Spencer
Hi Guys,
We’ve been on mega crunch mode the last month working to get a ton of new features into the upcoming patch. It was an ambitious task to begin with and to throw a spanner in the mix we lost half our programming team (Tom) for the foreseeable future :'( which has definitely put the pressure on. (For those worried, Tom is fine but unfortunately has had to attend to a family emergency).
That said we have a pretty epic update on our hands with a TON of stuff that’s been in the pipelines for a long time coming together.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few weeks on creature upgrades, our AI system while efficient at doing what it currently does isn’t the easiest to add functionality to. At some point soon I hope to have time to give it a decent overhaul and replace it with a behavior tree system I’ve had my eye on for a while. In the meantime, I’ve added some new behaviour like leaping off the ground, fleeing if too close and running parallel to the player to make the interactions more complex (not just kiting in one direction).
It’s been a ton of work getting new animations, skeletons, ragdolls etc into the game but the new creature diversity on the islands is definitely worth it.
SAM Sites
I spoke briefly about mining with rockets last blog, to make things interesting in these zones that are primarily designed to be flown around we needed some PVE tools to make things more interesting. This is where our new Surface to Air missile turret comes in!
This badboy is deadly accurate, and will mess up your Mozzy if not avoided correctly giving us some really interesting denial of airspace functionality. Not only can we force Mozzys into things like valleys and force them to fly through areas at high speed, but we can deny areas of the map all together making them on foot only. We plan to extend these turrets to our construction system so that players can deploy their own turrets to shoot down enemy Mozzys, this will probably be coming next patch.
Iron Doors and Floors
Part of fixing up explosions from SAM site rockets I was able to resolve our issues blocking us from implementing the Iron door, while I was at it I added an iron floor / ceiling to go with it. We will keep an eye on raid balance and adjust accordingly.
Early Access Remains for Now
Our original plan was to leave Early Access with this patch, given the amount of new features we’ve added, and limits to our team this month we aren’t going to get the game to a level of polish that we wanted. We will spend more dedicated time on bug fixes, performance optimisation and quality of life features in the coming months before removing the Early Access tag. This is merely a marketing choice and doesn’t really affect the patch we are releasing.
Release will be going out at 10pm Melbourne time on Tuesday the 18th.
Mils
We’ve been really busy getting ready for this Islands Update which is looking pretty huge.
I’ve been quietly smashing out art assets and there have been quite a few varied things I’ve been working on so get ready for a deluge.
Firstly the Easter Island style head statue. This was a quick model I made to decorate the islands.
We added SAM launchers to the islands to create interesting Mozzy game play elements. This was really fun to work on.
These I made form the existing creature meshes and textures. These will be the items that sit in your inventory or drop on the ground when you throw them out of your backpack.
This is a new resource called Galvanite. It is a large node which can be mined by firing the Mozzy’s rockets at it. We wanted this to have a lot of contrast between the materials so it can be seen from a fair way away.
Below: The Galvanite node you mine with a Pickaxe
This is the small shard that breaks off the Galvanite resource nodes.
Lastly I made some set pieces for the new islands to dress them up and add to game play.
HENRY
The beast that is the in depth trailer keeps growing. it is currently a maze of clips and audio. This week we have added several new sections, which required me to pick up the mic again and add to the voice over which is very difficult to match tone and pace. The new sections feature some community footage as well as the new sam sites and islands.
With new creatures comes new sounds. I have spent a few days pooling audio from a library which will be mashed together in a frenzy of pitch shifting and reverb to make something truly awful.
Can’t wait to share this with you all next week.
TEHSPLATT
Hello, deep in environment world at the moment. We’ve run through a bunch of iterations on the islands and they are taking shape now. The hardest part was trying to a make sure players couldn’t exploit any mechanics we built into the islands, it took a whole lot of test playing and redesigning to get some enjoyable islands down. One of the funnest things has been the Mozzy islands. They are essentially small race tracks, based off of drift tracks in Japan made for lower powered cars so there’s a lot of tight linking corners and minimal straight sections. We wanted to actually challenge Mozzy pilots, so we’ve added resources you have to try shoot to mine fast enough that you avoid being shot by the Sam Sites. This will take practice, but is an extremely rewarding challenge. I’ve been working on making sure the islands really feel different and interesting. It took me a while to break the habit of using the basic formula we have on the main land. Still a lot to do, have to fix what ever is broken on the main land and repaint/add a bunch of stuff. Here’s some islands.
