Greetings Pioneers!

Happy Friday! This week the new workbench has transformed out of the 2D concept into glorious 3D. Also our player arms have been updated to match with the new suit models, plus the always sneaky Stalker has been coming together with the new AI code.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Mainly been doing the rounds, engaging with the work the guys have been showing off this week. Giving them quite extensive bits of feedback so that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet as we begin to bind this beast together!

Matt – Art Director

For the majority of the time I’ve been focused on bringing our new work bench to life. This is our first step towards tier items that allow you craft the ‘next level’ or valuable compounds and building parts. The bench is meant to be something relatively basic in comparison to the top tear engineering visuals you see with upgraded turrets.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve finally got the majority of functionality out of blueprint into code for the AI. This should give us a nice performance gain. I’m now looking at the AI rotations because we seem to have a few bugs with some of the code base that already exists. I also want to try and polish up some of the perception functionality now we have AI inside buildings and corridors.

Tristan – Lead Developer

This week I have been helping out with the direction for the melee implementation with Carlos, Yves and Marcin. It’s looking pretty good and we are going with something more modular so that we can easily adjust functionality and make sure we get it feeling fun and rewarding to play.

Tom H – Designer

These past couple of weeks I have been redesigning sections of the Silo and Eden Kit Facility areas. The design of these areas will allow players to explore and underground facility that has been overrun with mites and hunters.

By designing these areas to have multiple entrances and various routes to take to the silo players will be able to explore these areas at their own pace and in their own manner and discover the secrets this abandoned Silo has to offer.

Captain Thomas – 3D Wizz Kid

I’ve had fun showing the guys the beauty of Substance Painter, which is going to lead to lots of beautiful new models for you all to enjoy!

As well as that, I’ve been slowly but surely reworking the opening terrain area, ready to hand off to some of the other devs so I can get to work doing the final polish on our cuddly, loving, generally adorable Hunters and Splintermites.

Carlos – Developer

I’ve been busy re-working the new melee system after discussions with Tristan, Yves and Marcin, this modular approach should allow us to build new melee weapons with mix and match functionality!

Lauren – Lead Animator

This week many discussions have taken place regarding AI and our priorities going forward with how we want them to behave. Now that we have Lee’s newly optimised AI code to hand we can start to refine the behaviours and get them feeling right. The stalker animations are still in progress but we now have a nice throw attack to add to the mix. I tried to include a gif but he has a new bug and no longer spawns projectiles, alas hopefully next week we can show you a video of him in the level 🙂

I’ve also had a chance to revamp the 1st person arms to update them with the new character meshes, a few weighting and material tweaks still to do but it’s getting there! (screenshot WIP)

Jamie – QA

This week I’ve been testing out the new makeshift crafting system and I’ve been playing through the updated locations in the game. I’ve also been testing the latest build of the game to find bugs and crashes in both singleplayer and multiplayer.

Andy – Lead QA

I have been looking into the necessity of a few of the pending features, clearing off boards and putting together estimates for John.

From there I have been investigating the crashes we have been having when AI kill the player, looking into the melee rework and evaluating the alterations to the HUD.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix