DEV

Building Decals and Disappearing Skies

The team has made a number of inventory improvements this week. We have a completely new ui on your inventory screen. Things have been streamlined and rearranged to make better use of space, and make it easier for players to quickly change gear and grab items. Information about each item is easier to pull up, we have new selectors for the inventory and quick bar, and everything is semi-transparent. You now have a chance of seeing a creature charging at you, if you stopped somewhere to organize your hat or knife collection.

The art team put together an extensive decal library to quickly age and mark up buildings, especially ones made with our procedural building system. We have decals for wood, concrete, stone, and metal, covering a wide variety of things like: scratches, dents, mold, moss, rust, water streaking, and even dulled colors. This should allow us to add the right amount, and specific type of weathering, to any building and save some artist time in the process.

We took a look at a few refinements done to our newest batch of mutants. We talked about what models and items we need for the areas we’re building out around the Thorcon Power Plant to make them complete. We dug deep into our old model and art folders to start an unused asset inventory. We found quite a few things that were put on the back burner for one reason or another, and planned out where these items could be used in game. The team made a list of what models were ready to go and which still needed a little work before being game ready.

The web team remains focused on putting together promo and game videos. We’ve been hard at work cutting up and editing existing videos for GIFs, and spent a fair amount of time coming up with captions. We discussed a number of possible videos in the future: highlighting important aspects of the game, differentiators that highlight the beautiful danger of post fracture Lahaina, and things that are just funny to watch.

In addition to putting together blooper reels and getting glamour shots of some of our most horrific mutants, the web team is working on the upcoming achievement system. Jared is setting up the backends and compiling a list of web specific achievements ahead of ingame ones. Jesse has been working on layouts and the ui, as well as designing reward badges for each achievement.

We’ve fixed a number of bugs discovered while running around shooting things that moved in the jungle, and each other. Medkits will now heal virtually any status effect that your player gets, including poison, but you’ll still need to make a fire to get yourself warm and dry if you’ve been standing in the rain, or went swimming. Ammo boxes will have ammo inside them, as one would expect of an ammo box. You will no longer find that some crafting recipes are empty, leaving you to wonder what items were supposed to be there. Double click looting should work soon as well, so you can quickly strip everything of even remote value from a corpse or bag. This should be very useful if like me, you’re a loot hoarder, and only begrudgingly drop items once you can barely walk from the crushing weight of the junkyard on your back.

Our march toward UE 4.20.2 hit a bit of a snag last week when the staging build suddenly found itself without any sky. There’s no doubt that it makes the game look much more ominous, and might be a good storyline for an alternative world down the line. However, one of Chris’ mantras is always that we make things look more Hawaiian. While a skyless dark world is scary, we didn’t really see a Hawaiian connection. In fact, none of us could remember ever seeing a picture of Hawaii with the sky a dark formless void. It’s usually pretty sunny. We’re working on bringing the blue back currently, but here’s a shot of “Dark Lahaina”.
Responsive image