Development Update 19.12.2024

Hey all, welcome to this week's progress report.

This is the last report of 2024 and most of our team have already gone into their well deserved Christmas holidays. It was a great year and we made some awesome progress in all areas thanks to your invaluable support. It's a great pleasure to build this game for you and with you. We are sure 2025 is going to be a very productive year and we are pumped to see this project make immense progress towards the finish line with you.

The next post will most likely happen on January 10th as most of the team resumes work that week. But for now let's relax, visit family, go on trips and recharge as we pass into 2025. Thanks again for your amazing support and we wish you all a great festive time.

Here is what our team has been up to this week.

Level: 
In the Level department we have completed the blockout B state for Apoc and started an improvement pass on the surrounding canyon landscape areas.
The Alpha Camp has been getting some improvements and polishing done to many of its models, especially collisions and detailing.

Code:
The code-department has been collaborating with our game designers to continue to make various improvements and fixes on the combat system. 
On the sandbox side we have started implementing more image features to the sandbox cameras like exposure settings, vignette, color grading options and more.

Character: 
We have been working on more hairstyle upgrades, converting some of the older hairstyles to the new visual style.
A new outfit is in the making, as well, which builds on the Sexy-knight foundation we have built previously but now without the sexy aspect and instead going for a full-cover serious fantasy warrior/knight design.

Animations: 
In the animation department we got the Gobbler and Hyena all ready to go for fine tuning by Game Design - both are already in a fight-able state now, but still need a lot of balancing work done. While Hyenas don't quite thematically fit anymore with the alien fauna of the Kerpal we have now, we still wanted to keep them. So they will probably be getting a little makeover in the future and then accompany the Blackrocks as fierce guard animals. We also continued our work on the Feral Bull enemy.

Design:
Most of our design efforts have been going into combat improvements and addressing community feedback. For the build last week we added a new spear weapon with faster moves and tweaked various elements of the system. This is something we will continue to do next year. We would be very happy if you could continue to test the combat from this month’s release and provide feedback here or on discord so we can get right back to improving things after our Christmas holidays.
We have also been working on getting the minigames from the demo into the new game world. Giving the characters like Milanna and Kim a story update for the new world while trying to preserve the existing scenes. Further, we have also been working on some of the patron-proposed romances, e.g. Taurok and Maya after solving his quest.

Thank you for all your continued support, and see you in 2025 ;)

-Wild Life Team