Isle DevBlog #7 Spittin' it out there.
[h2]Filipe | FTessaro - Lead Programmer[/h2]
It’s been a busy month as we’re hard at work finishing up this next update.
I’ve been working this month mostly on bug fixes and improvements in general. Some of the improvements required changes to how various abilities worked to detect the ragdolls, such as eating and pickup. The addition of pieces of meat and schools of fish adds further complexity to the code, resulting in additional bugs of course.
We’ve made significant improvements to the Utahraptor pounce, some technical issues remain, relating to the engine which causes a weird rotation problem. I hope to fix it ASAP, but it won't delay the update, as we’re able to easily deploy the fix in a hotfix update.
Ragdolls have received more attention, especially when picking them up or dropping them around, including bodies in water, weird behaviors are still expected sometimes, just because ragdoll physics are really hard to "control". Expect to see additional improvements in the future.
AmbZones were updated to account for the new day cycle system, which is not the final system, all that will be improved down the road.
Another important thing we’ve been working on is server performance, which we’ve improved to allow for more stability, more players and decrease the chance of jittering or teleportations.
Client performance has also seen some improvements, but with the addition of the basic day/night cycle we are not going to see a substantial improvement just yet. Keep in mind that the day/night cycle wasn't in our plans for Update 2, so we will continue working on improving it´s functionality and performance. The strange over time fps decay seems to be fixed, which I think will be a major improvement for the client experience overall.
Bleeding has been a very popular topic in QA meetings and discussion, not only related to its functionality, but also how much and how it affects the game. Bleeding uses a mathematical system that simulates individual wounds, each wound has its own time of bleeding and blood "damage", that is stackable. If your blood pool reaches 0 you simply die. That is when wallow comes to help you, to avoid dying from bleeding after a long battle, you can wallow to clog your wounds temporarily, allowing you to survive while your body closes the wounds. BUT, if during the time mud is clogging your wounds you are attacked again, all your wounds open and start to bleed again, so be careful!
UI indicators were also added, but overall the functionality itself is still WIP, so bleeding can still change depending on the balance requirements.
Besides all that I also have been working on adding some more security to the game code, mostly related to admin and dev commands. We will be improving the game security a lot more over time.
[h2]Amarok - Programmer[/h2]
Well, every month seems more crazy then the last it’s been a busy few weeks preparing for Update #2 fixing bugs and working on some last minute additions. I really felt the environment needed some attention so we worked on adding the new Day/Night cycle early and it's been well received by QA and I'm sure a lot of you have seen the screenshots although still a WIP it really improves the overall feel of the game.
I also worked on improving the situation with keybinds, All of you gamepad players can now rejoice as support has been added for those along with being able to set any keybinds that were previously missing.
AI has also seen some needed attention with improved movement and behavior for the Dryo. We have also increased the spawn rate and amount of AI whilst also resolving the issue with AI seemingly not respawning.
Lots of additional functionality to the admin panel. Since we now have time you can control. Along with the overall brightness and night time lighting. There is also an added option to teleport to a specific named location within the current playable area. (names subject to change)
Foliage Interaction and Foliage Fade is back , although not fully implemented yet the fade is in as an interim solution and will be improved over time. Foliage Interaction is also in but not fully implemented and will be further improved over time.
I have also been busy looking at IK(Inverse Kinematics) and coming up with a proper solution that we can scale to our current and future roster. You will hear more about this in the near future and should see it added to the roadmap in Ongoing Content soon.
Fishing has taken up some of my time as we start to move into Update #3 territory. The schools and elite fish are mostly complete as far as functionality goes. It’s over to QA to break it which I'm sure they will!
That about wraps it up for me. I just wanted to add that I’ve been here for almost 6 months now and it’s been a pretty wild ride. I see the real potential of the game now and I'm looking forward to the incredible future The Isle has in store.
[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
I continued work on the hypsi spit ability. We ended up going with the trace based solution for more reliability. I also added an aiming system that indicates whether you will blind your target. It zooms in your camera as well to give you a better angle and it can be cancelled with the R button as well. Recently the range has been greatly extended to allow hitting predators while staying outside their attack range.
I changed the charge ability to be more forgiving. Previously ending it caused you to come to a complete stop to prevent spamming. That has been replaced with a cooldown, so you can cancel the charge and keep running. I also modified what happens when you charge into something heavier than yourself. If your target is not much heavier than you then they get staggered and you have an opportunity to land a bite. Hitting heavier targets will end up with you getting staggered instead and even take damage when running into much bigger dinosaurs. Pick your fights carefully!
I made several changes in the background regarding how we store certain data, this will give us an easier time in the future as we have a growing number of dinosaurs. It doesn’t mean anything to the players, but from a programming perspective these changes help a lot.
