Development Update 22.11.2024

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

Level: 

This week, we finalized the Umbar B Quality Blockout, so the design department can start implementing quests and routines. We also completed work on the last large-scale cliff meshes, which will be added to the world map early next week. For the rest of the week, we focused on the landscape, with particular attention to the canyons, the desert, and cleaning up the coastal areas as well as experimenting with some more colorful rock and cliff styles.

In the Alpha Camp we are working on wall tile-sets for the interior of the habitation containers. 

In Apoc we are continuing our blockout work, this week we have been focusing on the arena.

Code:

This week, we implemented a feature that allows us to shoot projectiles from a melee combat move. This will be used for the Blackwing to shoot a sonic projectile and the Arac to shoot a poison projectile.
We also implemented projectile parrying, which allows you to deflect certain projectiles if you block at the right time. Which projectiles can be parried depends on the projectile and your weapon, e.g. an energy projectile can be deflected by an energy weapon, but not a spear, while an arrow can be deflected by most weapons.
On top of that, we made a whole bunch of small improvements and bug fixes for the new combat.
The implementation of upscaling technologies (DLSS, FSR, TSR) has been finalized. Since some of the associated settings (and some already existing ones like the Graphics API) require a game restart to function properly, the game will now prompt you accordingly.

On the sandbox side of things, a whole bunch of new Lua functions have been added to control the animation in an animation prop.

Character: 

The female Wildfire outfit has been finished and is now awaiting rigging and transferring which we will tackle next week. We started modeling work on a very cool outfit idea, check out the image. Tali is also finally going to get her long awaited Futa version, we started working on that this week and are hopeful she will be able to make it to the December verison.

Animations: 

In the animation department, we have finished moving all characters over to the new animation system. While this won't change much visually at first glance, it was a necessary move to improve performance and make the animation system cleaner, more flexible and easier to work with. Most importantly though, it ensures all characters work correctly with the new combat system. It also means all Kerpali can now finally sneak instead of T-Posing and cat/wolf Kerpali got their quadrupedal sprint back (when out of combat).

Our next step will be to give all characters a default "fists" weapon and basic combat animation set. Further weapons will be transferred over from Maya at a later date, once they are correctly balanced and their moveset considered final. This is to avoid having to make animation changes on multiple characters.

We also continued our animation work on the feral Boar enemy.

On the motion capture side, we finished all mocap-recording and processing and imported the files into the project. Currently we are working on retargeting and the next step is to implement them one by one into the cutscenes, starting with the intro scenes.

Design:

This week we finished the Raptor AI and moveset and then shifted our attention to the Arac creature. Our ongoing work on the combat system QA has also continued this week, such as on improving the hit detection for the player model in certain attack animations as well as solving some issues related to player rotation during combat moves.

A lot has happened in the quest and story department this week:

For starters, we have added quick travel points for most mini locations on the world map. They are hidden at game start and have to be discovered.

We also added additional quick travel markers to the Adûn mountain pass, which are available from game start.

Shiva's world quest has been updated, too. She can now be found in the Warrior Village in chapter 2, where the player gets hints towards her relation with Maya and where she can be found in chapter 3. Her quest has been further fleshed out, we hope you like it when you test it in the coming build.
We updated Kylee's and Momo's romance quest with proper dialogue-emotions and log texts and added the missing third quest ending.

Further, we added item icons for the new weapons in the December release.

We Iterated Maya's quest 'Caravan to the South', provided by Agon. The quest-success dialogue with Agon now actually makes sense and an alternate ending was added. We also added some small blockout fortifications around the escape pod north of the Warrior Village and continued work on Max's initiation quest to join the Warrior Tribe.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team