Hello and thank you for taking the time to keep up to date with development. Here we will give a casual breakdown of some of the recent developments in Jaws of Extinction and what you can expect to see in future updates.
As always, if you enjoy reading these notes from the developers, please like and comment as we also like to hear from you as well.
Treasure Hunting
Working on the treasure system has been very enjoyable. We wanted to design a system which was both creatively unique and fun to play. So there will be multiple ways to embark on a treasure hunt.
You could find a message in a bottle on the shore
You could find part of a map on somebody you loot
Or you could be given the task to locate the other pieces of a map found by a member of one of the safe zones.
You will need to find all parts of a map before you can successfully get the booty, even if you think you know where it is, all parts will be required.
Maps could be divided into up to six parts and each part will give you a clue to another part.
Locate the treasure and return it to the quest giver for a plentiful reward or sell the booty to the local treasure seeker that will be found at any one of the safezones.
We are starting to test this system on the Staging Branch soon and you can expect to see the treasure hunting systems go live on the Main Branch in the near future.
Wreck Diving
Explore shipwrecks to unlock clues to treasure locations, parts of maps or the booty itself. We want to make the ocean depths to be as detailed as possible and action packed as on land. So don't expect to be alone down there, with sharks that will behave like real sharks, not: “we want to eat you and attack you as soon as they see you”. They will make choices based on your location relative to them, time of day and your energy level. So be on your toes or you might just lose them.
Website Integration
We have spent the last couple of weeks working to bring the website up to date with the latest information, images and more.
One thing we have been eager to make available is a Road Map that we can now update on the fly with ease. Due to being so busy with development we needed a solution that we can use with our day to day workflow. The website now directly reads data from our Trello roadmap that will update in real time as we change it.
We also needed a system that could help players on all platforms as well as Steam to be able to activate unlockable content and DLC all in one place, so we have decided to make our own solution to this.
DLC and unlockable content, free and paid will all be managed by our own system. This enables us to offer a service for all platforms to be able to use a product key to activate / unlock content all in one place.
No Downloadable Content (DLC) will be available for purchase via Steam or any other platform and will only be available via our website and activated directly in-game.
AI Updates
The conversion to the latest version of the AI is almost complete. Most of the old systems have been removed and replaced with the new AIV4 rework.
This upgrade has been vital to remove lag-spikes caused by NPCs in older versions of the game. Additionally, it has been an excellent opportunity to stamp out some nuisance issues from the past.
In the latest staging releases, we’ve integrated a new pooling system for NPCs, which is used for spawning NPCs who do not need to persist after despawning. This is useful for circumstances such as guards spawning around air drops and pop-up spawns in quests.
Additionally, static NPCs are being moved on to the new AI system. Previously, the static NPCs around the safe-zones were completely separate from regular NPCs. Now they can co-exist on the same system. This has the benefits of allowing static NPCs to spawn and despawn using a better optimised system, as well as allowing NPCs to activate into a non-static state. In other words, this means traditionally stationary NPCs can become active and start moving seamlessly if required.
Human NPCs using the latest AI system have received some improvements too. They can now use all types of weapons like their original counterparts. This means you once again expect to see groups of Xiles using bows, melee and firearms.
What to expect in the second quarter of 2022
We have finally got round to working on multiplayer again and although performance will always be our number one priority the show must go on.
We are looking to partner with a new company soon that should give us the resource injection we need to hire additional team members in order to get content complete quicker and finally get on top of performance. This will help us to also get further into multiplayer development as well.
Don't forget to browse over our Roadmap on a regular basis as we will update it as new things happening over at https://playjoe.gg/roadmap/ and if you happen to stream or cover the game on YouTube or Twitch, grab some artwork at https://playjoe.gg/presskit/
Thanks again for all your feedback and continued support.
The JoE Development team @ KYE Creations