Greetings all! So it is the end of Sprint 3 and things are coming along wonderfully! We are almost 80% complete with all of our tasks. We didn’t have any slippage from Sprint 3 and we have added a number of additional tasks into Sprint 4. All in all we are doing great and things are really starting to come together for PAX East. The next three weeks leading up to PAX East are going to be busy but our main focus at this point is polish and finishing up any remaining bits of content. Things are really coming together and I am extremely confident the pre-alpha demo is going to be in a great place for PAX East and everyone else when we release it.
I spoke with our audios partners Serial Lab Studios and they gave me some great info about their process for working on the audio in our game. I put up a feature with their details. If you are interested in their process check out the feature here: Audio Process.
Also take a listen at our first audio sample to the public.
Again this week I am going to steal a little image for my section of the news by showing you some more of our UI. Last week you saw the first glimpse of the UI for the exploration portion of the game. This week I’m giving you a sneak peak of the character sheet and inventory screens. As before this is a WIP and may change over the next several weeks.
One of the biggest things this week is that we added in some very basic base building functionality. We plan to expand a lot on this as we work toward alpha, but for the demo we wanted to make sure there was at least some of the system in there to show where we are going with it. As it stands you have some pre-selected locations that you can build various objects in your base to aid in its defense. We’ve also included some objectives that directly tie into your survival for the demo.
When we move past the demo and onto the alpha the base building will not be pre-set to specific locations you will be able to build what you want, where you want it once you’ve setup a base somewhere of your choosing. Additionally, there will be a lot of gameplay around the fact of managing resources and your survivors for who is going to be working on the base and who is going to go out exploring and scavenging. However, in the meantime this initial base building setup should give everyone a good idea of where we are going with the base building.
Along with the base building Chris has added placeable status effects that can be tied to different things in the world, for example barbwire fortifications will slow and damage zombies until they eventually break it apart. This will allow us some great flexibility to add additional flavor to the world in terms of interacting with the environment.
Additionally, Chris has started on the scavenging system. We are still working some kinks out but it is coming along nicely. The system dynamically changes the world as you scavenge and find things altering the look of the world, for example - opening previously closed objects, tipping them over, clearing them out and more. While not a huge feature it does add some nice flavor and solidifies immersion just a little more. With this we want to add some randomness to the scavenging while you are out in the world. So we have a nice little script that we can add as many items to as we want to and also pair a % chance too. This way we can have some items have a 100% chance (if successfully looted) while others may have a 25%. So what we can do here is say you successfully scavenge something - we could set a 100% chance to get a metal scrap, then 25% 3 more times for the same scrap type. This would then guarantee one but add some variance to the node.
Finally we have made some general performance fixes to make things run a little smoother and allow for our expansion as we branch out further into the base building functionality. Over the next week we are working with our partners to get the GUI fully implemented and the demos we have been working on with just pure GUI have been great so I can’t wait to see it in the game.
We have changed around our camera perspective a bit and I think it actually makes things pop even more than before. The first shows one of the areas with the FoW and LoS in effect and no base building fortifications in place.
This next shot shows some of the base fortifications in place and how the player built fires affect LoS.
Kieran made some more enhancements to our characters and actually built out a custom shader that we are using on our characters now that have a lot of great effects! We should have some more detailed shots for you all next week.
Also, I mentioned last week that Kieran was working on an extra little side project. I’m not going to say anymore about it but I do have a piece of art to show from it. You are welcome to speculate on what it is for :)
Mitul has been hard at work helping me out getting images together for the Kickstarter campaign. So nothing directly to show but once you see the Kickstarter you will see plenty of work from him!
Here are some of the other places you can see us this week:
Nice inventory screen. You might wanna desaturate the red a bit.
I will look at this. The red doesn't seem to stand out quite as much in the game.
I like the art, and the music just sets the right mood.
Thanks!! We are really excited about the music and look forward to the possibility of getting some live orchestral work in there as well!!
Looking good so far! Keep up the great work ^_^
Thanks!! We are working hard to get the pre-alpha demo ready for everyone to play and give us feedback so look forward to that within the next few weeks.
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Amazing concept! Looks really great! Good work!
Thanks!!