Development Update 13.06.2025

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

Level: 
Our level team has been focusing firmly on progressing the blockout of the Pearl Village, now adding some interiors into houses and some more details to the outside areas. We have also fully integrated the currently available props into the sandbox, as it stands there are over 500 new props coming in with plenty of customizability for them. Further, we have been continuing our detailing work of the Adûn area with procedural content generation tools.

Code:
This week, we started working on bringing our room system up and running. This system allows NPCs to react to players entering their house for example. It has existed for some time now, but was never used and only half implemented.
We also implemented a glance off or break feature for projectiles. This allows certain projectiles like arrows to glance off hard surfaces when impacting at a shallow angle, or break when impacting at a steep angle, so they do not stick into surfaces where it does not make sense. We are still missing effects, so the projectiles simply despawn when they break for now.
Further, we continued to work on the Inventory and HUD UIs and their navigation. Some clothes now have item representations that can be equipped and unequipped similar to weapons.

Character:
Our work on the final boss model continues, we transitioned from body hair to facial hair. Additionally, we have been making a few more outfit transfers based on user requests. 

Animations: 
In the animation department, we fixed and polished up the old twinblade animations, made variations of existing animations so they work for heavier swords and added some one handed stabs for lighter swords. This marks an important milestone for combat, as we now have a complete basic move set for every melee weapon type Maya can use. The next step will be to fine tune these, make some variations for specific weapons and finally tackle the big task of transferring them over to other characters. We also continued our work on the final boss. 

Design:
The design team worked on the finalization of AI behaviours and perception, with the goal of building a believable game world. NPCs will get angry when they witness a crime, like theft or intruding into forbidden zones like the World Tree area and private home spaces. NPCs will also help friendly NPCs when they are attacked, be it by the player or a roaming monster. The vision ranges of NPCs and monsters will increase notably, together with their hearing, making them smarter and more dangerous.
We iterated on the improved HUD and inventory, cleaning them up visually and improving messaging and control behaviours. There was also some design work done regarding the implementation of armor items. Since there are 2 player characters with different skeletons, we needed to find a comprehensible solution for which armor item is available for which player character.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team