It has been a little while since out last update and in our silence you will find us hard at work on the game getting it ever closer to an alpha state. I have some nice new screenshots to show off in this update around some of the things that we have been working on. I did however, want to mention that while things are still progressing nicely we lost our level designer. We have been working hard to get our new level designer up to speed and our programmer has been hard at work getting the random world generation and free-form base building working. The world randomization is already shaping up really well and the only slowdown is getting all the models and art to start populating the world fully. As a side note, if there are any talented environmental 3d modelers with texturing skills out there we are looking for some extra assistance.
We now have a city environment and its borders building in full. We are currently working on each of the Chunk Areas (Individual buildings, parks or event spots.) These areas make up the meat of the game and as we pump them out the world feels more and more concrete. We have also moved towards a more grid based world behind the scenes to clean up a lot of the issues with pathing and object placement in the previous demo. This change will greatly improve the feel of object placement in base building. There is still a lot of work going on with the level design but the screenshot below shows a fully procedurally generated section of the world.
The base building is the newest piece we have been working on. In our last demo you played in a pre-built base with limited pre-determined building spots. It has been our goal from the beginning to allow the player to build where they want to and as such we have started hammering out the free-form base building. You decide where to call home. Setup your campfire and start building what you can. Certain structures and items will require you to build workbenches to enable you to construct them. We are also hashing out the design of the various base levels, what objects you can build at each level and what is required for building everything.
Some of the next big steps include implementing a full fledge database to allow us to more easily store and reference data and then start working on some of the basic survivor AI allowing for you to find and recruit new survivors, bring them back to your base and have them start to work on things with you.
On the art side of the house we are working on some additional character models, weapons, and environment assets. Here is one of our new characters. Up next are some new female models.
Please stop by the forums and let us know your thoughts or give us your ideas! We are in the process of re-working the actual Kickstarter campaign so keep an eye out in the near future for some early previews for our previous backers. We are working hard to try and get the re-launch up in July but we want to make sure there is plenty of time to get the alpha build out to press and start spreading the word before we re-launch. As such it may be closer to August or September. In either case, we are also working on making some more convention appearances in the coming months and we will be sure to let you know once we have any of those confirmed.
It looks nice. Looking forward to this relaunch.
Thanks we are as well! Hoping to have some videos in the coming weeks as we move closer to the re-launch.