Greetings Pioneers!

Art and development are advancing ever closer to that alpha release standard. More elements are being tied together, working together and fixed in general. Quality of life fixes have also been worked on such as revamping lighting systems and materials, as well as auto equipping of Items. Finally we are organising getting the art team better hardware to speed up production *whips team*

John – Lead Designer

This week I’ve been looking into a load of business related shizzle! I’m hoping to really get back to it next week in order to start some of the new guys working on getting the new UI sorted and up to scratch. I think we’ll find a bit of a hole with the info screens/map, objectives screen and vehicles once the roaming enemies and new level zone A is complete, so having those components started as soon as possible will help with get the full feel for direction.

Matt – Art Director

Working on piecing together our new male character mesh after finishing the female. Our new character model setup is practically finished so we’ve moved on to putting together an in engine benchmark for the new skin materials to bring them to life a bit more as well.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I’ve been working with Marcin developing the new AI behaviour planners and identifying any bugs along the way. I’ve also been looking into giving the level designers the ability to have the AI run a specific script of tasks instead of running their normal planner so we can have AI react to specific events in a certain way.

Tristan – Senior Developer

I’ve been working with John and Andy to get new workstations for the art team. I am currently on holiday with my lovely wife and plan on coming back revitalised and ready to kick ass.

Yves – Senior Developer

Improving melee combat with the introduction of blocking and parrying, with a bit of luck I would have got the finishing move in too, otherwise that’s coming in next week.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Made good progress on the consumable weapon which is needed to complete our new 1-10 equippable slots work.

I’ve also been working on some auto arm on pickup functionality which will mean you can walk over weapons, armour or equippable weapon consumables while having empty hotbar slottage to send em straight there and get using them without all the fun of opening the inventory UI first.

I’ve also been debugging the objectives save system to get it designer ready.

Marcin – Designer

This week, I’ve been working with Lee on the perception checks for the AI. We’ve been looking into compartmentalising perception data so that instead of coming in big compound chunks we can gather and access only as much as is needed. Also Lauren and I have been putting together generic humanoid Aim Offset assets, which will allow us to aim the upper body of any humanoid accurately no matter what weapon or locomotion pose it’s currently using.

Joe – Environment Artist

So I’ve been reviewing some of the rather lovely art Tom’s been implementing for the starting area of the game, as well as having many many discussions with Rick on how to go about reworking the in-game UI to make everything clearer and more concise for you guys, based on Matt’s concepts. I’ve started with new visuals for the hotbar to complement the new functionality the other guys have added in.

Tom W – Designer

Over the last few days, I’ve been completely reworking the way we approach texturing, especially with regards to things like landscape and foliage. The benefits of this should include a massive reduction in the amount of memory being used by the game at any point in time, as well as allowing us to do some nifty effects down the line with regards to terrain changes. On top of that, I’ve reworked our skylights to adjust according to the time of day, which should lead to much more cinematic lighting throughout the game.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been animating new attacks for the Stalker, which has been slightly neglected for a while, we’re looking forward to adding new behaviour that is different from other AI and actually add more characteristics that will make the name make a little more sense, having it stalk the player before attacking, dart in and out of combat and hopefully be a little more interesting to engage with. I have also started rigging up our shiny new player character meshes woot!

Andy – Lead QA

John has forced me to do all the exciting things such as writing documents and pricing up components for new workstations. But as soon as I’d knocked that out of the park I got back to the good stuff…

I’ve been testing the crafting on player mechanic along with the new hotbar work done by Ricky and Joe. We also had a big change with the terrain that was implemented into the engine and I got to run around a section of the world that’s looking vastly different to what you guys will be used to. Tom, Matt and Joe have done an amazing job.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix