This week the team is finishing up our game trailer and adding a bit of polish to several systems before we start sharing the fruits of our labor to a wider audience. The autonomous drones that patrol the island and stream gameplay live have great new controls that help us direct them to specific events and areas. They already do a pretty good job of finding the action themselves, but this allows us to make sure that we capture everything worth capturing and quickly make videos of certain aspects of the game. Below you can see a video we made of a drone getting some good close-up shots of a deer going about its business in the wilds.
We’ve made a lot of audio improvements in the last few sprints and that work continues. Specifically, we’re working on audio and visual cues for status effects on players so a person starving, about to die of thirst, or shutting down due to shock gets the message that things aren’t going very well for them in a hurry. For those of you who believe automatic weapons are instruments that need to be played, we’re working on giving them a voice. Currently, we’re fine-tuning the micro Uzi to ensure that it’s spraying beautiful music and bullets at anything in your way.
The team is also making improvements to our AI spawner. We’ve created an actor that can be used to quickly generate AI spawn points within a defined area and adjusted how many and where the spawner will produce animals and creatures ready to rip off a player’s face. This way we can adjust how many mutant obstacles are in an area quickly.
Speaking of face-ripping obstacles, we’re working on a new loading screen and have decided to include The Butcher, one of our most beloved player-eaters. We adjusted some of the lighting around him to help bring out the murder in his eyes and added some torches to highlight his cleaver but haven’t decided on which shot to use yet. Below you can see some of our favorites so far.
