Development Update 28.02.2025

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

Level: 
Over the course of this week, the environment team continued adding wear and tear texture details to assets in the Alpha Camp. In parallel, we prepared everything for the full production of the Warrior Village meshes, introduced new tools for our level artists, and also started work on spaceships, shuttles, and statues for the Lizard Settlements.

Code:
This week, we have finished implementing the finisher move mechanics for the combat system, which the Animation and Game Design departments can now create and implement assets for.

We have also identified and optimized a significant inefficiency on our characters. With this optimization in place, you can expect a decent performance increase if there are many NPCs around, especially if they are moving about.

On the sandbox side of things, we implemented a few quality of life features, these include:
- Being able to increase the vertical size of the prop picker window
- Being able to undock both the prop window and the inspector panel
- Props can now be assigned random rotation and scale on every axis when placing and/or duplicating
- Increased speed in switching to edit mode by asynchronously loading only necessary data

The Media Player prop has also received some love - we've implemented a new plugin that makes external sounds play much better and more reliably than the previous system, even allowing for the same sound to be played multiple times at once by a single Media Player. This also now adds support for OGG and FLAC files, as well as re-enabling MP3 support.

Character: 
The character department focused mainly on the development of hair physics for our characters. The current plan is to have two systems complement each other on different levels of detail. The top level, which will be bone-based physics like some hairstyles already have, will be mainly responsible for the large movements of the hair like swinging the hair around as the character runs or turns, as well as reacting to gravity and impact. The next level will most likely be mesh-deformer based and will be responsible for having individual hair-strands move independently and react to the movement of the top level to create a more detailed appearance for the hair behavior.

Animations: 
In the animation department we put the finishing touches on the Sandshark's animations this week, following some feedback from Game Design. This large centipede will be threatening players as they attempt to cross the desert on foot, so better be on the lookout for suspicious movements below the sand! 

We also started work on the move set for heavy weapons, which includes two-handed clubs and hammers and on creating more special attacks for dagger variations. While all weapons of a type (sword, dagger, etc) share the same basic moves, they will often come with unique special moves to make them feel more varied.

Design:
In the design department we kicked things off with our (hopefully soon-to-be) new member of the team, who will be helping us refine the dialogues and smoothing out rough edges of the character writing. Additionally, we finished the first design of the Max & Maya romance. It still needs some polishing and lord Steve's blessing, but is looking really promising so far. Last but not least, for the combat system we added a couple of new moves for the Feral Bull to give you guys a proper smacking, finished designing the status effect system for things like poison, fire build-up and other such effects and started to implement the claw combat movesets.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team