New Team V Logo
Dear Community
As you may well have seen from the image above I took some time to create a new logo for Team V. It's a simple logo but it does it's job adequately I think and I think it's a nice upgrade from the old one.
I have also created a new startup video which is pretty much the same in length. But this is hardly the most exciting news I wanted to share.
Improved Intro Sequence
For quite some time I have wanted to improve the very first intro sequence. It starts good enough with the text but the lighting and the station itself always felt a bit flat. This has been tweaked and I think it's a major improvement. I won't spoil anything, you'll just have to see it in motion for yourself.
Another thing that bothered me was Aryn and John's introduction. It wasn't conveying their personalities properly nor their relationship as two friends and colleagues who have a shared history together.
Again I won't spoil anything but this has also been addressed and I think this new opening is a much more gradual intro. Instead of just dropping the player at some starting area, it now starts with a nice first person animation sequence which was pretty tough to pull off but I am pretty proud of it.
But wait, there's more!
DataPad FPV Tweaked
The first person view has been improved. Aryn's hand has been changed to a more natural position and the DataPad is now closer to the players view which increases detail as well as it being properly centered towards the screen.
Echoes
Echoes has been given some attention too. In this new updated the warning has been fixed. So now when you venture deeper into the station, you won't have to be staring at it for the remainder of the mission.
Other tweaks is a lighting polish, I think the level looks a whole lore better. Merry has been tweaked to not be the god of blinding light. (It's still bright but it's within bounds). And the overlapping dialogues have also been fixed.
There are still a few minor bugs that need to be fixed but the major annoyances has been deal with.
DataPad Save Game Improvements
In the future I plan to add achievements. A portion of these will be tied to the crew logs you find throughout the game. You might have to collect a number of logs from a certain crew member in order to unlock an achievement, or simply by collecting them all. Because of this Whenever you started a new game or by selecting a chapter from the chapter selection menu, you would retain all of these logs.
This has now been changed. Whenever you start a new game, the logs will be cleared, except, for when you select a chapter from the chapter selection menu.
This means that you can use the chapter selection menu to search for logs you might have missed in a previous chapter. You can also now manually delete your logs through the game options.
Mirros
I have added the option if turning the mirrors on inside the options menu. I tweaked my old system and it works pretty solid. Now, it's not a true mirror but more of a camera that mirrors the environment.
This has been done to keep performance in check but turning them on will come at a minimal cost. By default they are turned off, but it's only a click away from being activated.
Keep in mind that the game has not been designed with these in mind. You might catch Aryn talking but there's no lip sync feature in the game and the character model of Aryn needs an update which I hope to be able to attend to sometime in the future.
So, What's Next?
I will be putting my focus on getting the localization back working. Our French customers have been waiting far too long to be able to play the game in their native language so I will have to take the time and figure out what's going on.
We will also be working on getting chapter 3 localized. Besides that I will try to fix a few more bugs and what not but after that I will be heading onto the next chapter.
The game is in such a good place right now that I feel I can start moving forward again having done a ton of legwork in terms of fixes and additional polish in content, visuals and gameplay.
I hope you guys will enjoy the new stuff in this update and as always feel free to share your thoughts.
Joure & Team V