s still in limbo and so your feedback is appreciated! Either way, we will be starting to get the prototype for the start-game established this week coming so it’s an exciting step forward to getting this next release out to you!

Matt – Art Director

I have been working on merging mesh components within our build primitives to optimise performance. It has already lowered the load time for the game and given us a few frames back to play with so definitely worth doing. I have also been working on destruction meshes for our decorator items so they can be destroyed in a satisfying way, smashy smashy! I am currently in ‘murica meeting up with an online friend who I hope is a real person.

Lee – Technical Director

So I think we are getting to the point where a lot of the major bugs have been caught and dealt with now. This week I’ve been concentrating on a number of minor AI bugs and working closely with Lauren to see if we can try to make the animation runs smoother with a number of AI, which in itself is quite time consuming. One aspect has been to make creatures come to a stop gracefully instead of a dead stop, and also how we can integrate the animation system and AI system closer together.

Marcin – Designer

By the looks of things, everything is shaping up nicely and after the next release there is only a few major components of the game missing. That means the full picture is much clearer than ever before and so we can focus on those parts of the game that need the most attention. This week we’ve had a good push on the quality of our neutral AI, and also John and I have been looking at the future of the Pioneer’s non-combat interaction – mainly mining and building. We believe we can make these processes much more interesting and understandable to new player, while at the same time making them less grindy.

Joe – Environment Artist

All sorts of different bits this week! Tom kindly provided me with some awesome high poly fish models which I’ve given a slick new paint job and finished all the game-ready artwork for. I’ve also been helping Ricky with designs and art for the new loading screen as well as materials for Armour integrity display. The bug-squashing has continued and I’ve also fixed a load of (mainly level-related) issues this week, including highlights like Fish spawning in Forest biomes. Towards the end of the week I’ve been looking at adding additional Outpost bases for players to explore in the new map.

Tom – Character Artist

This week I’ve created a bunch of different smaller fish in high resolution form ready to be worked up into in-game models. Glub glub.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week the whole team has been working on squashing as many bugs as possible to get things stable and finally fixed up the last remaining issues stopping us progressing with multiplayer. There are still more left so I am currently working on some mantling issues to prevent pioneers ending up inside rocks. I mean if you’re stuck you should at least have the option of a hard place as well.

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve spent most of the week fixing crashes, some caused by memory stomps. @PabloZurita (Twitter) contributed a memory stomp allocator to the UE4 engine, which has helped massively in tracking down some very difficult bugs.

Ricky – Developer

Implementing a shiny loading screen – that may sound a simple task but it’s been riddled with bugs and crashes along the way. No pain, no game right? Also added some extra handy features to the UI so Armour and Modular Weapons will display armour integrity and attachment icons respectively on their slots so you can tell at a glance what’s going on without having to hover over or select them.

Also bugs.

Lauren – Animator

Polishing and debugging has been the agenda for this week, we’ve been trying out a new implementation for fast AI turning which looks to be working and looking a lot better than the last. Alongside this I had a couple of days to work on a new big fish including prototyping its toxic egg attack which was pretty fun. Here’s some work in progress with the underwater creatures below:

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been continuing work on the female armour sets for the game – making sure that the sets have a back view and the armour piece that need to be separated out for the modelling/equipment system for orthographics. Still a lot to do but getting there!

Andy – Lead QA

This week has been business as usual. The entire team has been working really hard on debugging the latest build. We’ve had new creatures implemented, AI tweaks and balancing of the stats and new modular weapons. All of which has kept me busy.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix