DEV

Playing With Friends and Building Neighborhoods

We kicked the week off with a number of group play improvements and features. We’ve worked out the last of the bugs interfering with the ability to heal others. Splints can be quickly applied to party members to get them up and running again when you’re in a hurry, and bandages now affect all injuries in a certain area. You can even force feed and unconscious friend to bring them back from the brink, stave off starvation, or role play an unsettling foie gras obsession. We also did some work to make it easier to find friends to join your group, and should have a player blocking feature in place soon, so you can ignore that player who keeps asking to feed you.

Our creatures got upgraded too. We continue to work on their AI, to make them cunning and dangerous opponents. We’ve completed the first pass at group attacks. The Trophy Hunters now have good basic group attack strategies: running at angles, utilizing cover, and avoiding bunching. We added a few different types of specialized individuals in large groups. Players can expect stronger/faster leader types with special attacks, and monsters with ranged attacks now.

We added some new audio for NPCs and creatures, but the monster audio is a little lackluster. We talked about making their growls more bone chilling, and less sleepy, as well as other options. The team started a list of audio improvements, and is prioritizing it now. We adjusted our loot drop scenarios to make sure they are focused on areas with buildings or structures, to make the scramble for gear more fun as well.

We continue to make crafting improvements. The latest round of weapon attachments are in and ready, without the sizing troubles we ran into with the last group of scopes and suppressors. We made some drag and drop refinements, added some more item description info, and a few useful tooltips. We talked at some length about rewarding players who want to experiment with crafting recipes to make something unique. The team discussed the best way to encourage those who want to make substitutions to their recipes, or just throw a bunch of stuff together to see what happens.

The Git rollover nears completion, with most of the artists moved over now. Jesse continued to make layout improvements. We looked at a new batch of wireframes and navigation options. The web team discussed new prompts, and context menus to help players along, and improve user flow, while Jared ran down, and fixed a few lingering bugs.

Our map rebuild continues to march forward. One of the biggest points of focus over the the last couple of sprints, work on populating the game map ran into a few hiccups this week. The Thorcon Power Plant wasn’t playing well with the area around it, and was broken in a few places, so we pulled it to fix the problems. We also found a bug that was causing trees and creatures in some areas to float above the ground. While areas of reverse gravity could lead to some interesting 3D gun combat, it’s not what we’re looking to do. In addition, we noticed that right now the foliage doesn’t move in one consistent direction like it should when the wind is blowing. Rather, the plants move in different directions, and speeds. Leaves and limbs writhe independently around you like you’re stuck in the jungle after drinking spiked Kool-Aid. We’re working on fixing the foliage, and the wind before someone freaks out.

Despite the few bugs, we are making good progress overall. We’ve aged the roads around Lahaina to show how much can be reclaimed by the jungle after decades of neglect. In this shot, you can see from the air the faint outline of some of the roads that once ran near the beach.
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We continue to add ruins and landmark buildings to the map section by section. Unlike the power plant, we had no problem with the Communications Tower or the Lahaina Armory, and are placing structures as we move along. Below you can see an area waiting for a few buildings that survived the fracture.
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We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.