Greetings Pioneers!

So we’ve been very busy knocking out fixes, like a digital boxer. We’ve been solving some major issues with the game and its performance this week. We’ve begun adding an early version of our long planned survival feature known as ‘corruption’ which in essence is similar to radiation poisoning except without the horrific mutation effects.

Exposure outside of your Eden Kit shield, certain areas of the Island, consumption of contaminated food and attacks from creatures are all planned to influence your corruption level. Luckily you’re able to develop Treatments using the new treatment station which we’ll be implementing with our next release!

John – Lead Designer

Reviewing the build and debugging! We are hitting bug after bug at the moment with the new replication system which has mainly surrounded ownership, this has meant that I came off what I was doing with designs and started to get back into the build to look at supporting testing. This weekend I’ll be creating a build to test from different places in order to launch servers and see what issues we face. If you want to help us out with this over the coming week, please let us know!

Matt – Art Director

Completed our data collection spree with Joe for our rock distribution throughout the Island, this is so we can revise ‘clusters’ of rocks for better visual association/balancing. I’ve also been developing item designs for our corruption treatments, as well as implementing the treatment crafting station, otherwise known as the medical station.

Lee – Technical Director

I have continued this week with looking at a few multiplayer bugs to do with AI and looking at multiplayer performance. I’ve also been looking at changing some of the framework to do with AI to hopefully allow for a quicker turnaround time.

Tristan

This week I have been helping out debugging a load of multiplayer bugs to do with our new structure replication logic including duplicate turrets which sounds like a feature but one of them doesn’t do anything 😀

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve been helping guide Carlos on looking into a bug with loading a save and assigning the correct team affiliation in Multiplayer. This has a bunch of knock-on effects that, once it’s fixed, should mean that a good number of the critical issues are fixed up! So, next week’s build should be looking a lot better once this is complete and in.

Marcin – Designer

I’ve been working on a few experimental features this week, while the work on multiplayer fixes and balancing are going on. Firstly, I implemented the very basic first pass of the Infection mechanic a few days ago. Infection is a new survival statistic, with less combat and more story driven consequences. Infection gets worse the more careless you are (if you eat raw food, breathe contaminated air, don’t treat your wounds, etc.), but you can control it with the use of various treatments. However just like with real diseases, if you abuse one cure too much, it will become less effective. That the general idea.

On top of that I was also further experimenting with the “Stalking” behaviour for the AI. Just to remind that’s the behaviour that should be happening after you are noticed by the creature but before you are attacked. It’s all still in the air, so i’ll give you more details when it’s getting implemented.

Ricky – Developer

Bugs glorious bugs. Bugs are virtuossssaarrrr. I’m a bug, you’re a bug everyones a bug bug. Fixin bugs… chaaa *jazz hands* But seriously, we’ve had a few graphical issues to iron out since we did an optimisation pass on the HUD and inventory screens, which has required careful tweaking to hit that nice middleground where visuals and performance work in unison.

Carlos – Developer

I’ve been looking into structure ownership, figuring out how to make my turrets stop shooting at me and just love me instead. This is a lengthy task, looking into how the server saves our built structures and how it loads them when the server has been shut down.

Joe – Environment Artist

Mainly bug fixes and rock adjustments this week! I’ve also placed the new AI spawners around some of the bases and worked a little on spawners for the large corrupted base. There are still some issues to clean up here but we’re confident it should make base exploration much more exciting.

Disclaimer: the visuals are for clarity of placement only, we aren’t actually adding pink rocks.

I believe I have fixed all the remaining major issues with the Intro sequence, including duplicate Pioneers, cleaning up AI spawners and removing the Pioneer butt-shot (sorry guys). Most of my time has actually been spent removing and re-balancing rock outcrops, focusing on the mountainous/rocky shelf areas, make them more fun to explore and add a reason to explore in the first place!

Lauren – Animator

Moved onto rigging for other creatures and adding flinch animations which we’ve been syncing up with push back attacks such as single blast. Take my word for it, it feels SOO much better with these hit reactions now going into the game.

I also animated myself going on holiday. Kind of like a digital voodoo doll.. and it appears to of worked! I’ve been magically transported to having a few days off before getting back into it next week.

In hindsight animating myself back flip everywhere I go wasn’t such a good idea.

Andy – Lead QA

Once again, this week I have been looking into the issues we are having with multiplayer and relaying them all back to the dev team.

We have debugged our fancy new intro sequence, fixed some minor collision issues with the new medical station asset, did a balancing pass on our first implementation of the new Infection mechanic and working on debugging an audio issue a member of the community is having with single blast.

Massive thanks to @Terik92 (twitter handle) for being so patient and understanding. Go check out his YT channel and show him some love. (https://t.co/XpNtTfKnpy)

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix