Development Update 30.05.2025

Hello everyone, welcome to this week's progress report. 

Level: 
This week, we continued our work in the Pillar Region, placing large-scale roots to give the area the dense, overgrown feel of thick undergrowth. These additions help reinforce the region’s unique atmosphere.
Tech Art returned to landscape and material work, testing features such as tessellation and improved color grading to enhance visual fidelity.
Meanwhile, Level Artists addressed internal feedback for the Adûn dungeon, implementing targeted improvements and bringing in the next batch of props to further develop the Alpha Camp.

Code:
This week, we have finished implementing the ranged combat AI. We will most likely need to tweak and balance it a bit here and there, but everything is there feature-wise.

We have also been working on improving ammo handling, resolving issues like picked up projectiles not getting merged with equipped projectiles and the weapon not remembering which ammo it had last loaded when shot empty.

In the sandbox we added the ability to override existing morph target values of characters (For example, breast deformation on costumes). This way your custom imported clothes can also deform the character if needed. Other morph targets that are usually controlled by outfits like "elf ears" or "cumflation" can also be controlled more granularly this way, offering a greater range and interpolation instead of just "off" and "on".

A few more quality of life features were also added:
All options that reference externally loaded assets (models, textures, media etc.) now have a "Reimport" button, which will clear that asset from the game's cache and reimport it from scratch. This way you don't need to go back to the main menu or constantly change the name of the asset just to see it update in game.
We also added Copy/Paste buttons to various settings panels to easily copy data between objects. These panels include the prop settings, fingers/toes, events (updated) and the new outfit customization. In the case of prop settings, the prop type is not important, if you copy some prop with a "Color" setting, any other prop that has a setting named "Color" can have that data pasted into.

Character:
We are currently working on research into how to best display body hair for our boss-character. We have also been transferring a few of the new outfits over to other characters.

Animations: 
In the animation department we turned our attention to finisher moves this week. These will trigger when attacking an exhausted enemy and deal an extra large chunk of damage in a special, paired animation (despite their name they do not necessarily kill). We also continued our work on the final boss. 
On the cutscene front, the mocap cleanups are progressing well and are speeding up with the growing familiarity of the raw mocap to polished states. Currently, we are still working on the "reading datacube" cutscene, which is close to completion.

Design:
We implemented the missing blockout versions of the boss intro and side quest cutscenes. The bosses which got a cutscene are Chakkar in Apoc, Gorgh the Meatgrinder in the cannibal caves, and Lazra the commander of Adûn. Quests that got cutscenes are 'Going into the Woods' showing Rhoc's transformation, and 'Pain is Pleasure' showing Mona humiliating Max. We have also reworked the intro cutscene for the Max X Koodie minigame.

In addition to that, we have worked on lore snippets you will be able to find in locations like Yterra or the laboratory. They come in the form of logs or notes and tell about the happenings on Kerpal from the distant past.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team