Greetings VR lovers,
Today, we present you the first episode of our award-winning* Developer Diary. In it, we’ll cover a bit more of our development process. There will be sneak peeks of upcoming features, maps and enemies. Most of it will actually make it into the game, but there could be some that end up on the chopping block. Don’t hesitate and write us your opinions, so we can know which of the new content resonates with you guys!
And now, let us introduce you to your next enemy: the Embracer. Fast and deadly, she will challenge your reflexes as well as the durability of your shotgun. Her motivations are as yet unclear, but she definitely wants more than just a hug.
In the beginning, we had three solid attributes to start from: She's female, ferocious, and haven't slept for a while. Her hair was one of the big question marks surrounding the concept, as if we want to keep our level of polish and optimisation, a resource hogging lush hairdo is not the best idea.
We brought her into this virtual world only to find out that she's way too dateable to be scary, and so the process of uglification began: First, we gave her a generous set of sharp teeth, which completely solved the dateable problem, but it was far from enough.
Then, we added the facial expression of a girlfriend after you've tried to cancel romantic date-night again. The research for this feature was one of our most trying projects but hey, nobody said game development was going to be easy.
All that was missing was a touch of purple skin and there: Perfection. This is going to be our first female character, so the team discovered a heap of fresh challenges. We’ll have to make brand new, feminine animations and also find a real life walking and talking woman to do the voice acting.
At one point we've experimented with giving her a mask, but we kind of missed her smile, so in the end decided against it.
She still has a long way to go before she’s able to rip your virtual head off though, right now we are working on her animations and then we’ll have to test and balance her out with the other baddies. What do you think of your newest enemy so far? As always, we really appreciate your thoughts and feedback!
Cheers,
Xreal Team
*Unfortunately we cannot disclose the actual titles of the awards for, erm… legal reasons, but we can assure you: the quality is award-winning! ;)