With our planned Friends and Family Alpha release getting closer every day, a lot of polish work, bug squashing, and styling continued this week. We wrapped up some loose ends with our ability system, and introduced some really fun craftable items. The game now has grenades, claymore mines, and camping lights. The beach may be full of booby traps and surprise grenades are being tossed from the treeline now, but at least everything is very well illuminated. Our first craftable item, a bow, is mostly done too. It looks pretty good and has decent range, but it has gun audio hooked up to it, so every arrow shot is accompanied with a big boom. Personally, I think the gunshot sound should be an available upgrade but we’ll see what happens.
We fixed some layout issues with how images are displayed on the website, and moved some links and tags to the bottom of the page for easier navigation. The team made it easier to navigate to specific sections of the FAQ and fixed a bug so that sectional stories only show up in the proper section. The almost endless work on making the environment look better continued. As you can see below the jungle just keeps looking better, but Chris noticed that the shadows are a bit blue.
We are also working on a bug that locks up your inventory, and made some improvements to the AI so our mutants stop moving like their legs are asleep. A higher density landscape was imported making the map as smooth as silk. Not only does it look a lot better, but you won’t get stuck on a rock while running for your life anymore. There was some more amazing work done with fog, dew effects, and underwater refraction. As you can see below, it’s not perfect yet, but if you’re a fan of dramatic shooting, soon you’ll be able to burst out of the water and and mow down your enemies like a mid 80’s Chuck Norris.
With more players running around soon, we discussed the state of our servers, some of our options, and how fast we’ll need to get more. We talked about time scaling between day and night and how long our ingame evenings should last. Crafting trees and recipes were discussed and we talked about how transparent we’d be with recipes. For now, it looks like you’ll have to do a little experimenting to discover them all. One thing we decided should be more clear though, is where we are in our sprints and what each one is focusing on. You will be able to see that soon.
Finally, our communication tower continued to be the building of focus for the art team. The interior is looking great and soon you’ll be able to walk around inside. While, the elevator looks great with the sun in the background as you can see, it’s going to be a while before the “out of order” sign can be removed.
