Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been implementing the glorious turret upgrades, including a pass on particle effects so they look more epic with each level. The whole team is on 4.14 now, including the rebel Ricky and we are making good progress. There is a bit more debugging to do before the new arsenal is ready for release but we hope to have it out to you soon.

John – Lead Designer

This week we’ve been looking at guiding turret upgrades and continuing on with designs for the mining system, crafting refinements and shortcuts for moving around the inventory. I’ve also been looking at melee refinements and will most likely be doing so for the next few weeks. Basically we are looking at improvements across most areas as we move towards exploring corrupted bases as a core part of the game objective.

Matt – Art Director

Setup and texturing of the new turret levels this week, and now… a sneaky preview of the three new auto turret levels. Last level is a bit of a beast <3

Lee – Technical Director

This week I managed to complete the move over to the new version of the unreal engine and I’ve also been fixing up a few bugs with our new turrets. I’ve also been working towards moving some of our behaviour tasks into components so that we can then attach them to any object other than AI.

Ricky – Developer

To my adoring fan(s), this week I’ve been a-bringing you some lovely turret upgrade work and solving some of the caveats that come with a simple thing like swapping out one mesh for three others.

I’ve also solved some performance spikes from the UI when taking damage to armour, added in an extra Eden Kit level and included new meshes from the Art depot for each of these too. Then there was a crash fixed, when getting kicked out of a game which needed fixing so to not add insult to injury so to speak. We’ve also decided to remove durability setting from the World Setup Menu, we believed there was plenty to play with by scaling damage rather than changing the health and it didn’t play nicely with our new upgrades.

Tom – Character Artist

Low res meshes for the female and male character heads have been handed over for texturing and setup. The final designs for the suits are next!

Joe – Environment Artist

I started the week tweaking the Tactical Map design based on feedback before moving onto designing a revamp for HUD Markers, which should make navigating the world and interacting with things much more consistent, easy-to-use and informative. All these new designs are fairly in-depth at this stage but they should all tie together nicely!

I then had chance to make some level tweaks. You can now skip the introduction cutscene if you so desire, and I fixed up some areas where players could build outside of the intended playable area, which potentially caused a crash.

On top of that I’ve been creating icons and particle effects for all the new turret levels. The level 3 Laser Turret is now world-endingly awesome, and fully operational…

P.s – the Empire did nothing wrong

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working on improving the 3rd person animations for the player and the system behind them. I have been experimenting with a third person camera so we can see more of the Pioneer’s lovely buttocks…(you pervs!) I have also been working on hit reaction, death and stagger back animations to make hitting things and getting hit have more impact.

Simone – Concept Artist

I have been working on designs for a basic armour set that will go with the undersuit, so far we have a starting chest piece and helmet.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have spent most of my time testing the new turret upgrades and the new eden kit upgrades. We ran into a few issues with the firing and the saving over the health but that all appears to be fixed now. Matts has made the turrets all pretty and new, Joe has given them some lovely new PFX and Ricky has made them shoot at things.

Need to give another shout out to the Games Soc over at Staffs Uni for helping me out with another test session. I know we had a few issues getting the client over to you guys, but next time we will nail it. Thanks for all your help.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix