Development Update 08.08.2025

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

Level: 
This week, we continued refining our landscape shader, giving us greater control over how materials blend across the terrain. Alongside this, we made progress on key locations, including Apoc and the updated Pearl Village buildings. We also began the next phase of work on the Sky Village, which will bring updates to its buildings, caves, and all interior spaces.

Code:
This week, we worked on level streaming to ensure, e.g., that characters don't load in before the level geometry is fully streamed in, resulting in the characters clipping into or even falling through the geometry. By the same stroke, we improved how fast-travelling is handled under the hood.
On the sandbox side of things, we are currently experimenting with the possibility to enable in-game scene/prop/preset sharing and downloading using mod.io as our backend. Initial tests seem promising, but we are still evaluating the system to see whether it is viable.

Character:
In the character department we are working on the high-poly sculpting of the new hopper model. We are currently working out the larger shapes and will be doing the small-scale details and textures next.

Animations: 
In the animation department we continued helping with combat polishing. After gathering feedback in an internal playtesting round, we adjusted animations and AI behaviours for several monsters and weapon movesets. These changes will now go into a second internal testing round before we launch the big community test in the upcoming build.
Meanwhile, we started work on transferring all the weapon movesets over to multiple character skeletons. Once this is done, and their AIs are balanced, we can finally start filling the world with all sorts of bandits, cannibals, and other scoundrels!
We also touched up several cutscenes this week, and are currently working on details and bringing them to near final as well as getting close to finalizing the face mocap retargeter.

Design:
We have finished the implementation of the Maya x Locu questline with the finished dialogues, now it's time to thoroughly test it and correct any bugs we find while our writer is working on the dialogues for the other romance paths.
We also further improved the combat arena mode and have been doing some testing rounds with a select group of users. We are looking forward to releasing this and showing you the latest state of the combat system in the coming build.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team