Development Update 01.11.2024

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

Level: 

We finally finished the cleanup process for the landscape mesh in preparation for detail work, ranging from large mountain erosion lines to water flow paths and small creeks. In the coming weeks, until December, we will focus on the overall appearance of the landscape, including all inland water bodies and the implementation of Nanite for the landscape. Additionally, we will reintroduce features like tessellation to the landscape material.

Our location team has in the meantime started to replace the old blockout models in the Apoc area, finished their work on the mesh decal development and started developing final materials for the Alpha Camp, and also started to create the building models for the Warrior Village.

Code:

This week, we implemented effects for ranged combat. For now, we will be reusing the effects of the old combat, but they will be replaced with new Niagara based effects in the future.
In addition to the effects, we started implementing UI elements for the new combat mechanics. We are currently working on a health and general status display widget which gets displayed above enemies.
On top of that, we made a bunch of tweaks and resolved bugs with the new ranged combat.

On the sandbox side of things, we started work on a user-customizable particle system for all your special effect needs! A lot of settings have already been implemented, including the ability to use your own textures and "color/size over time" color ramps.

Character: 

The male Wildfire armor model is finished and ready to be implemented into the game and we have made great progress on the female version too.
Work on the male sexy knight armor has finished and it is now available for several Max and Sethro based characters in the sandbox. We also created a nice axe model to go with it.

Animations: 

In the animation department, we tackled ranged combat this week. Luckily, not much has changed there, compared to the old combat system, but our existing animations still needed some fixes and adjustments - mainly for technical stuff like weapon orientation, which is now more consistent across all weapons. (Axis conversion from Maya to Unreal to two different local item bones is quite the... adventure.) We started with the trickiest weapon, the bow, and once that is looking alright, we will add the easier ones, such as pistol and rifle. We also continued our work on the Sandshark creature.

For many of the cutscenes we have re-captured the animations with our new in-house mocap system and are now retargeting and implementing these new animations into the cutscenes and also doing some polishing to the cameras and cuts.

Design:

We spent this week working on ranged combat, mainly implementing the energy pistol and energy rifle and doing QA for the ranged combat system.

We also did some small HUD redesign for the combat system which involves status effects, as well as buildup and ammo display.

In addition to that, we continued working on implementing monsters, the Blackwing can now hover and has a more complete moveset and its AI system is being developed.

On the FX front, we created blockout effects for energy weapons.

The story-mode has also seen some great progress this week. We finished work on Iljah's world quest, which has turned out to be quite long. His dialogue for Maya at the party in Umbar is ready, too. Additionally, we polished Maya's teasing dialogue to bring Zyke's blood to a boil.

The game world is progressing nicely as 1200 new collectables were added. This mainly includes different foods, crafting materials for ammunition and alchemic ingredients.

It will get even more content with the addition of monsters, hunting prey and humanoid enemies. Those will drop weapons, upgrade materials for equipment and more. The first batch of enemies will be added to the world map further down the line.

The inventory redesign has been reviewed and is progressing well. Some of the item tooltip cards are still WIP, but besides that it is now ready for production.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team