Development Update 28.03.2025

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

Level:
Level artists are hard at work on the Lake Village's interiors, placing props and improving the look and feel of the different houses to better visualize their professions and social standing. Meanwhile, work on the architecture of Adûn is nearing its end. The next phase will focus on set dressing and adding more details to enrich the area.
Over at Pearl Village and the Umbar Mountains, the team has begun a much-needed overhaul of the placed foliage. This involves replacing old placeholder meshes with improved blockouts to enhance the visual quality and overall atmosphere of the region.

Code:
This week, we finished implementing character attributes and status effects. As part of the new status effects, we implemented two new build ups; Heat and Cold. These get triggered by environment zones, which will be placed in the desert. During the day, the Heat build up will increase, and during night, the Cold build up. If either build up reaches its maximum, the player will get the Overheated or Freezing status effect respectively, causing damage over time.
We also implemented the underground mode for the Sandshark, allowing it to burrow under the ground. The underground mode is functionally identical to the hover mode of the Blackwing.

On the sandbox side of things, a few more quality of life features have been added, as well as one big new feature: A skeletal mesh importer!
This feature allows you to import any mesh that contains a skeleton and attach it to any character in the scene to have it match its animation. This could be used for custom clothing, hair, multi-limb attachments or even full custom characters. For the animation to work correctly though, the skeletal structure of your meshes need to match the in-game skeleton (i.e. the bone names and offsets need to be the same). The imported skeletal mesh prop has the same options as any other prototype mesh with texture and material options. Custom morph targets are also supported and exposed as options.

Here some of the small changes:

• The prop preview widgets have received some love with an improved design to highlight details better and make them pop out more.

• The functionality of holding Shift while moving an object to have the camera follow has been expanded to rotating and scaling.

• Ambient Occlusion settings have been added to the post process options of the level settings and custom cameras.

• Poses have received two toggles to use the selected pose's vaginal/anal look instead of overwriting it with the vaginal/anal spread sliders.

• Added two render target props where custom cameras can render into, one for in-world and one for UI purposes. FOV, aperture, post process settings etc. will all be included in the rendering.

• Added a "Render Opacity" option to all UI elements.

• Added a tilt slider when a custom camera is possessed.

• Added the ability to push objects up/down in the outliner using Alt+Up/Down.

• Fixed a bunch of small issues all across the sandbox editor.

Character: 
After having finished the first pass of hair physics for Maya and Shey based characters, we continued to set up hair physics for the human males on all Max, Sethro and Bol based characters. With the same approach, we transferred a few hairstyles between characters, so you can expect a few more different hairstyles on many characters. We also worked on a very sexy new dress design that is now available for Maya, Shey, Geneva, Koodie, Janara, Jenny, Kim, Milanna, Shiva, and Riv, as well as transferring the Sexy Knight outfit to Maya and Koodie, the Loose Dress to Maya and the Full Knight outfit to several Max based characters.

Animations: 
In the animation department, we continue to work our way through weapon movesets, moving on from hammer to the blackrock's power fists. We also supported Game Design with additional combat animations this week, handing over a dropkick animation to be used from Maya's flight, a stagger reaction for being hit with an electric weapon and some other bits and pieces. We also made the flinches (aka non-interrupting hit reactions) of large monsters more consistent in length, so it is clearer which attacks can interrupt their moves and which can not.
On another note, we started improving our control rig setup that we use to process and polish motion capture animations for our cutscenes. The cleanup process is going well and is getting close to the final animation level.
Lastly, our work on animating one of the Max and Maya romance minigames is well underway.

Design:
We started the process of updating the background info sheets for all characters. This will give them additional depth and help us polish the overall dialogue. 
We also made the new HUD and inventory design production ready and finished the design for loot containers. 
On the combat and movement side, we completed the list of weapons, including their movesets, so we have a final list of missing combat animations now. We also decided on which skeletons need to use which weapon, so the respective combat moves can be produced.
We also made a first draft of the final boss fight, including his abilities and move set. 
Additionally, we finished working on the design for underground movement for the sandshark and are currently finishing up the design for Maya`s glide kick.
Lastly here, we started iterating on the design of the Grappling Hook feature to improve on the current blockout stage.
On the level design side, we wrote the direction document for the Pearl Village`s interior designs, so the level department knows which room should have which features. We also updated the Bandit Camp and Caravan Camp blockouts, getting rid of legacy assets and improving on the level design.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team