We started the week by making a big audio pass over a wide variety of game interactions and systems. There are new sounds for menu navigation, eating fruit, meat, and canned foods, crafting, adding an attachment to weapons, holding your breath while aiming, and felling a tree. In addition, we’ve made a few updates to the elevator to make it sound more realistic. We may not be ready for an elevator simulator mini-game, but the new updates are a big improvement. If it clinks, clanks, buzzes or thuds, we have audio for it.
Much to Chris’ joy, we began some bullet penetration work so players will be able to break and ruin a lot of what they discover by shooting it. While it’s true that non-broken glass is a rare find after the fracture, you will soon be able to shatter windows and the island’s usable glass market on a whim. We also talked about including gas tanks and other volatile objects to the list of ruinable/explodable items for players who like to examine things while they’re on fire.
The team also nabbed a few bugs this week. We fixed a bug that would cause the drone stream to constantly restart. We nabbed a construction error that would empty your inventory when trying to place a piece in your structure, and we finished attaching and positioning fire fx for flaming torch projectiles. Throwing a burning object at someone’s face has never looked better.
Work continues on our AI spawner so that we can fine-tune how many horrors of the jungle hunt players in different areas, and where they might hide. We want to make sure that we don’t overfill an area with terrors or leave a neighborhood too safe. The spawner improvements allow us to quickly adjust mutant and animal numbers across the map. We’re also improving loot drop mechanics and are working on a beach tool similar to the automated river, road, and building systems we have now.
Below are a few areas created with these automated tools. As you can see, they are looking great.
