Development Update 23.01.2026

Hello everyone, welcome to this week's progress report. 

Level: 
We have started modeling some additional personal space ships for some of the entourage characters that landed on Kerpal in pursuit of personal goals.
Work on Yterra continues, as well, we are now placing the tilesets and dressing the area up to get it to a complete blockout B stage.

Code:
This week, we improved projectile behaviour to prevent them from visually clipping through geometry and added a secondary crosshair to show if the projectile will be blocked by nearby geometry.
We have also added an item transfer screen, so you can exchange items between Maya and Max.
In addition to that, when unlocking the ability to switch between Maya and Max in story mode, the other character will now also be displayed on the world map screen, which has been updated to reflect the current state of the open world, as well.
Lastly, we have added a new section to the combat arena to test combat in a theoretical in-world scenario.
On the sandbox side, we have fully integrated the new Dirt/Blood/Wetness system as part of the character customization.

Character:
We are about to finish the new Shey outfit and have also prepared concepts for a few more upcoming outfits.
The character skin material cleanup pass is complete, the features are locked in, and we have made a full conversion to virtual textures for all character related materials and textures.

Animations: 
In the animation department, we started work on some additional combat animations this week. These will be used for specific perks in the skill tree and for adding a little more variation to finishers. We also made animations for the Jelly Bomb and Jelly Baby that will be baked to vertex animations for a more optimized use in the engine.

Design:
We have been finalizing the full list of perks we want for the character progression, taking into consideration what would be useful and exciting.
On the quest front, we implemented the Maya & Drakon quest this week. The roguish lizard adventurer will be found camping near the road to Umbar, much to the guards' suspicion. We also reviewed a first draft of the quest dialogues that will lead to Maya's infamous scene with four pigmen.
Further, we continued working on various quests in and around Pearl Village.
We have also made progress on the sound design front. Environment ambiences are done, as well as 3 melee weapon classes. Sound implementation starts now and will pick up pace in February.
We are in the process of populating the game world with enemies, as well. We have added hundreds of enemies and critters to the Great Plains and Emerald Falls regions. Additionally, we have added various merchant NPCs to the game world and updated existing trade inventories.
Last but not least, we have hired an additional writer to help the team with finalizing the remaining quests in time for our release plans.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team