The Team continued their work on adding new design features, and talking through the crafting process. We’re updating a few icons to give players a good visual representation of what they’re working on to avoid any confusion. We discussed adding additional recipes, and talked some more about using trash as a resource when crafting. We worked on a few features to make the player inventory easier to work with while you’re busy improving your rifle with: a new scope, a bipod, kitty decals, or whatever else speaks to you.
We looked at a few examples of wash benches that the art team had mocked up, and discussed different aesthetics from: futuristic high capacity machines, to piecemeal chic, and even the latest in radioactive-water-conserving designs. We discussed what features we want in other crafting/repair machines/benches and some possible ui issues to look out for.
The Team had a brief discussion about expanding the merchandize we currently offer in the store. New shirt designs, some additional Hawaiian themed offerings, and a few improvements to already existing products were discussed. We also put some more time into reworking the drone HUD. While we love the way the Veil News Network (VNN) live feed looks on the front page, we’d like to organize the information shown in the HUD a bit better. We want to give players easy to read information about the places they are looking at as the drone camera travels its path across the play area.
We circled back to our discussion about roads and paths in the game, and how important having a robust backbone of paths across the map is. We’re concentrating on including reimagined versions of Route 30, better known as the Honoapi’ilani Highway, and Route 3000, the Lahaina bypass. 30 hugs much of the coast offering players good access to the beach and coastal structures, while 3000 parallels through the heart of Lahaina. We talked about adding signs to help players navigate and warn players of any dangerous boar crossings.
We continue to make improvements to our AI. We have improved animal reactions when encountering people greatly. Since we no longer have issues with bears rolling over on their backs before mauling players, and small animals don’t charge into the sea when they see people anymore, we’re focusing on making the horrors of the jungle a little smarter. Everyone has played that game where the monsters are too stupid to go around buildings, jump, or climb to reach you. While shooting a bloodthirsty creature 100 times through a crack that it is too big to fit through is fun, and hitting it in the head with a bomb every time it tries to squeeze through can be a joy, it’s only entertaining for a few minutes. We don’t want mindless killing machines, we want at least nominally intelligent ones. We discussed what level of combat smarts would be the bare minimum, and the level of tactical know-how we aspire to in our monsters.
Lastly, we made a lot of progress on weather in the game. We’re making improvements to how storms work, and fixed a bug that was causing the rain to be invisible every so often. We’ve made lighting adjustments to make the stars stand-out and pop more at night, and highlight that famous “Hawaiian Blue” to the sky and water during the day. The shots below show off how much that work is paying off.
We’ll be back next week with more pictures and updates.
