Development Update 15.11.2024

Hey all, welcome to this week's progress report.

Level: 

This week, we continued our work on the Umbar blockout, focusing on roads and the various workshops of Umbar's craftsmen. The landscape pass, with most of the testing completed, is now in full production, and the current step involves improving the transitions between cliff meshes and the ground terrain.

We also continued the development of the homes for the Warrior Village and an interesting modular wall system for the Alpha Camp as well as continued working on the Apoc blockout.

Code:

This week, we implemented many sound effects for the new combat. We are currently reusing the sounds from our old combat, but we will need new sounds in the future as they don't fit very well in some cases.

We have also created physics assets for our new creatures. These are important for projectiles to be able to hit and for ragdoll physics.

On the sandbox side of things, more progress on improving the particle system has been made. We also built a new map showcasing a few use cases, as well as providing some additional information about various options in the particle system prop.

Character: 

The medieval villager outfit is still being worked on, as well as the female Wildfire outfit. We are also running some research on a potentially new way we can make hair movement in the game.

Animations: 

In the animation department, we did a pass over our existing pistol and rifle animations to ensure they work properly within the new combat system, just like what we did with the bow before. We also started work on attack animations for the feral boar, the smallest of the three feral creature types. It will replace the tiny feral lions from the demo, using their skeleton. The actual feral lions will then be the larger version (which was the boss in the demo) to be more of a believable threat.

We also worked on the Mocap Shoots for various cutscenes. Shooting will go well into the weekend but if all goes to plan, we will have shot and reshot everything needed for all cutscenes.

Design:

This week, we finished updating the existing Warrior Village quests with proper log texts, adding new sub-quests to existing quest lines and improving on existing dialogues for all characters in the area. Additionally, proper dialogue emotions have been set and various bugs were fixed (mainly path finding). Now, we have started working on Max's initiation quest to join the Warrior tribe.

On the combat front, we continued working on AI for our creatures, mainly Blackwing, Hopper and Raptor.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team