There were some periods of time when I didn’t have any tasks related to Update 2 so I had the opportunity to swing back to the ptera and the deino. Both of them had to be updated code-wise to work with systems that have changed over the last 8 months. I got them up and running and jumped straight into working on the pteranodon’s issues that have been bothering me ever since. After finally scratching that itch I moved over to the deino swimming. That one is much more complete mechanically, but getting the animations right is a lot more difficult. For aquatic movement we can’t have sudden snaps that are fine on land. I feel that I made good progress, although there is still work to do. In a way it’s kind of like art, where you feel very satisfied with what you made and then others tell you that it still needs a lot of improvement. After spending a lot of time with something you see it in a different light and then look at it the next day and you see it completely differently.
[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
Wedge here, new Sound Designer for The Isle. It’s been an exciting and enjoyable first month working with everyone on the team and seeing what they are all working on. My time has mostly consisted of creating supplementary sounds for the new playables, the most interesting of which being the unique attacks for each, Hypsilophodon’s spit, Carnotaurus’ charge and Stegosaurus’ tail attack. Other vocal sounds added for these three include wallow, snore, pain, eat, bite, pinned, pounced and so on. The process has been an interesting one; adhering to Dinosauriac’s existing sound identities for each creature whilst contributing new subtly different and appropriate vocal sounds.
As well as new dinosaur vocal sounds I’ve been focusing on creating foley sounds for a range of elements, ranging from adding mud foley sounds to the wallow to feather rustles for the Hypsilophodon to additional breaths for medium and small creatures to name a few. The footstep sound for medium sized Dinosaurs have been tweaked, replacing a layer of the medium sized Dinosaur footstep sounds to add a bit of weight, driven by the systems already in place to control pitch and volume parameters based on the size of the creature. Mud footsteps have been replaced as well however I think the way mud sounds are approached will be a developing process. Knockdowns and slide surface material foley sounds are in the works with drag foley following after. Small and medium sounds have been created for knockdowns and medium for slides, ready to be implemented.
Getting acclimated to the sizing and growth audio systems has also kept me busy when getting sounds implemented, balancing cues to create a smooth transition from juvenile to adult and small to big dinosaur, with rigorous testing from QA keeping me on my toes and helping me pick it up quickly.
With lots more work to be done I’m looking forward to creating more sounds for what’s in store!
[h2]Gabriel Radić | VisualTech48 - 3D Environmental Artist[/h2]
This month has been a bit hectic but I can finally be proud to have far more assets into the main branch and it's coming to the update soon!
So what has changed/is new? This month I’ve been heavily working on the modular system to get the *ACCESS GRANTED* Utility buildings done, and the *REDACTED* station, and get the whole system finally tested and ready for shipping.
The whole system has been redesigned both for the interior and the exterior of both of them, in regarding to what should’ve been the *REDACTED* a few months ago. We use less, but precise pieces to make the same building but still allowing a lot of flexibility to the whole kit.
This has been a huge challenge to implement and do the proper tile test so I can make sure that everything fits absolutely perfectly, and that it can be reused in future builds, but as well have a versatile amount of pieces so we can do a lot of cool and unique variants. It should be soon clear not only with the 3 new pieces coming to the game for the human environment but in the near future with the addition of the *REDACTED* camp/ huge station.
Alongside that I’ve been adding a bunch of new textures, some you may seen but a lot has been redesigned, like the trim texture, and a few new metal pieces, and a more crispier glass texture, and the all new set of a specialized non uniform texture for the garage, which we can reuse with multiple dimensions and sizes depending on our needs.
Not to mention I’ve implemented some really cool known technologies with normal maps to achieve some of the crispier decals and normal edges, like on the intersections of walls:
And finally, some of the props you’ve seen, you will soon find in-game if you manage to locate them. This and the amount of effort to make it all function and be implemented correctly has been really hard work, but a really pleasant work, as I’m more than thrilled for you, the community, to see it as soon as possible. They will deploy in a patch following the release of Update 2.
Here are some of the new stuff that is in,
[h2]Jack | Hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
*GASPS FOR AIR* . Where do I even begin?! Firstly, I need to apologize for having not written one of these for a LONG time – it’s far overdue and I realize I can only use the dog ate my homework trick so many times…
Since my last update, truthfully, the majority of QA’s duties have not changed all that much. Those poor people expect sunshine and rainbows but they’re really in for nothing but pain and torment. It’s fine, they signed away their souls to us.
As before, we’ve been putting our various testing methods to full use for this update BUT our processes for approaching them have been streamlined. Previously, QA were given massive lists of potential issues to check, one by one. For example, “what happens if a player pounces another player that’s swimming?”, which we would then break down into various sub-queries to check, such as “what happens if a player pounces a (Tenonto, Hypsi, Stego, etc) while it’s swimming?". This process became incredibly tedious and in hindsight was not an effective use of QA’s time; imagine what would happen if we had 20 different playables? Yeah… Let’s not.
Instead, where possible, the queries to test for shared mechanics, such as grouping/wallowing/bleed etc, do not need to be tested by EVERY species at their various progress in growth, they’re instead just tested using one playable. You may believe this to be less thorough, and arguably it is, however the shared mechanics all use the same code regardless of species, so 9/10 times if it’s not an issue for one character, it’s not an issue for all of them.
