ABSENT LOG Dev Update 10/15/2025

This month's update we want to talk a bit more about some of the progress we’ve made with implementing some of our world planning, updates to level structure and how that affects our asset pipeline, and introduce a few exciting new concepts!

As mentioned before, a lot of our base mechanics are functional, with the last update focusing more on us wrapping up the final parts needed for our weapon component system for the player. Enemy AI is at a passable state, interactive systems are working as intended, UI elements are functioning both for in-game menus, and contextual items like player HUD, Inventory, status, etc…

The only exceptions to this are the logs, map, and save game system. The main blocker for these items is that we need (preferably) 2 completed levels so we can test and build persistent player items and stats, world items, and any other data that’s moving through levels. This is important information required by a save system, but also a fully developed map is needed for at least getting the map system functional.

So really we are at a stage where development is moving more and more out of mechanics and raw game systems, and almost purely focused on content production.

We’ve intentionally kept our scope fairly low in terms of mechanics and systems, as we want the game to be as streamlined and straightforward as possible, but the biggest bottle neck really is assets and art. It takes the most amount of time. 

Levels need to be built and tested, they need to be textured, and propagated with sensible props and ambient details to fill them out, and need to be optimized.

Some changes we’ve decided to do with level design is to have a heavier focus on verticality, and break up larger levels into smaller sub levels.

A great example and a good segway is the residential sector.

The residential sector technically houses numerous areas then just the residential block. It has a large commerce sector, a medical sector, a maintenance sector and a pathway that leads to a chapel area and the upper decks of the ship. When building this out and playing through it we started to get scattered with the design as we kept having to move back and forth between large sections of the map and found it difficult to focus into a particular area. This severely slowed down development and didn’t feel very good as quality work was being done but it was so spread out in the play space that it did not feel substantial enough to really showcase, which ended up causing delays in showcasing any real updates.

So moving forward, we are going to split up larger levels into sub levels. Residential will be its own level, with commerce and medical being sub levels that might be smaller in scope and total play space, but should be built with a greater degree of verticality. With this new approach we should be able to get more substantial and meaningful work done on each section, and reduce a great degree of the "exhaustion" from those larger areas. 

This new approach will apply to other levels like concourse or industrial, where if the play space ends up moving to a larger size, we can section it off a bit to focus more on refining each location.

Another big push we are going to start moving forward with is getting more story and character content ready to implement in game. Such as Voice acting, cinematic assets, animations, and environmental story telling elements. We don’t want to talk about what that all entails just yet as we want to save a deep dive of those in particular for a future update where we can really focus on that.

Another aspect we are starting to get more intentional about in filling out our event roster. We have a backlog of enemy types that still need to be made functional in game (Overlande Gardes, MD Heavies), but we are discussing and planning out concepts and ideas for bosses and other enemy types we want to start working on.

ART ASSETS

"One Enemy in particular we have decided on is named the “Mesmerizer”

The idea for the Mesmerizer is to be a lightly armored low offensive enemy type that primarily is focused on distracting and disorienting the player. It has the ability to float above cover and attack the player by emitting energy bursts. When accompanied by other enemies, it will attempt to disorient the player by distorting your vision, creating AOE spots on the ground that will also disorient, potentially cutting you off from other cover points."

"Its floating ability will likely either operate on a cool-down, or some other arbitrary threshold like damaged received. During this cool down, it will land on the floor and will need to walk and physically assault the player, as at this stage it no longer has access to its abilities until it takes flight again. This may be more of a timed event as in the event you dont have ammo and need to wack it, as long as you avoid its attacks, you should be able to when it lands."

"Another ability we want to implement is for the Mesmerizer to be able to resurrect a dead mandrone into a “shambling” enemy, where much like the Mesmerizer, isn't much of an immediate threat, but can distract you from larger more dangerous foes. When shamblers are spawned from dead MDs, they would essentially just operate as zombies. Very basic AI, track and attack the player, slow and easy to put down, but in number can cause problems. They can potentially be resurrected over and over until the Mesmerizer is dead."

-Loom

Officer Alt Suit

“Ive been thinking about some way to showcase more and more background elements and historical context to the games story and visual. When thinking about TW specifically, it's hard to just outright state whatever had occurred in her past, as it's hard to find appropriate places where that would make sense. An idea I had was to include an alt suit that gives some insight to her past.

Tw in her early adult years performed military service for the Imperial Sahmar, though it was more general labor as opposed to any real combat or security. A majority of her work was more related to base administration, general clerical and paper work. 

Many young colonists or other individuals that don't have much upward mobility tend to perform some degree of military work as it pays decent enough and provides most basic needs. I wanted to make an alt suit that showed a little bit of this history. I imagine it's just some mid level Vac-Suit with a defensive lining, but with her old uniform just sort of thrown over.

I'm a bit of a sucker for uniforms complete with all the little trappings, like ID tags, semi official leather straps and belts, ties and everything else that comes with it. For this suit in particular I want to have an alternative hair style complete with a hat that would replace her iconic head band as an option, so whenever un-helmeted, she would wear this hat instead.”

-Loom

Sarosha Texture Planning

"Easing back into work on Absent Log, I've been preparing to tackle an important aspect of our level design that will demand a little more spacial attentiveness than our work up to this point. A defining visual feature of the introductory Dock Concourse level is that it has large banks of windows looking out on the Sarosha's large fly-through docking complex. Since it's such a visible feature of Sarosha's exterior, we're at the point now where we need to push to finalize the ship's design. Sarosha is huge, and one of the challenges I've been contending with is how to pack in enough detail to ensure that the scale is readable while still being performance-friendly. My current thinking is to use a large texture resolution (likely 4096p) in tandem with traditional pixel art techniques to represent dense and crisply-defined detail.

"Since the dominant surfaces of the hull are broad and relatively flat, I can likely paint virtually the whole top and bottom hull surfaces in orthographic. Meanwhile most of the smaller connecting surfaces, and cut-ins of window banks and greebles, can be handled by general-use details included on the same texture sheet. This should allow the smallest details to feel appropriately small relative to Sarosha's giant size, while still having plenty of unique detail tailored to the hull shapes. But of course, no matter how much detail we pack into the main model of the ship, it would never hold up when viewed from the in-game player perspective. That's where LOD (level of detail) assets come into play. For the docking complex, only the area that the player will be interacting with will be built to a "complete" level of detail. Once we know what that looks like, I'll proceed to build lower-detail representations of it to fill out the distant view of the rest of the docks."

"This is far from the only place we'll need to take this approach. One of my goals with Sarosha's twin-hull design was to give plenty of opportunities to see parts of the exterior from the inside. Since the dock is connected to the first level, it seems like a natural place to start off and figure out our process."

-Tekka

MAIN PROJECT UPDATES:

- Various new crates, boxes, barricades, Trashcans and general level props made and added in game.

- Further development and refinement of Gadget functionality.

- General AI reworks and refinements.

- Fixed various IK related bugs since adding a new IK channel from last update

- Created new decal materials for grunge and wall signage details

- Fixed some issues where camera effect overlays from dashing and sprinting would infinitely loop if interrupted.

- Filled out more of the play space in the fitness center in RESIDENTIAL

- Detailed up the Commerce station in RESIDENTIAL

- Reworked lighting in RESIDENTIAL, this should allow me to better control lighting per sector instead of relying on a single global illumination value.

- Added new modular level assets for RESIDENTIAL