Greetings Pioneers,

This week we have been continuing final design work on the starting area, we’ll be going into more depth over what we’re currently working through one major thing being early implementation of the 3rd person mode. The movement is very important to making the Pioneer feel real, so the majority of the time is being spent refining the feel of this as we play test the new opening areas.

Many hours have been spent discussing grand ideas and scribbling on the white boards, Andy, Matt, John, and our two new guys Alex and Tom are primarily driving this important aspect of the game forward. Some discussions were the type you could imagine your 9 year old self having, full to the brim with outlandish ideas and mechanics that were so far out of scope that you can’t even imagine the big budget guys taking a run at them.

We’ve been bolstering the design team as you may of noticed, so we are ready to get our teeth stuck into how these locations will feel and play out. All of the locations in this feature are in their early layout stages, the pretties will come when we’re happy with the game play intended for those spaces. A large majority of planning time is going into themes for the colony bases where we’ll be creating a more distinct feeling of history and story behind these locations.

This will also allows us to provide a defined play space for specific encounters and battles, which will ultimately be rewarded by finding rarer loot.

The design documentation for these areas has been finalised this week, after hours of writing and rewriting the doc we went on to the job of breaking the entire design doc down into tasks for our internal Trello boards.

This then gives us the opportunity to really get down to juicy details. There were lots of exciting discussions, reference collection and people standing with a blank expression, eyebrows raised and squinting slightly as they try to recall some obscure game, movie or TV show as a reference. After the initial break down of the tasks there’s a further break downs to a more granular level that then allows us to get a better scope of the time involved.

We’re now at the stage where we have paper designs, critical path diagrams, and silhouettes added to images so the level designers could get an idea of scale.

One of our most exciting developments is getting to play test all of this in the 3rd person mode. Which has freshly been implemented with all of our new character animations (video coming at some point soon). This mode is in anticipation of our updated character models going in, but really puts emphasis on the scale of everything we’re creating.

We’re working as fast as we can to get this into the hands of all you wonderful Pioneers, and we’re very excited for the next stages. Our plan is to release these aspects of the game in stages, some in larger updates.

In the mean time you can keep up to date with our current progress here

See you in the fray,

– Team Flix