Hello everyone, welcome to this week's progress report.
Level:
Over the course of this week, we worked on several quest locations ranging from small to medium, creating interesting encounters. On the other side of the Environment, we worked on bringing the Pillar Region ground areas to the next level with more scattered assets. While that is happening, we are reviewing and improving our PCG tools to speed up that process and our 3D artists are hard at work implementing and creating additional final assets.
Code:
This week, we started working on properly setting up the parameters for the nav mesh. This includes setting up different navigation agents, so differently sized NPCs can better traverse the world, as well as tweaking the resolution to balance precision and generation cost, and finding ways to mask areas that are irrelevant for navigation.
In the sandbox, the way you access your scenes has been overhauled:
We have added a new dedicated sandbox "Play" mode, where you can load into scenes completely without editor tools (i.e. you cannot enter edit mode), which can be useful for playable experiences.
The level selection screen (Showroom, New/Old Wild Life map) in the main menu has been removed and the sandbox scene selection menu can now show scenes across all levels. This also means you can now load directly into a sandbox scene from another level while in edit mode.
Pressing "Empty / New" will now give you the option to select the desired starting level.
To reflect this overhaul, the scene selection screen has also been improved visually.
Character:
The last few remaining weapon models are getting finished and we will soon be complete on that front. The Slugroth is also getting a nice addition for the ones found as part of the travelling trader caravans. Now they look like proper beasts of burden. We added a new sandbox character, as well: Tyler, a femboy-ish character based on Sethro’s skeleton.
Animations:
On the animation side, we are working on some more NPC routine animations needed for specific quests.
Design:
In the quest department, the revised Max x Shey dialogues have been fully implemented and her drone quest has been extended with two more scenes; one at the beginning and one at the end. (The minigames for these scenes are still WIP and not there yet). Work has now started on planning out the Maya x Rawn quest.
We also finished the routines for the bandits of the various bandit camps. Bandits feel alive now! We got started on the implementation of the sexbot questline, as well as getting started on the first narrative / writing pass for the intro section of the game.
We kicked off the SFX production for NPC routines and are now in the process of doing all the necessary recordings. We also improved the zone placement in the World Tree, Cannibal Jungle, Adûn, Apoc Canyon, and Temple of Kraal areas which fixed music and environment sound inconsistencies while also adding a couple of new music zones.
We added the final flirty dialogues for the Maya x Max romance and tested all fragments which are now ready for review.
Thank you for all your continued support,
-Wild Life Team