Hey everyone. The team hopes everyone had a great holiday season and wishes you a happy New Year!
We are working on features for Alpha 5 which mainly includes the Biomes and Artifiacts/Lore. Scroll down and check out what we’ve been up to.
Upgrade Meshes
Kevin
Final assets I will be working on for upgrades. Re arranging the workshop a bit to fit its upgrades.
Workshop 
Evaporator 
Water Cannon
Artifact Textures
Elliott
Wood bust of Emperor Tandor (W.I.P)
While am thinking about adding additional detail like barnacles to this bust. I wanted to make a gruff depiction of the emperor by using facial expressions to show his despotic personality. I was initially thinking of using more wild and large unkempt hair to depict Tandor. But felt fitting for an emperor to have a neatly trimmed beard and hair.
Faction flags tattered (W.I.P)
I didn’t want to apply too much wear to the color of the faction’s flags since I saw it as a recent creation. What I wanted to focus on was the damage with intense tattering to reflect the ongoing battles between the factions in-game.
Bottle of missive
While not much to note about its design. I wanted the bottle to be slightly damaged and the missive to be completely intact. Am not even sure what secrets lie in the bottle.
Artifacts
Shawn
Ocean Shader and Bugs:
Some graphical bugs with the ocean has been found and fixed. I will continue to fix any issues as they are reported
Artifacts:
Gameplay design for artifacts discovery and collection is mostly completed. Some things may change but the bullet points are:
- Artifacts will be found in the world and in specific biomes
- Villagers will be able to collect the artifact from a ruined floating city
- Once collected, the artifact will award 5 tech points and be placed in the Artifact Room
- The Artifact Room is a special place that all artifacts can be viewed and read about – this room will be accessed in-game and through the main menu
- An individual artifact will only be found once per game but each game can find the same artifact to gain the awarded tech points
Biomes
Zomawia
More progress on the Biomes and implemented two key feature: water color and water floor height changes depending on vicinity biome. These are important for the player to have visual cue when entering Biomes. Our current water system was not made for this so I had to destroy a lot of things in the process. Next I will need to implement a fog system under the water and the custom spawning for each Biome.