Greetings Pioneers!

It has been another busy week of continuous feature implementation, optimisation, debugging, tweaking and polishing creatures and features. Although this may sound the same as last week, a lot of the mechanics are now at an internally testable stage. There will be a lot of bugs to fix once we finish tying all the new systems together but we are making steady progress with it all. Check out our individual progress below:

John – Lead Designer

Staying on top of the team, but not literally because that would just be weird. Been pushing the guys to keep on track with our current production plan.

Some features are moving faster than others and it looks like we’ll be hitting our debugging and testing phase in one week’s time. This could potentially mean a possible release to our experimental branch sooner than later for community members that would like to opt in, so let us know if you would like to get involved in our testing phase on the steam forums or in the comments and we’ll look at giving you more details on this soon!

Matt – Art Director

Shiny metal things, shiny metal things that propel shiny metal things. Shiny metal things flying everywhere. The weapons have been getting their final pass treatment, this can only mean one thing.. Better looking shiny metal things will be in your shiny metal gloves very soon.

Lee – Technical Director

At the start of the week I was finishing off a few implementation details with the Wolf, before moving onto the Elephant. I’m now in the process of starting to debug the new creatures and polish them ready for the next release.

Tristan – Senior Developer

The modular weapon system is nearing completion. Well the implementation part anyway. Then it’s time for the balancing. As well as the modular weapon system I have been looking into possible rendering and gameplay optimisations for our large colony bases with the help of Matt and The Designers.

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve been working on updates to do with the save system in preparation for new building features, I’m in the final stages of getting that working.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been mostly working on the animations for the ‘bear’. This is a Juggernaut-class neutral creature with, long claws, a big temper and a powerful swipe. I have also been working on bits and pieces for our other creatures along with Marcin and Lee, refining and tweaking to polish them for release.

Ricky – Developer

A rather busy week indeed. The UI for modular weapon crafting/assembly and attachments is now functional for testing but still needs some remaining parts finishing off, along with changes to how these 3 UI’s and other UI elements in the UIMenu look and behave with each other such as tabs and where they sit on top of each other in different scenarios.

Joe – Environment Artist

Lots of different bits this week, mainly with tweaking and fixing many elements of the UI and adding in my icons from last week for the modular weapon components, final weapons and attachments. I created a widget to allow us to display Tooltips over hovered UI elements which should help with making the game more friendly for new players. Other UI bits and pieces include an initial pass of the new reticle textures and adding in stats for all barrel and receiver combinations.

Alongside this I’ve had some time to get back into the level and get it polished for release. I’ve fixed a load of level issues that have been bugging me for ages and made a few improvements to detail textures. In more exciting news, 4 new creatures that the other guys have been working on are now walking around the level, and I’m in the process of adding new lakes and rivers to expand our Underwater biomes!

Marcin – Designer

Good evening everyone. Along with Lauren and Lee, we have been working on implementing additional creature to populate the world with. Our goal for this week was to get 4 of them finished: a deer-style creature, a wolf-like creature and two crustacean-style creatures: the Scuttlecomb and the Bloodpod.

We managed those, and also got some work in on the two new juggernaut class creatures: the elephant-style and the bear-style animals, so hopefully if we get enough time, we can bundle them together in the future release. As you can see we are still very bad at naming the animals on time, so if you guys have some nice ideas, please let us know in the comments, on steam, or on our public trello board.

Simone – Concept Artist

I was away at the beginning of the week, so I have been catching up the last couple days on changes to the big fish concept and continuing work on the Eden Kit upgrade concepts. I’m also working on creating some marketing pieces for the game.

Tom – Character Artist

Under the sea, under the sea. Down here all the fish is happy, as off through the waves they roll. The fish on the land ain’t happy, they sad ’cause they in their bowl. Working on the models for the sea creatures!

Andy – Lead QA

With the pace the guys have been working at we haven’t really had many new builds with fixes in because the team are fully focused on getting all the new features implemented. However I did manage to get my hands on a build with a load of the new AI in. Yes they still need a little work, but it’s been so much fun watching the world really come together and feel alive!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix