Development Update 01.08.2025

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

Level: 
During the last week, the Environment team focused on improving the landscape material and its workflow, making several changes to the material's structure and testing out color maps for additional details. In parallel to that, our efforts continued to finish the A-quality blockouts for Apoc and Sky Village, as well as implementing finalized houses of the Pearl Village for the August build.

Code:
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been continuing to improve the combat. E.g. We implemented orbital dashing when locked onto an enemy, improved diagonal input handling for combat moves, added a backwards dash when tapping dash with no movement input, implemented a vertical aim offset for attacks to make hits more reliable when fighting on slopes, and many smaller tweaks.

The combat arena system has received some more improvements for testing and data collection. Most of the changes were made on the backend. Other internal WL tools were also updated for a better workflow.

In the sandbox, this week was spent on fixing a bunch of bugs (Broken collision on landscape, incorrect spline mesh point order, animation editor sample rate not saving, inventory closing when using "I" in search fields, torch playing sounds when invisible, and spline mesh collision missing).

We also added new Lua functions:
wl_get_all_prop_ids
wl_get_all_prop_ids_in_category
wl_get_all_prop_categories
wl_editor_spawn_prop_collection
wl_get_object_category

Character:
We are finalizing the Hopper model. This week, we have optimized the topology and greatly reduced the poly count of the model. We also worked on the blockout meshes for the rifle and gun weapons which will soon be sent into full production.

Animations: 
In the animation department, we did another round of combat polishing this week, helping with playtesting and adjusting monster AIs and moves. Now that Maya's weapon movesets are locked in, we also prepare to transfer them over to the other humanoid skeletons, which will be a big task. Our work on weapon special attacks is also nearing completion now.

Our cutscene progress is going well, these past 2 weeks we have been working on the face mocap metahuman to wildlife rig retargeter and fixed/cleaned some further cutscene mocaps including a few completely newly cleaned with our improved pipeline

Design:
We finished the design and dialogue writing for the Maya x Locu romance, which is now being implemented. Old friends reunite after being separated as youth and become lovers. Their tribes would disapprove and the tension of secrecy makes things all the more arousing. The major romances between Maya x Rawn, Max x Shey and Max x Zumon have their quest structure ready and dialogue is currently being worked on. 

We picked up the design of the perk system and character progression on level ups as well. It's not finished yet, but we can already tell that it's gonna be a mix of discoverable locations in the open world (e.g. trainers teaching skills) and the classic character UI, with perks to unlock and attributes to increase.

We also focused some of our attention to the game start area around the Alpha Camp, adding new NPC routines and dialogues to the people around there. The Pearl Village story content is also being worked on, quests and dialogues for various NPCs are being made.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team