As the first full week of sprint 24 comes to an end, the team continues their work on smoothing out any remaining crafting issues. We’re giving crafting icons some attention so it’s clear what your working on, and the images match what’s in your inventory. We discussed timers, and contemplated making adjustments to the length of time it takes to make a bow, a new shirt, or leg splint. We also went over prompts and messaging to help people while they are crafting a new survival item, or just something nice for mom.
We’re making some improvements, and expanding available weapon attachments. Fans of using compound bows to bring down the horrors of the jungle, will have a few new fancy options for sights, making their arrows a bit more accurate. The group discussed healing other players, and talked through the mechanics of patching up your friends. We even discussed adding force-feeding for a party member unlucky enough to be starving and bleeding out at the same time.
We decided to make the time it takes to auto-loot a container dependent on the container’s size. Now clearing out a shipping crate will take a little longer than emptying a shoebox. We banged our heads against merging the game map with a “points of interest” map we have been using to place various key locations, and buildings across Lahaina. After a lot of teeth gnashing, and metric to imperial conversions, we were successful, and have a working reference map to help with development.
The web team moved some error messages to make them more prominent, and are busy refining a few layouts. Audio work progresses across all areas of the map. We talked through what certain areas should sound like, and adding just the right amount of echo in our large buildings. We found a bug that wouldn’t allow your game audio to be adjusted in the settings menu, and are fixing it now.
While AI improvements are being made across the game, we’re focusing on monster AI this sprint. Right now our creatures only fight in melee, run in straight lines, and fight to the death. While that’s a start, we’d like to add a bit more finesse to their tactics. We talked over adding different roles for monsters in combat and adding: the ability to fight at range, attack and retreat, moving in semi-erratic lines, and utilizing cover, sometime down the road. For this sprint, our goal is to have monsters do their best to avoid bullets as they charge towards a player.
We fixed a few bird animations that saw our avian friends fly without flapping their wings, and sometimes hover like a balloon when they ran into an obstacle. We reviewed a number of character animations including: deaths, jumps, punches, throws, and even a bunch of different dances. Now, the Tappers can not only tap across player corpses, but they can shuffle, foxtrot, and lindy across them too.
Lastly, our lighting and weather work moves forward, with special attention paid to environmental lighting at dawn/dusk, and with the stars at night. You can see the progress of that work in the shots below.
We’ll have more updates next week.
