The team started the week off doing some audio work in various locations around the map. We’ve made some improvements to the sounds of the jungle, and are working towards having a unique sound profile for all of the game’s unique buildings. We’re adding some new audio for weapons too. Guns, machetes, spears, and clubs aren’t just sounding better, they’re looking better. We’ve updated a number of melee weapon animations to make your hack and slash experience more visually appealing, and are including a lot of weapon throwing improvements as well.
The Veil News Network (VNN) camera drone is getting some attention. Now that we’ve smoothed out much of its path around the island, and removed the abrupt spinning turns, we’re focusing on the HUD. We’ve made a lot of improvements, and as you can see here the new HUD is looking great.
Our performance improvement work continues this week. We’re working on a number of improvements across the game map, and the Thorcon Power Plant in particular. The Thorcon is a great place to run around exploring, and we want to make sure your GPU thinks so too. We addressed some performance issues on the web page too. We made some loading and animation improvements across the page, and discussed some live feed options as well.
The web team fixed a number of lingering layout issues including: adjusting the background colors to many pages to increase text contrast, fixing some rendering problems on the Account page, and we made Player profiles match the look of House profiles. Jesse showed some wireframes for a streamlined player portal to handle nothing but character related items like: friends, House, wallet, and live stream in the near future. We found a bug that would cause your Friend screen to appear blank. Jared is hunting down the problem now.
Even though the Great Fracture devastated much of Lahaina, we still want players to be good stewards of what’s left of the land, so we’ve added the ability to reuse some items for crafting purposes after you’ve used them. For instance, you can break down a can for the metal now, instead of just throwing it on the trash pile. We continued to work on our second loot drop scenario, and made the horrors of the jungle lootable. Now you can find a number of useful items on their bodies, including food and drink. Just don’t think too hard about how many times the Green Lady has backwashed into that partially finished bottle of Manimal you found in her bag.
Team ui has been updated and is almost finished, so players will be able to explore with friends and strangers alike in the near future. We’re adding finishing touches to the underground spawn area, and are working on AI updates as well. The art team is hard at work filling out the map with places to investigate, loot, or hide, using natural terrain and existing structures as a guide. We talked again briefly about which existing roads we wanted to keep in the game to help encourage players to move around Lahaina.
Lastly, our material upgrades and global lighting improvements continue. As you can see from the screenshots below, the game is looking beautiful with the latest weather and lighting updates.
We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.
