It’s Thanksgiving week, and that means for many of us our heads are filled with thoughts of delicious food, and being trapped in conversations with those weird relatives you only see on the holidays. Nonetheless, there’s still plenty of work to do in the game, and we’ve been busy.
The web team has been focused on hunting down bugs, making user flow improvements, and doing some messaging work. We got some great feedback from a few users, and Jared is working on fixing the issues they found. We took a look at some problems in the account creation process, and are doing some QA testing as we work to smooth them out. The team focused on creating some new email templates to share specific parts of the page, and special announcements as well.
Jesse is making some small changes to the House creation process before moving on, and making some improvements to the House themes we offer. We talked a bit about ways we could allow users to personalize their houses as well as add personal touches to the game. We want players to be able to make things feel like their own, but we’re mindful of the limits we have to put in place to keep gratuitously offensive material out.
Everyone loves free stuff, especially cool free stuff. That’s why we’re giving away a brand new XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS 8GB. The contest started last week but you still have plenty of time to enter before the December 15th cutoff. There are multiple ways to enter: join our discord server and say hello, following us on twitter, visit the website and reserve a player name, and many more.
AI improvements continue this week, and our cover system is finished. Now the terrors of the jungle will move out of the way of gunfire, and utilize surrounding objects to mitigate the amount of lead they’re catching. We like our mutants both horrifying, and smart enough to move out of the way of a moving train.
Speaking of smart mutants, we’re working on a new AI for Big Bob to make him our most dangerous opponent yet. We’re giving him the ability to put other mutants in a sort of hivemind state in which he controls their actions and tactics. This allows him to properly soften and tenderize players before he charges in, and adds them to his food diary. We’re also beefing him up with a bunch more health to better reflect just how much of Big Bob there is to get through.
Finally, we took to imgur again to talk about the progression of our lighting work and environmental improvements. Throughout the development process, we’ve strived to make the beautiful deadly wilds of Lahaina look and feel as realistic as possible. To us the environment is another tool to tell the story, and set the mood for the game. We want the hibiscus waving in the wind to be vibrant and calming, just as much as the dark places in the jungle to be foreboding. We talk about the technical issues involved with making a dynamic looking world, and what we’ve done to make normally flat looking terrain pop, and add just the right amount of light to those dark places. Below you can see a couple shots of just how good Lahaina is looking, but to get a better appreciation check out these before and after imgsli shots.
