This week, we have been internally testing the following new features but we realized that we still need more time to marinate them to add more flavor and make sure that the balance is right for public consumption.

Trading (Buying / Selling) Plinths

XP Player Progression

Weapon and Tools Durability

Warping

As a result, we did not update the game this week. Apologies to the people waiting for these features. Next week, we plan to make some changes and balance these features. We might be making bigger changes for warping. Hence, it may take several weeks before this reaches the players. Oh no! We are looking into enabling players to warp to their friends. Oh yes!

When we release Trading (Buying / Selling) Plinths, we will get the beacon sharing feature back into the game so that you can work on your creations with friends. We have also started to work on the development of the tutorial / achievement system. The theory is that this should lower the learning curve considerably. When we have a clearer timeline for this feature, we will let you know.

The hopper (working name) is hopping in the game now, doing the job it’s meant to do We still need to support other animations / AI before its release but we hope we can release it into the wild soon. Stay tuned!

Code

This week, we have been adding durability to items so they now degrade as they are used. Its first pass with a bar graph showing the item’s remaining durability. Work continued on some part of the warping, including warping to friends. We are also continuing to iterate on the buying and selling plinths as well as some related economy parts such as tax.

The creature work has been refining the movement using the animations and using the hopper as a test bed, with it bouncing around on bounce pads, sliding on ice and so forth.

The world builder has added some more options for 3d noise and how resources are generated. Along with this the first pass world region naming is being implemented so large biomes will have names such as “Forest of…” (but with a universal language neutral convention). Visiting these named biomes will use the explorer progression, Discovering and visiting all the named points of interest in a World will increment a players Explorer progression level, as well as helping people by providing common reference points. The world colour palette is also being worked on, fixing up some colour indexing bugs.

We spent quite a bit of time tracking down the issues that caused the server crashes earlier in the week. We are also reworking some of the error reporting to help us diagnose the problems more rapidly. Otherwise we’ve been looking into some options for a global chat system and what would scale well to large user bases.

Design

This week Rob has been updating the HUD concepts to integrate the ideas for the chat system and objectives as well as reworking the gain log. He’s now continuing to work on the look and feel of GUI.

Matt’s been polishing and adding to the biomes he’s created with more interesting strata and caves. We’re now in a position to start testing this for balance. This week has also seen lots of work around prefabs, and Matt has been building some, and supporting those of you who have been building them too. See the thread about it here.

Balancing has been the main focus for Ollie this week. Crafting duration, inputs and outputs and power, as well as adding more recipes. Also more effort on analytics this week as we get the production ready system in place. Also more idea development on the Location Markers.

Luke on the other hand is on holiday, so is likely to be sunning himself somewhere…

Art

This week, we have been working on finalizing the rig for the Hunter. We had some bumpy ride to get this to work technically but it looks like we can start animating it from next week. Hurray!

We received some feedback from the community that the weapons and tools can do with more detail / resolution especially for the 1st person view. We have taken this feedback and we have started to look into producing higher resolution tools and weapons. Here is our first up resed axes. As you can see from the screenshot below, we are looking into changing the design too.

We are hoping to finalize the creature progression concepts very soon which includes creature scaling. As a sneak preview, the pic below show the potential scaling of creatures.