Development Update 07.02.2025

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

Level: 
Our work continues in the same areas as last week, with the Warrior Village getting closer to a finished A-Quality Blockout, and the next batch of final assets for the Alpha Camp has been implemented.
Parallel to that, we have started work on the Grassland region; by adding a bigger variety of blockout plants and trees and small rocks and pebbles to the landscape, we are bringing the area to the final stage of the blockout phase, similar to our other villages.

Code:
This week, we started implementing finisher moves for our combat. These moves get triggered when you attack an unsuspecting NPC in their routine from behind (backstab) or an exhausted enemy and deal critical damage. Despite their name, they are not guaranteed kills, though.

On the sandbox side of things, a few minor quality of life features have been implemented - a character preset will now default to the name in the hierarchy instead of "My Preset" when saving to make overwriting existing presets easier. Trigger zones have new events that provide the GUID of the overlapped character now.
Lua has also received some new functions for getting camera information, projecting 3D coordinates to screen coordinates and a sphere-cast function. More info can be found on the WL Lua Documentation.

In addition to that, we have started to implement a Photo Mode, which will have access to the camera filter system that was added to the sandbox and will be accessible in Story Mode via the pause menu.

Character:
In the character department we have implemented the casual modern outfit for various Max and Sethro characters, and 3 updated male hairstyles (stub, bowl-cut and small mohawk) for Max and Sethro characters. We are also researching further into low-cost mesh based physics solutions for hair.

Animations:
In the animation department, the dagger move set has been handed over to Game Design for implementation. We have now moved on to making more variations for staggers - currently, all attacks trigger the same length of stagger, which obviously makes fast attacks overpowered and slower weapons hardly viable. This will be improved by having fast attacks/weapons only stagger briefly (or not interrupt enemy moves at all in some cases) and heavier attacks/weapons stagger longer, as one would expect. The heaviest of attacks can even knock you off your feet - better get out of the way when that huge enemy winds up! We also finished up the engine implementation of the Max x Riv minigame, so it is ready to be put into a quest now.

Design:
Here, we are currently working on the final stagger system (extension for light and heavy staggers) and the final damage system (critical damage and attribute bonuses) and attribute-based equipment conditions for weapons. We also continued to polish the Feral Bull attack move patterns and values.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team