Development Update 17.04.2025

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

As we are approaching the long Easter-weekend, much of our team has been taking a few extra vacation days to visit family and get some rest. We hope you have a nice Easter too :)

And now, here is what we have been working on this week:

Level: 
This week, our level team started the blockout A pass on Adûn, as well as preparing a huge batch of new props that will be implemented into the game soon. These range from very small things like plates and glasses to beds to large cranes and other contraptions and will be found giving nice detail and adding life throughout the villages of Kerpal. We also plan to add the first batch of these finished props to the sandbox for the June build.

Code:
This week, we started implementing Maya’s flying drop-kick move. During flight, attackable enemies will be highlighted and by pressing the attack button, Maya will swoop down to the highlighted enemy and knock them off their feet with a kick, after which she lands on the ground.

On the sandbox side of things we have added the ability to pack child props into the parent object. Packed props will act as a single object, meaning that it will only show a single element in the outliner and all manipulations like changing visibility, intractability and locked state will be applied to all props in that package. If any of the child objects were already invisible before being packed, they will remain that way regardless of whether the parent object was made visible again. Of course you can also unpack those props if you need to edit them again. This could be useful to keep your scene outliner nice and tidy!

Lua has also received a bunch of new functions, mainly for access to the events/dispatchers/receivers on a given object and the ability to manipulate custom materials. These are the added functions:

wl_get_events_in_dispatcher
wl_get_events_in_receiver
wl_clear_events_in_dispatcher
wl_clear_events_in_receiver
wl_get_object_event_dispatchers
wl_get_object_event_receivers
wl_material_create
wl_material_get
wl_material_add
wl_get_unique_object_name
wl_get_unique_event_name
wl_get_unique_material_name

Character: 
Our focus this week was on the Slugroth, which we thought looked too dangerous and aggressive for the role it plays in the game. So we had our artist soften him up and give him a bit of a redesign.

Animations: 
In the animation department, we implemented the final animation set for the Slugroth this week and handed it over to Game Design for combat implementation. These beasts of burdens are gentle giants, but can still pack a mean bite if you provoke them! We also transferred light, normal and heavy staggers to all humanoid characters, so it really makes a difference whether you hit someone with a tiny dagger or a two handed hammer. Our next task will be to do the same for monsters, depending on their weight class.

We also made some good progress with mocap cleanups for our multiple cutscenes which are in the works. We found some new helpful methods to clean up the input data much better and faster.

Design:
Earlier this week, we had some meetings with a freelance writer and narrative designer who will help us improve the dialogues, quests, and romantic encounters in the game. We started by showing him our current plans for the romance encounters and characters and those will be the first things he will be working on.

We also started to work with the musicians on the initial briefings for the game soundtrack.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team