With our plan to have a “Friends and Family” release ready in just over a week, everyone has been pushing hard to work out the remaining kinks and root out any existing bugs. Our modular house/ruin system is done and we’ll be replacing the old sort-of-damaged buildings, with much more detailed and ominous looking versions over the course of the week. There’s even flowing lava now! As you can see, we still need to add some steam/heat effects and work on better interaction with the surrounding rocks, but the magma is moving.
We talked through some of the game systems and made some decisions about mechanics. For instance, you can now fill your canteen from a puddle in the game, but there’s a chance that the dirty water might make you sick. The same goes for eating raw meat. Speaking of raw meat, we outlined some parameters around cooking. It’s bad news for slow cooker fans and people who want to “Set it and forget it,” we decided it will be possible to burn food if you’re not attentive. We also came to the conclusion that players making a clean kill shot on wildlife would get a bigger hunting bonus than someone running through the jungle wounding anything that moves.
A few crafting/recycling bugs were worked through so that we could avoid infinite item loops. Some AI work was done after it was discovered that enemies didn’t seem to care who was shooting them, and would go after anyone in view, no matter how many rounds were coming from the other direction. We’ve added a lot of refinements to the areas around the communication tower and our game tutorial area as well. As you can see below, the tutorial area is looking impressive.
On the website side of things, we did a lot of debugging since the last update. We added some sticky navigation in a few places to make things easier, and worked on some House improvements. In the near future, Houses will have new choices for banners and members can pick from a variety of background options. We added a number of characters from the story as players, so don’t be surprised if you eventually run into a few while exploring post-fracture Lahaina. We’ve added a Sprints tab under the development section to be as transparent as possible about what we’re working on, what’s already done, and the issues or features we’re tackling next.
Finally, we addressed a number of game play bugs. Players can feel confident in knowing that they will no longer sink into the ground when going prone. It’s virtually impossible to get stuck on a rock sticking slightly out of the ground now, and the days of getting stranded in the middle of a ladder are gone. Like last week, we thought we’d include a couple of screenshots of our best bugs. First we have a look at what happens when inventory mesh and automatic camera placement collides. We assume that this guy’s head is in his hat somewhere.
Also, for a short period of time, if you were in first person mode and pulled out your M1911, the pistol would be replaced with your feet. Luckily, your foot gun was still capable of filling something full of lead, but it wasn’t the best look.
That’s it for now. We’ll have some more updates and improvements for you soon.
