Greetings Pioneers!

Blog it! We’ve been making more progress with the AI, getting all of Lee’s new AI code into the game, which has temporarily broken things, but we’re still moving in the right direction! Thanks Lee <3 This should allow for greater flexibility and varieties of behaviour for our in world encounters.

Our new characters are getting textures and new customisability setup put on them, with the intent to allow for user defined colouring.

See details of what we’ve been up to below:

John – Lead Designer

Working in tandem with Andy to get the guys moving the content into the game. Main priority is working through the planned changes to crafting and environmental systems with the developers.

Matt – Art Director

I’ve been working with the guys on the new environment art direction as well as creating our template for customisable character colours. At the moment there are several different coloured areas you can define, including the base undersuit, it’s padded areas and defined trim patterns. Our aim is to also include different surface patterns as well as custom logos that players can interchange.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have managed to integrate the new AI behaviour system into our Main branch. Now it’s just a matter of giving it some play testing to iron out any bugs.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Continuing work on the UI hotbar 1-10 slots being usable by all items. When this is finished one cool thing it will allow is modules to handle more functionality each.

So for example instead of blast being left click and grab/mine being right click, each one of these modules will be able to control their own functionality for each key. The blast module will be able to use left or right click, or tertiary fire in it’s own way.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I worked with the other arty-types on improving the TabMenu layout. I also cast my eye over the awesome stuff Tom & Al are cooking up. Mm mm mm, tasty. Not sure about all the sand though; it’s coarse and rough and irritating.

Marcin – Designer

Lee’s integrated some very important code work, which I’ve been waiting for to continue working on the melee combat for both the player character and the AI. Earlier this week I’ve had spectacular time filling out animation spreadsheets so we can keep track of which animations we have, which we don’t, which are essential, which aren’t and most importantly which ones we can re-use in multiple places. Spreadsheets are life, spreadsheets are love. More recently I’ve been putting together the defensive side of melee combat, namely block, parry, and stagger mechanics. I’m on the second iteration now, going strong, working out a good formula for parry window timings.

Tom W – Designer

I’ve spent the last week experiencing the joys of working with World Machine, generating all the lovely new pretties for our new starting area’s landscape. As well as that, I’ve been building new shaders for our rocks and landscape, allowing them to blend together seamlessly as seen in some recent game releases. Really excited to show off the work Alex and I have been doing!

Alex – Designer

This week I’ve been a busy beaver hard at work making particle effects for the new revamped starting area of the game. Dust, Sand, Clouds and Tumble-weeds are just some of the new cool things you can expect to see in the near future.

Lauren – Animator

This week has been another week of refining animations for the melee and working with Marcin on the new player locomotion system. We now have a better idea of where we are at with it and the animations left to do. There has also been discussions on the AI now that we have Lee’s work starting to be put into the main branch. I’ve been looking into references for AI animations for various behaviours such as seeking cover and stalking the player.

Andy – Lead QA

I’ve been working on designs for new melee weapons, meeting regarding the 3rd person player movement and design meetings and reviews of the new terrain pass we are working on.

I also had to sit in on a web seminar for Lee. The audio was rubbish and the content was stuff we already know. I have a sneaky suspicion that Lee knew all this beforehand and was just trolling me.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix