Greetings Pioneers!

More delicious progress has been made in the way of art this week, with landscape details coming into being and new tilesets for the various abandoned structures around the world being textured up. Our pipelines are also being refined to speed up the environment development process as we progress.

We’ve also been continuing development of the 3rd person movement now that you can see yourself run around from the perspective of a disembodied spectator (or camera if you prefer).

John – Lead Designer

They call me the juggler, the puzzle solver, the dynamic dancer, the Instant inspector. I move and weave in and out of all development areas like a warming breeze. Collating information and relaying back to the holy spreadsheet, the magnificent matrix, the holy document. Firing up the workflow wizard. This is the magic that turns the wheels of the machine and stops them from falling off. I am the glue man.

Alex – Designer

I’ve moved on from the relay hero piece and am now on task texturing the modular assets for our “Maintenance kit”. You’ll see these used in a few places but predominantly in Dam area.

As we are using modular kits, I’ve started by making some high detail trims and tiling sheets, to which i’ll be unwrapping the kit too, This workflow speeds up the texturing/unwrap processes and gives us more variation to a high quality standard with much less work in the end, so that we can get these assets out to release much faster for you guys 🙂

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been re-checking everything that has changed with the AI to make sure its all working the way I expect in world. I’ve also been looking into managing the creation and destruction of AI to try and eliminate some of the garbage collection overhead.

Tristan – Lead Developer

I have gone to another end of the earth (Nepal this time) for the wondrous post wedding formality that is know as the ‘honeymoon’. I always thought the moon was made of cheese and not honey.. So the term still perplexes me. See you all in the never ending world of 1’s and 0’s when I get back from tasting the moon of honey.

Joe – Lead Artist

Spent the week basking in the all the glorious art being produced by the other guys! I’ve been hashing out pipelines with Alex with regards to the modular sets so that we can hopefully end up with a huge visual variety of playable areas without it taking too long to get it out to you guys 🙂 First up is the “Maintenance” set which will form the basis of a large portion of our interior areas.

Tom W – Designer

Things have really progressed this week, with the pre-terraformed landscape material just about complete. Emphasis needs to be placed on the “pre-terraformed” part, we’ll definitely still be getting the lush jungle areas you’re all used to!

It’ll need to be refined in future with regards to things like different sub-biomes, but overall it’s looking really good both close-up and far away. The system has been designed to be completely procedural, allowing the level designers to focus on the important gameplay related tasks, rather than laboriously hand-placing individual rocks and clumps of grass across the the entire world.

Matt – Art Director

Now we have the new characters on the ground in third person running about, it was quite obvious that the ground level visuals still need more work to ensure it fits with the higher level of detail. Tom in particular has been working towards surface details that are automatically generated, yet will also provide enough variety to ensure not one spot on the ground looks the same.

I’ve been tasked with some tough decisions over the level and ultimately a lot will be changing (for the better) to cater for some of these new procedural elements. This is something I want ready for our next big update, full steam ahead folks! Toot toot.

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week I have been a bit under the weather but have been working on third person animations for all those lovely Axe swings. I have also been continuing to refine animations and blending, while fixing up various blueprint bits to get the third person axe showing up in the third person hands, now if it would only cause damage 😉

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve spend most of my week looking at collision issues we have been having with the lovely new terrain rocks Matt and Tom have main. I also had a lot of fun looking into networking this week with Matt and by a lot of fun I mean it was soul destroying. haha

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix