Greetings Pioneers!

We know you eager explorers want to know when we’re releasing the update.. we’re now in the process of crushing the last bugs so expect to see the new turrets soon.

More specifically there are a few critical issues left to resolve as a result of our most recent engine update, namely a crash in multiplayer, so we thank you for your patience while we rid the game world of those pesky, fun destroying bugs!

Here’s what we’ve been upto:

John – Lead Designer

I’ve been looking into balancing the turrets this week against the enemies as it looks like the enemies have been too overpowered in the past. The knock-back on enemies has been throwing up some issues which means we need to rewrite the way that this works to accumulate a knock-back value before eventually ragdolling. It’s technical stuff! 🙂

Matt – Art Director

Mainly texture and material cleanup and setup that manages the animation of turrets. Spent the last part of the week on LOD mesh generation for the new turrets and Eden Kit levels. Here’s a quick breakdown from start to finish for the final level missile turret.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have continued with work to do with the AI behaviours. The main idea is that we can attach behaviours to any object and it should allow for quicker design ideas to be tried out.

Ricky – Developer

Working through turret debugging, a few critical issues with their behaviour had to be addressed. In particular a strange one due to cool down times being set incorrectly, causing the last level of the laser turret to target enemies but never actually open fire. Encouragingly, we are on track to cleaning these up for our next release very soon.

Tom – Character Artist

Working on the new base suits for the Pioneer male and female characters. Very early work in progress for the male suit Torso.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working on the 3rd person animation blueprint to get smoother motions and transitions between actions. I have been looking into getting in more variants for player movement, Idles and poses that should help to add more realism.

Joe – Environment Artist

Working on upgradable Turret polish this week – I added unique upgrade trees and nodes, made a bunch of icons for them and added new descriptions. I tweaked the turret firing PFX too as they were a little bit weak-looking!

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been working on the issues that arose from upgrading the engine. Also been continuing to test and polish the new turret, focusing on PFX, animations and balancing.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix