Patreon Development Update 09.12.2022 (Patreon)

Welcome to one of the last dev update posts of the year,

UE5 (Important): The move is making progress but some of the “little issues” we mentioned last week turned out to be not so little. Our main concerns currently are: lighting, physics and performance. It all generally works and looks quite good, but these aspects still require more time. The performance currently is down overall until we perform an in-depth profiling. Physics behavior changed completely and we had to revisit all physics settings. We are still experiencing some issues with jittering but other than that the character physics should be much more stable than before. The lighting with lumen works already and it produces some amazing results. Now we need to dive deeper into these new settings to approach a more final lighting result for all the different situations our game will be featuring. Expect the lighting to look somewhat different compared to older builds.

There is still a lot of work to be done and we expect it to take a few more build releases for the vast majority of aspects to be fully sorted and improved. So please view this next build as a heavy work-in-progress snapshot of the bigger work we need to do to make full use of all the cool new things UE5 has to offer.

Level: We are continuing our work on Lake Village houses. Check this out :)
Also looking into nanite related modeling approaches for level assets.

Code: In addition to the before mentioned UE5 efforts code has been working on some more Sandbox quality of life improvements and a few new features such as a camera follower (similar to the player follow but it attaches to the currently rendering camera) and a surface type material property to change the sound that footsteps make when walking on an object with that material.

Character: Thank you all for the great name suggestions in the last post. Our current favorite is Slugroth. This big guy has progressed further too.
We also started work on the next creature - the Skyray:

Animations: All minigames for the coming build are finished and we are now focusing on more assorted sandbox animations. Blackwing movement and idle animations are still in progress.

Design: Combat system design: Editing workflow (continued from last week) as well as flying combat design. Side quest + dialog implementation is also in progress.

That's it for now, thanks for all your awesome support,

-Wild Life Team