New Map
This week, we began working on a map to introduce game mechanics to players in the form of a tutorial. Here you can see a screenshot of the level as it is being created. The large area is a weapon practice range. Targets will respawn several seconds after being destroyed, allowing players to try different weapon combinations. In the future, we will add targets with varying amounts of health and armor.
New tutorial area being developed
While developing this new map, we’ve had a chance to better define gameplay zones. We’ve created zones that allow players to change gear, as well as zones that will warn players when they are straying too far from the battlefield. When a player strays too far from the battle, their screen will fade to a black and white effect, reminding them that they are out of bounds.
Character Animation
We are beginning to work with motion capture technology to create higher quality animations. This is new territory for our animation team, but the early results have been very exciting to watch. We’ll have more to show from this in the future.
We recently identified an issue with our 3d asset development pipeline that was causing problems with cloth physics. Our 3d artists working in Blender were using meters as their measurement unit, while Unreal Engine uses centimeters. The end results were the same size, so we didn’t suspect that anything was wrong until we started experiencing issues while creating cloth elements for character designs.
A lot of work has been going into character turn-in-place logic. Its approaching the desired results, but its not quite there yet. This has been a personal project for me, and while sometimes frustrating, its been a lot of fun to work on.
Performance Optimization
For the past two weeks we’ve been prototyping building destruction. We quickly got the results we were looking for, but at a heavy cost to frame rate. After a few more days of work, we believe the code is now optimized. It shouldn’t cause any more frame rate problems.
Miscellaneous
Our audio team recently created new sound effects for some of our weapons. The new sounds feel more high-tech and fit with the overall art style of the game better.
We are continuing to polish the UI, and have designed some new menu layouts that we will be creating over the next couple of weeks. One new UI system that is already working is a system announcement system. We use this system to display important messages to the player, warning them when enemies have taken an objective, or showing an error message if they are attempting to craft something they can’t afford at the moment.
If you haven’t already, you’re invited to join our Discord community (https://discord.gg/KDGU6vr). Alpha testing will be announced soon, and Discord is a great way to get to know the dev team and learn more about the game.
Thanks for reading, see you in the next blog post!
Silas Talley, Creative Director
