Greetings Pioneers!

This week we have been making more steady progress on our beautiful, virtual world of Pharus-7 and our new introduction to the game and story.

The abandoned bases are getting more heavily detailed, sound, lighting and atmosphere are being set up and more AI and loot have been placed to get a feel for the encounters we are developing.

See below for what we’ve each been up to in more detail:

John – Lead Designer

There’s been a whole bunch of production this past week that will culminate with a visit to Gamescom at the end of August. The new introduction is now getting there with a number of previous blockers removed or fixed and the core feedback we have had from community for quality-of-life changes are in. These include having “E” to interact, making the hotbar function in a more standard fashion and splitting out tool modules to work more like weapons within the inventory. Next it’s adding all of the pickup and drop items as loot in the feature bases.

Matt – Art Director

Running through a lot of refinements with the guys this week as well as additional detail work for placement of assets and item pickups (especially in our Silo Facility). The lighting in our feature bases has had a lot of tweaking done on the way and it’s beginning to really inject the atmosphere we want in certain rooms.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been busy trying to merge our perforce release stream back into our main working stream. Due to how long it took to get this last release out the streams have diverged quite a bit, so it has been a bit time consuming and very boring!

Tristan – Senior Developer

Tristan is getting married tomorrow! Huge congrats to Tristan and Sarah.

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve been working with the team to fix one final bug with the new axe not being able to be used on foliage, we have our own foliage manager which switches out static mesh instances for actors when they’ve been attacked, our axe needs to tell it to do it’s job.

Tom L – Character Artist

Finished off the mesh work and texture bakes for the game model of the female base character!

Ricky – Senior Developer

Started Working on HUD and UI changes to our weapons system to allow all 10 slots to be used by any weapon or consumable and whatever. A few loose ends have turned up when dropping items which have been looked into and will get sorted soon.

Lauren – Animator

This week we have been focusing on audio for impact effects, improving the current hit and footstep sounds and creating new sounds for hitting a variety of new surfaces such as concrete, rubber, glass and tarmac.

With more surface types to play with now we have the ability to create more sound and particle effects for these surfaces. So when you hit vastly different looking things, you will get different effects, no more alien hives sounding exactly like the aliens and alien trees sounding like rocks, with their own ‘surface type’ they can sound different now, woot!

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I created the final few initial meshes we needed to give us the full visual variety for the Silo/Lab location. Next we need to look at tarting it all up if we’re happy with how it feels!

Alex – Designer

This week I have been adding in different weapons and testing how they play through the Transmitter tower, tweaking AI spawns, making sure it’s not too easy or too hard. Additionally I’ve been doing another pass of modelling of the relay tower, moved it’s location slightly which had a few knock on effects that had to be dealt with, but all of the extra work was worth it to improve the player’s experience.

Tom W – Designer

I’ve been doing some really exciting visualization and concept work this week, that may change the overall look of the game, the aim is to improve the atmosphere and aesthetics overall of Pharus 7, making it a more beautiful but more arid, desolate and intimidating place that you will want to explore.

As always work in the Dam has also continued, i’ve been working with the AI to make sure that they feel a bit more clever and make better decisions based on the situation they find themselves in.

Andy – Lead QA

Had a load of great feedback from the release last week and spent some time chatting to the community about the game in general. Few bugs came up with our latest build in multiplayer which Yves has been looking into for me. Had loads of help from the team’s newest member Jamie with reproducing bugs, catching new bugs and confirming fixes.

The guys have been smashing the work with the new content this week. New audio, melee system tweaks, harvesting foliage with the axe, player interactions in the new structures, tweaks to prop location in the drop pod, concepts/previs for a complete overhaul of the environment, new female pioneer low res character model, populating the new ancient eden kit silo structure. It’s been a busy week.

Jamie – Bugs tester

My first few weeks working with these guys has been amazing and I’m enjoying work more than life itself! This week I’ve been working with Andy, an amazing character whom I dearly love, towards finding and reporting bugs on the newest builds of the game. I’ve also been looking through the steam forums and responding to issues posted by the community. This games making stuff is GREAT! Wooo!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix