Greetings Pioneers!

We are steaming ahead with bug fixes this week and everyone has been making great progress. We’ve fixed over 100 in the past four days so we’re getting there! There are still issues left remaining and balancing to do but already the initial 15 gun combinations are looking and feeling great so far. Thank you for your patience with this next update, we really want to make sure it is as stable, optimised and as relatively bug-free as we can get it.

John – Lead Designer

I have been working on ideas for an introduction component to the game that we hope will really help players when starting out while giving initial objectives and direction that make sense from both gameplay and story perspectives.

We’ll be aiming for story and objective driven play to be introduced over additional updates if it doesn’t make it into the initial release of the large map, so watch this space!

Matt – Art Director

Probably my favorite part, the polishing stage. Where everyone else is debugging, the cogs of the art machine are still turning, fixing minor visual bugs and cleaning up effects. My main focus has been further development of outposts and optimising the building system so we can start to allow players to assemble more at a fraction of the cost on the graphics processor.

Most of this involves refactoring and clever smoke and mirrors art and design. Using the culling and LOD system to it’s full extent is essential to making large structures work well across our target system specs. Especially when you have a game that is pushing the envelope for large levels of dynamic destruction, where numerous components/meshes can be onscreen at any one given time.

Lee – Technical Director

This week has been totally devoted to debugging of the new AI. I’ve also been looking at some of the older bugs we have had lying around for a while. Things are coming along very nicely now, hopefully I can turn my attention to doing a bit of optimisation with the new creatures.

Tristan – Senior Developer

Back packing around my local swimming pool. I realised I spend too much time doing actual hiking and adventuring. Although strangely I am drawn to the water, like it’s talking to me, telling me to wade through it’s glorious and cooling liquid.

Then it dawned on me, I must of been a fish in my past life, as memories of my fish brothers and sisters flood my consciousness, I try to express my realisation vocally.. Glub glub.

Joe – Environment Artist

Lots of hardcore bug fixing this week, I’ve mainly been looking at Level and AI issues. I managed to find some time to do a balancing pass over our Flora and Fauna numbers and also started on an initial implementation of in-world ammo counters on the new weapons.

It needs more work though so this will be going on the HUD for now. I’ve also reworked all of our spawn locations in the new map – my aim is to make each start area balanced, provide drive to explore and, of course, be visually awesome 🙂

Yves – Senior Developer

While everybody else is working to make sure weapon models are the right colour, interface lines are just the right thickness, and creatures know which way to turn, which is all very important, I’m sure you’ll agree, it falls down to me to tackle the ground-shattering and game-breaking bugs, such as game crashes, save and load compatibility issues, or major system failures.

We’ve sorted most of them, but there are still one or two that need fixing before we’re all comfortable with the stability of the game.

Ricky – Developer

Lots of excellent progress fixing up sooo many bugs, like, yer or boom or whatever you kids are into nowadays.

Marcin – Designer

What else can I say that the header has not already covered? It’s been pretty much a proper bug fixing week for us all, sponsored by long hours and a lot of hair pulled out. It’s not all doom and gloom however, since this is also a time for finally seeing everything falling into place and experiencing the gameplay as it’s meant to happen, which is extremely satisfying.

We are not looking heavily into balancing at this point, so certain elements are still a bit wonky, but you might be happy to know that I managed to squeeze in a pass over the overpowered Kinetic Laser, which plagues our last release. It’s still powerful but now much more in line with the Gauss Gun.

Tom – Character Artist

The creatures of the deep! I’ve been working on this monster.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been mostly on testing the new level with Andy and fixing bugs where I can. Making a few tweaks to get the animations and reactions of the creatures feeling better. It’s been great to watch the wolves chasing other creatures in the level, it really helps make the world feel more alive.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working on translating the Male armour into a Female version of the same armour set. There are small changes to make it sit better on the female figure but otherwise it will be the same as the current sets down to each layer.

Andy – Lead QA

This week we have really been pushing the debugging and I am happy to say that the entire team have smashed it. It’s been a few weeks since the guys have had any time to really concentrate on fixing bugs in the new Pharus 7 map so to see the fixes going in and the game coming together is really exciting.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix