Greetings Pioneers!
Today we’re bringing you a rather extensive update on what the team have been working on this past week as we push towards multiplayer. We’ve transitioned to Unreal Engine 4.8 this week as well, which should help us bring improvements to the game through more streamlined tools. Lee - Technical Director This week I’ve been working on implementing our new flying fauna and trying to tweak the pathing so it looks right.
I’ve also begun work on introducing our new reactive flora to the world, so beware!
Tristan - Senior Developer
My main task has been to continue on with foliage optimisation because as you can see every one else in the team seems to want to make more foliage stuff. Oh and writing Ricky’s development update.
Carlos - Developer
This week I’ve been working on our first pass of the multiplayer lobby system UI! In addition to this I’ve also laid out the first set of graphical options for all you Pioneers to toggle at your delight!
Chris - Designer
I have been working prototyping the feasibility of adding propagating fire into the game. I have also been looking into external tools to aid us expanding the world within a short turn-around period.
Ricky - Developer
Ricky is not here to write this himself so I (Tristan) have taken the time to do it for him. Kind of me I know. Ricky has been working on a new construction user interface to allow you to navigate our new build system. For all you builders out there. We hope you will like it.
Joe - Environment Artist
This week I’ve been working on creating the final art assets for one of our new Interactive Foliage prototypes (lovingly named the Exploding Sac Plant). I have also been working on creating initial concepts for future biomes and other weird and wonderful Interactive flora.
Please note: This is a work in progress and as such the visuals are subject to change.
Matt - Art Director
Through most of this week I’ve been throwing together an example of the possible structures that can be made from the new build components to set a precedent for the final quality we are looking for, and to verify all the pieces make sense and work well together.
This has taken the form of a multiplayer map which we’ll be using to test some of the basic and more complex interactions that take place in Eden Star.
Please note: This is a work in progress, visual benchmarks for game systems are only
representative of what we would like everyone to eventually be able to build in game.
Yves - Senior Developer
This week I’ve been working on more super complex multiplayer stuff, namingly hurting people remotely... with guns! And making their bodies go all limp. I’ve been working on other stuff too, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise! I’ll let you know next week :)
Lauren - Animator
This week I have been working hard on multiplayer weapon animations, setting up directional aiming and turning on the spot, as well as fixing some blending issues. It’s no where near perfect yet, but it's getting there.
Not happy with how characters turned on the spot in many other games, I wanted to try and get it looking better in Eden Star, without the feet sliding around. So far so good, now I just need to get it to replicate...
Andy - Lead QA
I’ve been working on the bugs that arose from updating our UE4 engine along with working on some of the bugs the community have been posting on the Steam forums and our public Trello board.
Gav - Concept Artist
This week we’ve been conceptualising a huge variety of creatures ranging from new apex predators to roaming, neutral faunas which will gradually begin to inject more life into the environments.
As always you can keep an eye on our more immediate progress with our Public Trello Board.
Happy hunting Pioneers!
Looks interesting but would love to hear more about what exploration will look like in this game. Will the main focus of the this game be tower defense (as this seems to be the direction) or will there actually be exploration into more of a sandbox world? My fingers are crossed there is much more planned in regards to "things to do" and a much bigger world. Thank you and good luck!
Hey Shakes!
It's something that we think we have some really cool ideas for but we may need to look at something special in order to deliver the full experience that we want to... All I'll say is that exploration will begin with a FAR greater sized world map, a reason to explore and re-explore, and fresh yet natural objectives (as skyrim style - "fetch this" or "protect that" missions won't keep the game fresh for long and will be too much to put into the game along with all of the other content we have planned). There should be something that has a procedural, or at least random, generation involved.
Because this is still in the design phase I don't want to say too much yet, only because the design may need to change dependant on progress with multiplayer. Thanks again for your support!
J