Greetings Pioneers!

Mainly arty updates for you this week, integration of the new look barren style landscape has started. More prep work for character customisation, and merging of the current latest build back into our main branch.

This essentially means the next update we do will begin to include the work we’re showcasing in the development blogs, which is exciting. Needless to say we want to be able to get it pretty polished beforehand so again, we thank you for your patience.

See details of what we’ve been up to below:

John – Lead Designer

Emails, Business, and Soul Reclamation, it’s what makes the world go around. You may notice some of our team is absent from this development update, this is because their contracts state that upon renewal their souls will be absorbed into the game, forever. (it’s in the small print)

Just kidding, they are all fine.. souls and all. Some just not very well, and others on vacation. The guys who have been here this week have been working 3 times harder to fill in the gaps <3

Matt – Art Director

Implementing what is essentially a re-work of our current terrain shader to properly accommodate the barren look to certain areas of the game. This has included a higher detail pass on the rocks that merge with the terrain providing a lot of the mantling surfaces. Very much a work in progress still.

The character customisation elements have started to be put into visual trial before they are integrated with the game system. Soon enough you’ll be able to define certain visual characteristics of the suit, skin and eyes.

Lee – Technical Director

Mainly this week I have been debugging AI and testing out the new ability for designers to create behaviour tasks in blueprint. I also managed to merge our latest Release stream back into the Main stream which was an arduous task.

Marcin – Designer

Continuing on from last week, we’ve had some play tests of the new parry and block melee mechanics. After I’ve had enough feedback I went ahead with the second iteration of the mechanic.

I even threw in a frivolous prototype of a finisher move, ugly, yet flashy. Following from there I continued with the integration of additional AI systems. A lot of boring stuff to be honest.

Alex – Designer

With Lee merging his AI stream into main, I had to reimport all of the AI spawners and test that they were working as intended. I also worked with Tom on getting the toolsets ready for the new environments.

Tom W – Designer

This week I’ve been working with Alex on making all the pretties for the new environment we are implementing a long with atmosphere tweaks to the world in day and at night. I also completed the revisions to the arm mesh for the new first person male character model.

Andy – Lead QA

I was knee deep in spreadsheets towards the end of the week, however it wasn’t all bad. I replied to a few peeps questions on the Steam forums and on Discord (yes, we have a Discord).

Had lots of design meetings with Tom, Alex, Matt and John regarding the new environmental assets we are adding to the game, went throw the new melee finishing moves prototype with Marcin. Lee was also able to merge his AI stream with the main stream so I have loads of new AI behaviour types to test.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix