Greetings Pioneers!

So we’ve crossed a bridge and the foundations for our vehicle system are fully in place for designers to get a handle on it. After much deliberation in the art department over the islands surface details, decisions have been made to add a more realistic selection of material types and blends.

We’ve also been putting some serious time into making our placement system more automated as whole (especially for foliage) to help speed up further development and make eventual modding of islands more user friendly.

Here’s what we’ve individually been upto:

John – Lead Designer

Working on Enemy Archetype designs in between managing projects 😛 – Again, I’ve been looking how this can be tied into progression. We’re working on systems to make sure that the variations of AI can meet a set number of modular systems that we already have in place. We have a number of the team who will be working hard to get these functional over the next 12 weeks.

Matt – Art Director

Finishing our review of surface types for the island. Wanting to make sure the details we go for are excellent quality and feel believable in both first and third person views (que more realism with surface photogrammetry). Tom has been piecing these together mainly.

A lot of the re-population of the surface will be done with more automated tools so as to speed this process up. When we’re ready to hit the go button you may notice the world is a tiny bit larger than before due to these systems..

On a final note we’re in the process of getting the blocked out spaces for the vehicles refined!

Lee – Technical Director

Galavanting n stuff like a boss. I’ve been working on the AI planners for the turrets and cleaning them up. I’ve also been trying to fix up some engine issues to do with our foliage where trying to damage them would cause the game to crash after our engine update.

I am all for Tree preservation but seems a bit extreme in a virtual world when the nights are cold and the natives don’t seem very friendly.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have spent most my time reviewing code and telling Lee to let us mine trees again.

Carlos – Developer

First blog in a long time!

I’ve been working on the selling functionality to be inline with the new tool module system that we’ve implemented. This should allow us to only attach this module to any others that we want to be able to sell and keep any other modules free to do another action should they not implement it!

Olly – Junior Programmer

So I reached the magical point (code climax) in time where I’ve committed the base of work for our vehicle system. The new designers can now get their hands on the basic tools to adjust stats and spawn vehicles with a variety of variables which can be modified to change the feel and look.

Marcin – Designer

This has been a rather eventful week. First of all we’ve had some additional meetings and designs for our AI, which with the new system almost done can properly take off the ground.We are solidifying the set of archetypes we want to focus on in the first place, and we are referencing games such as Halo, Dishonored, Half-Life and Doom to help us with that. Secondly, tis the season to get the common cold, so I am currently all about that and writing this from my bed. I should be back up and running on Monday.

Tom W – Designer

Hey guys, I’ve had a pretty busy week. One the one hand, it’s been full of meetings about our ai and animation pipeline, and on the other, I’ve been busy working on our base material layers for the more barren/desert portions of our landscape, which you’ll all hopefully appreciate!

Previously, I was having issues where we’d have a great looking sand material, and some lovely rocks, but when it came to combining them they didn’t look particularly natural or cohesive. To solve that, I’ve developed a workflow which keeps everything much more grounded in the same core biomes. Once they’re all combined in engine, all this hard work should result in a much more photorealistic world for you all to explore!

Thomas W – Designer

This is my first blog post for Eden Star but I have been working behind the scenes for a while on overhauling the crafting system. I’m still in the early stages of planning as and have been looking at how a player progresses throughout the crafting system to try and make the mining and initial crafting stages is more streamlined, but also try to keep the depth and creativity possible in the later stages.

Right now that means consolidating the basic raw materials required for simple base building, but making significant upgrades and buildables required key materials that are much rarer in the world. Hopefully this should mean you can get up and going quickly and spend less time mining and more time exploring for those key materials.

I want to make sure that the direction we’re heading with crafting feels right, and more importantly fun, with the rest of the upcoming additions and changes. So you can view my ‘wonderful’ ideas and planning spreadsheet here (many aspects are work in progress or ideas and not final) to take a look at what we’re doing.

Sam – Concept Artist

I’ve shifted from vehicles and started producing some silhouettes for different mite versions with a variety of abilities. There are a bunch of other plans for variations of creatures but I’ll leave that to speculation ;D

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been planning the archetypes of AI we will have in the world with the rest of the guys, taking references from all the games we love. I have also been experimenting with sharing of rigs for multiple characters so that we can get more use out of a single skeleton into multiple AI varieties.

Andy – Lead QA

We have had some fixes made to both multiplayer and turrets that I had the chance to test this week and I am happy to report that the turrets are working as expected and multiplayer, though there are still a few issues, is coming together nicely.

On a slightly different note I would like to thank all of the members of the community who take the time to post on the forums. I know Early Access can be a slow and sometimes arduous process, but all the love and support you show us each week on the forums is massively appreciated and I would encourage you all to keep posting.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix