Development Update 14.03.2025

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

Level: 
This week, we returned to the Lake Village to kick off work on the A Blockout. Our team created a first batch of blockout props and imported them into the project. On the Warrior Village side, we received the first work-in-progress meshes for the houses, which are now under review for feedback. In parallel, the level artists utilized tools developed by Tech Art to begin adding more details to the Pillar Region and the tropical area around Pearl Village. As part of this effort, they replaced old placeholder foliage with new blockout meshes to improve the overall look and feel of these environments.

Code:
This week, we started implementing character attributes, which are Strength, Dexterity, Spirit, and Technology. These attributes both determine which weapons you can equip, as well as scale the damage output. Armor items can give attribute, damage, max health and experience gain bonuses. Weapons give damage bonuses per point of a character attribute.

On the same note, we are reworking and implementing new status effects. E.g. If you fill up an enemy’s poison build up, they will get the poisoned status effect, which does damage over time, as well as the weakened status effect, which decreases their damage output.

Character: 
Our progress this week has been going quite well, we managed to set up 27 hairstyles for Shey and Maya based characters with the new physics system. It's worth to note that the physics are light-weight game physics and will not work perfectly for all styles and in all situations. Therefore we have implemented a toggle that lets you switch between the new physics and the old model with no physics so this big change is introduced as non-destructively as possible. This also makes it so you can still pose the hair styles with the sandbox poser ponytail bones as you have been able to so far. The new physics hairs can not be posed with the bone-offsets as they have their own unique skeleton.

Additionally, we have made some very significant improvements to the rendering quality of characters in the game. Here is what we changed:

• Introduced screen-space ambient occlusion which is not only character relevant but it does make them look a lot better.

• Adjusted skin material specular values and behavior so the skin looks better now as it transitions from low to high wetness values.

• Fixed female roughness texture map, that visible seam on back of the arms is gone now.

• Introduced a system that recomputes character mesh-normals in real time. This means no more weird shadowing under raised arms, the crotch region, between butt cheeks, boobs, and more details in facial and body posing fidelity for shadows and reflections.

• Added a reflection method option to the video settings to pick between screen-space and lumen reflection types as oftentimes lumen reflections don't look as good as screen space reflections.

Animations: 
In the animation department, we put the finishing touches on the heavy hammer move set this week, making it ready for hand-off to Game Design. We also started work on the central Max and Maya romance and its minigames. We discussed with our quest writer on how to best include this in the main quest in such a way that it would feel natural, yet also remain optional for players and started brainstorming three scenes of increasing intensity that will play over the course of it.

Design:
Our design and coding team collaborated this week to get the design for attributes, status effects and final damage calculation from the designers table to the coders for implementation. We also continued working on the design of Maya's glide kick and ironed out details like control properties and edge cases.

Our current task is to work on the list of all weapons as well as the silhouettes for all weapons in the game, so the final weapon model fits the planned strength, reach and speed of the weapon.

The Warrior village NPC routine actors have been improved and adapted to the new A-level blockout and we started to place some enemy actors in the Adûn region. Last but not least, we finalized the game HUD design.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team