Greetings Pioneers!

This week along with fixing up bugs for the hotfix yesterday, we have been finalising the final pass of our shiny new UI designs for the menus across the board. We want them to work well for both controller and keyboard and mouse input so they have been getting some much needed TLC.

This includes the Main Menu, Game Selection, Multiplayer Menus, Pause Menu and Options Menu. Next steps will be to transfer these layouts from designs into the game!

Different looking levels of Eden Kit have been getting rigged and animated ready for implementation as well, but before these are release we’ll be doing another balancing pass over the materials required to build them.

Here’s what we’ve all been upto:

John – Lead Designer

Managed to nail down a final design pass for raw food items and processed food types, which will give players a more expansive selection of food types with varying statistics. I’ve touched based with the art team enabling them to do a final character pass which is beginning properly next week! Simone, Matt and Tom are developing this taking into account a first level plan for pre-game customisation.

Lastly the user interface feedback for our design phase has gone down well, meaning we’re close to starting implementation for our final front end visuals.

Matt – Art Director

Implemented the five different Eden Kit level meshes and animations for one of our future updates and fixed up a bug with decorator holograms!.

Mainly worked with Joe on finishing our UI final pass which will include a whole bunch of new options, including planned character customisation and click and go game presets. Custom games where you can still modify all the small details will be one of these presets 🙂

Also managed to complete a revamp design for our main menus, which will incorporate a transitional background environment as you move from page to page.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I have been helping out with the server issues we had from the previous release, which was finally fixed and released yesterday. I’ve also been planning a new pipeline solution to enable our artists and designers to implement new AI without much need for a programmer. Hopefully I can get this implemented soon.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been fixing up bugs to do with the new foliage destruction replication optimisations so hopefully we should now have improved server performance and still actually be able to destroy foliage. Hope you enjoy.

Ricky – Developer

The start of this week I was gleefully skipping along solving the annoying issue which arose from Friday’s temporary update.

After solving that I’ve been looking over designs for new tasks and beginning implementation of some server logging information which I think will be very helpful for us all.

I plan to include things like; when the server has started and finished loading and is joinable, when players join and leave, and possibly extra things like when players die or some actions they do like claiming bases or get killed by vogels (I’d have to implement that one sometime of course, but it would be most shameful way to die in such a manner)

Joe – Environment Artist

Crazy week this week for UI and Design. I came up with a new Death Screen which apparently made our Art Director “want to die”. I hope that’s a good thing?

I also went over the Pause Menu, server info pop-up and reworked all the other Menu screens from the previous few weeks with updated style guides so we can hopefully get a streamlined, useful and most importantly cool-looking frontend user experience.

The last couple of days I’ve also been designing the “Comms Window” and “Activity Log”. See if you can guess what they are 🙂

Also we fixed being able to infinitely stack Laser Posts. Sorry guys.

Tom – Character Artist

Working with Matt and Simone on our pass for customisable male and female heads!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been discussing story design, delivery and implementation. We want there to be a meaningful reason for you being on Pharus 7 as well as driving exploration and a gameplay ‘end goal’. Following the story will be an optional exercise but offers opportunities to collect clues and items that can assist you in your quests… I have also been planning how to improve player deaths and ‘ragdolls’ so they blend better and look a little less silly.

Simone – Concept Artist

About to begin working with Matt and Tom on a final revamp of the player models base suits 😀

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been working closely with Rick regarding implementing a fix to the bug that caused us to revert last weeks release. We were able to get that issue fixed along with a few others.

We hope you enjoy yesterdays update. See you in the fray!

-Team Flix