Greetings Pioneers!

Breakthrough! We think we have just witnessed the banishing of the dreaded server crash back to the depths of digital hell, this may be jumping the gun but we just had a ‘GO TEAM’ moment, amateurish high fives were flying around the room, the hand to hand connections were less than powerful, but we’re still quite excited.

Aside from some minor client side bug clean up things are promising, and more so our latest development work is very promising as we’ve begun locking down any revisions to the layouts starting our placement of magical loot which utilises the new interaction systems.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this week:

John – Lead Designer

Out of office this week doing very important business stuff <3, but that doesn’t stop me from making development things happen, been calling in several times a day to check up on progress with everyone. No rest for the boss man!

Matt – Art Director

Majority of my time has been creating optimised drop items for placement in world. This is exciting because it makes loot discovery more intuitive for Pioneers, actually seeing a new item as opposed to it being an entire mystery at a glance. We’ll be making a push to get all this new content for discovery into the encounter areas asap.

Lee – Technical Director

Another frustrating week of tracking down crashes with multiplayer, just when you think you have nailed them all. On a positive note though the new areas the art team have created are looking awesome.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been helping out with bug fixing crashes. Still trying to iron out hopefully the last one.

Alex – Designer

Although having contracted the plague this week, I’ve been slogging away making cool art assets this week, it will be one of many landmarks you first see upon starting your adventure, and I’ve also been sculpting terrain, and placing rocks so that you guys can actually get to it.

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve been working on what is being referred to the “Stability Component”, it’s what decides on the appropriate reaction an AI performs when being impacted (Staggering, ragdoll, flinching).

Ricky – Senior Developer

Pickups off le floor is le finished, pending QA at least, this also included use and interaction system updates to work better with drop bags, and being able to drop individual items on the floor instead of them always being drop bags. There’s also now a distinction with use vs hold to use items, drop bags in particular find this useful because they can be accessed via the inventory via tap or just picked up in one go via hold.

And I’ve made good headway to get crafting on the player to welcome the introduction of makeshift items aiding nicely to the progressional flow-angular direction of especially the early game. You’ll surely see more about this in updates.

Tom W – Designer

Working through a terminal interface hero asset for the main Dam rooms and refining/adding to creature placement for the encounters in those areas.

Marcin – Designer

There’s been a lot of bits and bobs I’ve been working on this week. Ricky and I have been putting together the “Interact to Pick Up” mechanic for in-world objects, including minerals, weapons, armour, but also buttons and doors.

With Yves, we’ve been working on the force reaction mechanics, which will allow the AI to flinch and stagger before they “ragdoll”. And last, but not least, Lauren and i have been looking into animation systems for the 3rd person view of the player. There’s still a lot to do but we’re making progress.

Joe – Environment Artist

Fighting off illness like a boss, and although my doctor tells me even a stiff breeze could be enough to finish me off I completed the new entrance/vehicle bay for the Dam location and found a little more time to work on the laboratory tileset!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing with the axe animations and and have started doing more exciting things. Namely involving climbing out of the cryo-chambers inside the all new drop-pod you may have seen some shiny previews of last week…

Andy – Lead QA

So it’s been another stressful week of testing multiplayer only to find various crashes. We have made progress though and Im confident that we will have a build ready for release very soon.

We’ve also had young Jamie in house this week helping me with some of the testing and although his times keeping was a little sketchy and he didnt get the salted peanuts Lee requested, he was a good addition to the team.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix