The team started off the week with some work on smoothing out the flight plan of the Veil News Network (VNN) drone. The game’s eye in the sky broadcasts a live feed of what’s going on in the game, highlighting different areas of the map, and capturing player activity. We’re also working on an “Art Bible”, that documents the look, feel, and methods we’ve used in the game, to help keep things consistent for any new faces in the future.
We’ve finished some AI improvements for ranged attacks and reloading. We found that occasionally a ranged attacker would lose confidence in their ability to hit a target at a distance and move too close. We also ran into trouble with NPCs emptying their guns and then taking time to ponder what life choices led them to be in the middle of a firefight, delaying their reloading time. We want mindless killing machines who know enough to stay out of machete reach hunting down our players, so we’re retraining our antagonists to make them appropriately deadly.
While Terry was busy doing documentation on existing servers, and updating tech documents, we revisited the old keybindings sheet and decided to make a few improvements. All the normal shoot, jump, and movement keys are right where you would expect to find them, but we mapped out a few of the other less used movement/action key in a way that is intuitive for players and easy to hit when you’re being torn apart by enemies. Of course, players can always change things in their settings if they have a set-up they prefer.
The web team was busy making some layout improvements and squashing a few bugs. Jesse reworked the game packages page to make it look better. We worked on some context menus, added a few new animations, and looked at some background/wallpaper video options to give certain sections a unique look and feel.
We’re taking a deep dive into some SEO issues we discovered, and are making some changes to improve things. We discussed a few tweaks that we plan on making to the friends system to help you find play buddies, and follow people streaming the game. We went over a number of forum improvements that we plan to roll out in the near future, and talked about updating our YouTube channel more often with different aspects of game-play.
The art team remains focused on building out the areas around the Communication Tower to support our upcoming quest/tutorial. Players will start out safe and secure in our sewer respawn area where they will learn the basics of game play: aiming/shooting/fighting, crafting, looting, harvesting resources, and moving around. They will then embark on a quest involving the tower and the surrounding area using all the skills they just learned. We’re fixing a number of little bugs and adding roads, loot, buildings, and enemies in the corridor leading up to the tower.
With so many systems and creatures ready, we’ve been putting in a lot of play time, and of course found a few bugs. We’re working on ziplines, making it easier to strap yourself in, fly across a large section of Lahaina, and hopefully stop. We’ve been having trouble with the stopping part, and that’s a pretty important part. We’ve discovered tiny puffs of poisonous clouds where they shouldn’t be, and we’ve mostly worked out our remaining weather and wind issue.
Lastly, we’ve made a lot of improvements to the game’s lighting. This shot below shows off the progress we’ve made. The large spotlight clearly illuminates an area but doesn’t wash out the dimmer bulb in the background or the stars in the sky. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there. 
We’ll be back later in the week with the latest news.
