trailer Archives - Fractured Veil

Gunfire and Floating Mutants

Sprint 37 is coming to an end and we’re busy adding a bit of polish to the island, squashing bugs as they appear, and finishing up our game trailer. We ran into a bit of a floating problem this week with both rivers and dead AI occasionally refusing to obey the laws of gravity. Mutants no longer float above buildings after being killed and water is flowing in the proper direction now instead of up. We also fixed a problem with players being unable to interact with items that were underwater.

The team made some audio updates. There’s new harvesting sounds, and we added hooks for coughing when a player is poisoned so they won’t die silently. We addressed a bug where drone engine sounds were not being triggered for some clients and handled a problem with some weapons not playing sounds. Our clubs our thudding now and players can enjoy the calming noise of the waves and automatic gun fire too.

We worked out a problem with building containers not being able to store certain items and fixed the Thorcon door which decided to stop opening. Players will no longer have to live with the existential angst and uncertainty triggered by watching a death animation play when they are merely unconscious or knocked out. We also changed the player’s FOV to avoid aiming down sights being blurry in some weapons. Your relative life or death and iron sights should be much clearer now.

Lastly, we’re finishing up our game trailer and working on our AI spawner. We’ve made some improvements to how and where mutants and animals appear and added some controls to quickly adjust how many are spawned in certain areas. The neighborhood and surrounding jungle we’re shooting the trailer in looks great and we’re just finishing up some editing work. Below you can see a few shots of the area where we’re shooting footage.

August 8, 2019

Setting the Scenery

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.

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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.

August 1, 2019

Rivers, Creeks, and Streams

This week the team remained focused on filming our trailer and improving some of our automated systems. We’ve added many personal touches to the numerous ruins that dot the landscape to help indirectly tell the story of the people who once lived in Lahaina and the world before the Fracture. In addition, we began work on the building system that players will use down the road to make their own structures. We have a good amount of work ahead of us before players will be able to build their own apocalypse dream homes, but we’ve been working on textures and designs. Here’s a look at what thatched building materials might look like inside and out.

As usual, there were several bugs to fix this week too. We nabbed a bug with container widgets not showing item descriptions and addressed an issue where the torch VFX were sometimes not showing up if a player already had another item in their hand. The best bug of the week, however, has to go to one that saw players falling through the Earth when spawning. We fixed the bug right away although for some of us it seemed like a lost opportunity to wait 84 mins and 24 secs to see if players would come out the other side of the planet and then fall back through to Maui.

We’ve talked a lot about our procedural building and road systems but we’re also working on a water system to generate rivers, creeks, and streams across the map. In addition to other environmental cues and features like cliffs and smoke, rivers not only give players access to much-needed water but can act as a natural funnel to get players moving around the map. Below is a look at a couple of these water features around the area we are shooting the trailer.

July 26, 2019

Decorating Disaster

We’ve continued to add some polish to the drone and procedural building system this week ahead of putting together our game trailer. We’ve added more controls to the drone for spotting people and things of interest and staying on target long enough to capture anything worth capturing. These new controls will help us guide these automated eyes in the sky when needed, and improve their video streaming capabilities. If you’d like to see the fruits of that labor check out our most recent imgur post.

Adding a touch of personality to our building system has been a frequent topic of discussion around here. We want to make sure that the ruined houses feel like homes inside and provide the right atmosphere for players, reminding them of the lives lived and lost during The Great Fracture. We took a big first step in that direction with a new poster/picture feature. Now our ruins and a few other places around the map will have pictures or wall adornments that hint at the Maui that once was. Friends and family might recognize some of the people, places, and pets we have in rotation currently. We still have some work to go but you can take a peek at the system in the video below.

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We didn’t spend all of our time hanging family photos on the walls, however. The team also nabbed a few bugs and worked on sprucing up the neighborhood we plan on using for the trailer.

We added some animations for our cannibals after discovery we didn’t have any transitions between them feasting on the dead and trying to feast on players. They now stand up and crouch down instead of blinking into attack mode. We fixed some clipping issues with Big Bob and fixed a bug with arrows not showing impact fx on clients and traveling through objects. While a phase arrow sounds useful for those who get sick of shooting around things, it would be too big of a disruption to game balance.

The area where we’re shooting the trailer is coming together nicely as the team continues to add little touches inside and out. Here’s a look at the latest improvements we’ve made to the neighborhood.

July 18, 2019

Tag: trailer