The web team continued their work on creating the Veil News Network (VNN) this week. Designed to keep players updated with the latest ingame news, and important events, the news service is making good progress. We’re giving VNN its own section on the website, and are working on some animated scenes and embedding 3d assets to join the live video feed and newsticker. The team talked about different layout options, and ways to highlight the new section. This got us talking about using this template for various ingame companies in the future, giving them their own section on the front page. Jesse refined some of the layouts on the merch page and worked on resizing some logos too.
The art team continued work on creating a new spawn area. We’re keeping the underground/abandoned sewer motif, but are turning our one room studio into a spacious 3 room apartment, complete with a little hang-out area perfect for talking about your day, and sharing the location of clean water. It’s sure to be the envy of anyone being brought back to life after the fracture. They are working on a few concepts for other areas and buildings mentioned in the game stories as well. The armory is next on the list, and we should have some shots to share soon. Chris chose this moment to talk about the history of Titan I missile silo control domes, which one of the underground spaces resembled.
We continued our work on a group play system. The first pass on ui work is done, and we have team map markers in place, as well as VOIP. We want to encourage group play as much as we can, and are just about ready to start testing the system we’ve built. If all goes as planned, next week we will be happily running through Lahaina in small groups, avoiding the dangerous animals, and horrors of the jungle, while hunting each other down. We discussed including some sort of contested resources scenario, or a situation where teams have to hold the communications tower for a period of time. To be honest, it’s probably going to look more like a bloodbath than a tactical group effort to obtain a goal at first, but we need to test out every part of the team experience, even killing a whole bunch of people.
We did some more AI work, and San ran an experiment to see how much performance was impacted with multiple AI’s running around. The art team are making a materials change that looks much better, and saves on the GPU as well. With our TruSky issues worked out for now, there is some gorgeous weather in the game currently. However, as Grant would say they, “left the curtain on the sausage” until the end, when they showed off the latest lighting work in conjunction with a working weather system. You can see below how gorgeous our weather and day/night lighting work is in the game right now.
