

Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been continuing development on exciting new environments, features and creatures. The new level is getting populated with climbable rocks, secret caves and feature areas, the Juggernaut is stomping around, charging and breathing fire and the modular weapons artwork is coming along nicely and may yield more combinations than originally thought. Progress!

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

John – Lead Designer

This week I’ve been going over designs for the objectives system and the modular weapon system among many other design and production meetings and discussions. We’re making some exciting progress!

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been finalising the Juggernaut behaviours ready for an imminent release. There has been a lot more work involved with this creature than most other AI we have, just because of the way we want it to work. Now the work is done it should also make it a lot easier to add other large creatures to the game which we have planned.

Matt – Art Director

So, magical things have been happening in the new map. I’ve been creating a dynamic level loading system with the help of the developers, which allows us to perform a wizard like spell that replaces sections of the world with entirely different looking areas and features every time a new game is started. One example being sinkholes, which will tie into some of our story driven components to do with the origin of the enemy creatures. I will say no more and allow speculation to run rampant with just one image.. Enjoy.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been helping out with system and implementation designs for our new procedural designer built structures (we might change the name) to give the impression of a lost world. I have also been implementing the logout system where the player characters and their inventories will remain after they have logged out. This will mean you can go and loot people when they are sleeping so make sure to wrap up warm and surrounded by turrets when you log out 🙂

Yves – Senior Developer

This we… no I refuse to start any post like that. In this sprint I have been working further on deterioration of buildings, making the decay faster from the outside in, meaning a well supported structure should take longer to decay. Also I’ve been working towards procedurally placed structures, that’s all I’m saying on that… I don’t want to ruin the fun things we have planned.

Marcin – Designer

Graphs, flowcharts, documents, spreadsheets, and prototypes – namely designer’s favourite things, it’s what I’ve been buried under the entire week. Among other things, I’ve done another pass on the Juggernaut’s behaviour tree, planned out 3 alternative Progression flows, designed the experience distribution and finished up missing bits from the survival mechanic system. And to top it all up. I’ve started prototyping the more interesting attacks of the upcoming Splintermite Queen.

Joe – Environment Artist

Pushing to finish off my pass over terrain and mesh placement in the initial portion of our new map. Don’t tell the Directors, but I’ve hidden a few secrets in the map… We can’t wait to unleash this mammoth new world to the community.

Lauren – Animator

These past few weeks has been all about modular weapons, I’ve been working on weapon recoil, lining up the aim down sights so that it works with each scope/barrel/receiver combination and getting the new Heavy Receiver and Grenade and Bolt Launcher Barrels feeling good from an animation perspective. Dynamically blending how much recoil animation to play with any given combination is proving to be the tricky bit but once we figure this out we can begin moving the prototype into code. I’m looking forward to sharing how it’s all working and looking once we get it a bit more polished!

Ricky – Developer

I started this week by looking into some of the main issues users have been having to do with key rebinding and losing items/weapons and inventory. Most of the keybindings are now sorted pending testing, and temporary measures are in place to allow players to continue games where they’ve lost items until we can fully capture the issue.

After that debacle, I started getting my hands dirty with some of the progression system.

Simone – Concept Artist

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on making sure the environment concepts are correct and showing all the details that the team needs from them, as well as creating concepts for a deer-like creature that will be found in a few environments within the game. We want them to show how the different creatures interact with each other and it has taken some time to get the right feel from each concept. We are almost there!

Andy – Lead QA

Since our last release I have been working on replicating issues that have been reported on the steam forums and getting the relevant information to the guys to get them fixed. More recently I’ve been dealing with the distressing realisation that Matt got me a normal KitKat chunky instead of a peanut butter KitKat chunky.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix