Development Update 13.09.2024

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

Level: 

We are working on the completion of the outdoor area of Alpha Camp Blockout A and should be able to finish it today. We also started developing a Color Blockout for the Alpha Camp to get a rough idea how everything will look once textured. Next we will put together the materials and textures for the Alpha Camp so we can start finalizing it.

Code:

This week we implemented a new hover movement mode for the Hopper and Raptor enemies. In this mode the enemy flies/hovers just above the ground and has a different combat move set available, allowing us to make combat with those enemies more varied and dynamic.

In addition to that, we implemented a combat AI behavior for the jump attack. It's currently planned for the Gobbler enemy to use the jump attack as an AOE attack.

On the sandbox side, we worked on implementing a few more in-game tutorials this week:

Poses (Explaining creation and what the various options do)

Characters (Explaining creation and what the various options do)

Event system introduction (Explaining the basics of what it is and how to connect dispatchers and receivers with each other)

Event example: Light switch (Explaining a basic set up on how to connect a lever to a light)

We also added a menu where you can set the designated preview icon for your scene. You can either select an existing file, or you have the option to capture a new icon, similar to how it works when creating prop collections. Setting the icon to nothing will revert back to creating an automated icon every time you save.
Sharing sandbox saves and prop collections will include their preview icons now, too.

Character: 

We continued our work on the new feral lion model, finishing the high-poly sculpt, the detail pass and making good progress in the texturing stage.

On the outfit front, we have finished the high-poly version of the new Wildfire male outfits in all variations (light, medium, heavy) and are now moving on to the retopology stage. The female version will be started after that has been completed.

Animations: 

In the animation department we were busy getting the Gobbler enemy ready for Game Design this week. We also took the revised character animation blueprint that code finished last week and started filling it with some missing animations - for example transition animations when a character stops moving at varying speeds and a special setup for walk and run cycles while holding different weapons. This works quite well for Maya now and can soon be transferred over to all characters. (Note that since the new animation blueprint and combat are tightly linked, they will be released together)

Design:

This week we worked on the Alpha Camp A blockout replacing old routine destination meshes with new ones and added functional doors to all buildings.

We also designed the boss intro cutscenes for Gorgh, the cannibal leader, and Lazra, commander of the Adûn mountain pass.

We also continued working on item distribution in the open world.

On the combat front we finished the design for item handling, featuring (among other things) inventory and quick-slot handling, ammo switch and ranged weapon quick-draw.

We created combat move lists for the Blackwing and missing weapon types (Fist / Claws / Knife), as well.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team