Greetings Pioneers!

The development continues with haste. A lot of cool new art assets have been introduced to improve the look and feel of the drop pod area, as well as an entirely new set of ship debris which has been put together to represent the parts of the Eden Star. Or more accurately what’s left over.

Here’s what we’ve been upto:

John – Lead Designer

Been pressing the team to complete their current tasks and move onto some missing elements like our revised scanner. As we enter the summer our update is edging closer, and so the guys here at Flix are starting to really tighten up the quality. You’ll be seeing that quality improvement and more in our coming blog updates.

Matt – Art Director

Focusing my artistic efforts on bringing the airlock area of the drop pod upto scratch. I’ve been pushing the art team to get some quite hefty chunks of work into the game for use as well, such as our Kit for crashed ship debris which will house a bunch of interesting things for you to find and pick up.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been in a few meetings this week as we work out which parts of the AI combat are fun and which parts need improvement. We have also been discussing the reactions of AI not only to being hit, but reacting to what the player does during combat, which I’ve now made a start on implementing.

Tristan – Lead Developer

I have been creating some tools for the rest of the guys for adding new destructibles to the bases in the world. It should keep things optimal performance wise and allow us to make bases a bit more fun.

Tom W – Environment Wrangler

Following a well earned holiday, I’ve been focusing on modelling a new set of tents for our initial encampment, as well as really starting to push the hostile martian planet feeling with our atmospherics!

Carlos – Developer

I’ve been getting stuck in with setting up our melee functionality in code, fine tuning it and making sure that it feels good! This should hopefully allow us to make new melee weapons with similar functionality but with different feels to them!

Joe – Lead Artist

This week I’ve been overseeing some of the new and rather lovely sci-fi warning prompts we’ll shortly be adding to our heads up display. There’s a lot I want to change and improve with what’s in the current Steam build but this bit takes priority as it’ll introduce our players to the world and all the interesting changes the team have been making. Also, icons!

Marcin – Designer

This week I’ve working mostly on the objective system again. We’ve outlined a small campaign for the beginning of the game and I am slowly implementing all the elements and interactions to make it a reality. My biggest focus for the system is the modularity. I want to create simple tools that will allow us to put together missions in minutes, as opposed to bespokely implementing every mission individually.

OG Tom W – Designer

This week I’ve been busy with a lot of different things as many different elements come together. The new tool built by Trist makes placing destructibles in the world much easier for us designers, so we have been reviewing some existing bases and drawing up designers for new wreckage pieces that take advantage of this. Also I have been implementing and fixing the first stages of crafting and building, making sure all the schematics are correct. All this is driving forward the gameplay elements so we can get to a fully playable state as soon as possible.

James Brady – Environment Artist

For Eden Star, I was tasked with creating a modular set based on a ship that crash landed, which could be placed around a wreckage site/point of interest. This wreckage site would contain resources for the player to gather. I created this set in way that allowed for it to be placed manually by the art team or procedurally placed by the engine in random variations. I created a texture set inspired by sci-fi games such as DOOM.

Tom H – Designer

This week I have been working hard getting the landscapes in the first areas up to scratch. This includes creating new areas that were previously flat into wonderful steep cliffs with several ways around. This new cliff tool we developed allows me to easily place cliffs and create the edges of the landscape very quickly. All of this coupled with some very artistic rock placements leads to an environment overhaul that is as efficient as it is good looking.

Sam – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working on a small redesign for the shelters that you’ll find scattered around the game, as well as other items such as the transmitter unit and the in-game interface graphics. All three of these elements tie into the first few minutes of the game along the golden path, an area which we as a team have been focusing on quite intently, as the opening moments of a game can easily make or break the initial experience. I’ll likely be doing some similar stuff next week once some decisions have been made!

Andy – Lead QA

I’ll be back on Monday, and oh boy am I looking forward to getting back and cracking my liquorice whip of quality control. The team are going to be in for a treat.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix