Hello everyone!
August means vacation time at Exkee. Most of our developers took the opportunity to enjoy some well-deserved time off. As a result, this Dev Diary is arriving a little later than usual and will be slightly shorter than our usual updates.
But don't worry: you won't have to wait as long for the next one! September is shaping up to be a busy month, with plenty of work going into the preparation of our public demo, coming this October.
On the art side
We carried out an optimization pass on the project's textures.
New decorative assets were created to further enrich our environments.
Several art explorations were also conducted for potential new environments.
On the development side
On the development side, several features are continuing to take shape:
Work on Focus Mode continued and is now finished.
We started working on the players' ragdoll system, allowing characters to react to certain events. For example, when one player sprays another player with a jet of water!
Work on the end-of-mission statistics screen is still ongoing.
We also worked on the storage system to make interactions with multiple types of objects smoother, such as backpacks and handheld items. This also allowed us to fix the infamous bug that caused hoses to endlessly respawn in the hose carrier!
As always, another debugging pass was carried out.
On the sound design side
Audio work is also moving forward! New sounds have been created, while existing ones have been reworked and improved.
Here is a look at some of the sounds that were created and/or reworked this month:
Water-related sounds: hydroshield nozzle, differences between the various water jets, water flowing from the fire truck, and more.
Fire truck sounds: a new take on the engine sound, siren tests, and sounds associated with the pump controls.
Interaction sounds: UI sounds such as pressing a button in a menu, sounds for picking up and putting away objects with variations depending on the object, as well as sounds for dropping an object.
Mission sounds: tests for a jingle to accompany the completion of an objective.
Movement sounds: tests for footsteps when walking on ashes.
We can't wait to see you again next month and show you more of what we've been working on, especially as we get closer to the official public demo coming this October.
See you soon!
❤️ Rescue Ops: Wildfire team