“With all this extra time on your hands, what the hell have you been doing instead of the regular testing then?” I’m glad you asked! (Just pretend you did.) - Now that we have so much more freedom to test other areas of the game, playtesting within QA has been ramped up significantly. Playtesting is by far one of our more enjoyable processes, by which QA just plays the game, see how fun it is, and take note of any issues that do occur. The amount of issues alone we’ve discovered from simply playing the game rather than attempting really specific queries is staggering. I believe the quality in playability for this update will blow our previous updates out of the water and I only wish I had started this a lot sooner.
I believe that if it receives the QA grub of approval then I have no doubts that you’ll enjoy the experience that we’ve collectively delivered. (Seriously, these people will sit and test the gameplay balance for hours at a time; I’m like 72% convinced they’re robots.)
Talking about balance, QA have become much more involved in how we’re approaching balance for our game. Suggested topics for balance are brought to me by QA, which are then compiled into polls for them to vote on. When we have the results, we will review them in a meeting, looking at the majority votes and important points that they’ve brought up when discussing it before coming to a conclusion. Note: the conclusion isn’t always a majority vote; if there’s a particularly good idea submitted as to why a creature should be balanced the way it is then oftentimes the team can be convinced to go down that avenue. It is now up to you, the public, to determine how well of a job we’ve all done. By the time you’ve read this, the update should be out - if there is any feedback that you may have for the QA team on the game’s balance or mechanics then please do let them know because they are now actively monitoring those channels.
I just wanted to close my devblog to say how incredibly proud I am of the QA team. In the case that you were not aware, they are ALL volunteers and have given up their free time to make sure that the product you get is of the best quality. A huge thanks to them!
[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
Hey all! The majority of what we've been doing for the month of November has been getting the Hypsilophodon, Carnotaurus and Stegosaurus ready for you guys. We had to do a ton of polishing of their mechanic features, sounds, anims etc and we still have some to do after release. But we feel overall, things are in a good spot for you guys to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Please leave feedback and bug reports per usual so you can help catch the things we may not have. It helps a lot.
As it pertains to the concept team, I have seen a few questions about when/if we're going to show more concept redesigns of the old roster creatures in need of them and unfortunately it will be a little while longer before you see more of those. The concept team has been shifted to elder work for the EVRIMA creatures in preparation for the perk, diet and dimorphism systems respectively as they will all have an impact on elder acquisition. As the designs are approved and models completed, we will roll out some images for you guys on the Public Roadmap under the Elder card in Ongoing Content. Please be aware that while their models may be complete, there is an entire suite of tech, animations, sound, textures etc that will need to accompany their release. So as I mentioned in the previous devblog, you will not see any of them in-game until all of their needs are met. We will likely start debuting some of the images over the next week or so.
The animation department has had their dance card full the entire month of November with the Carno Charge adding approximately 16 animations per creature. OOF! When we develop new mechanics that have never existed in The Isle before, we have a few rounds of R&D (research and development) between the animation and programming departments where we try things out in multiple ways to find that sweet spot. The sweet spot consisting of what works the best for multiplayer, can be programmed optimally, is aesthetically pleasing visually and is the most fun to use. In an effort to achieve all of the aforementioned, it sometimes leads to some hefty overhead with animations and occasionally some mind-numbing programming wizardry. I'm sure when the animation department "wants to try something new" the programmers break out in a cold sweat. But they're always up to the task and always find the most ingenious ways to make it happen which lends so heavily to the feel and style of this game. Each department is a powerhouse individually but their achievements alone pale in comparison to their work together. Teamwork makes the dream work folks! (equal parts corny and true)
Moving forward, we're going to be hitting the ground running on Update 3, Fishing & Fishers. A lot of the content contained within, we've already shown development for so we're not starting from ground zero with our next update. We still have a lot of content to add to it that you have not seen yet though. Believe me when I say, the team is every bit as excited to get into aquatic and avian gameplay as the rest of you. Be on the lookout for its development. We are very excited to deliver on Update 3 in as big a way as possible so prepare to look for danger from above and below when you go in search of fishies.
[h3]Closing Remarks[/h3]
And that wraps it up for the seventh DevBlog! As usual I hope that you enjoyed the insight into our development process and by the time you’ve read this, Update #2 should already be in your hands. We’re all extremely eager to hear your thoughts & feedback. If you encounter any issues whilst playing please be sure to submit a bug report, it goes a long way in helping us create the game we’ve all been dreaming of. - Punchpacket
It’s been a busy month as we’re hard at work finishing up this next update.
I’ve been working this month mostly on bug fixes and improvements in general. Some of the improvements required changes to how various abilities worked to detect the ragdolls, such as eating and pickup. The addition of pieces of meat and schools of fish adds further complexity to the code, resulting in additional bugs of course.
We’ve made significant improvements to the Utahraptor pounce, some technical issues remain, relating to the engine which causes a weird rotation problem. I hope to fix it ASAP, but it won't delay the update, as we’re able to easily deploy the fix in a hotfix update.
Ragdolls have received more attention, especially when picking them up or dropping them around, including bodies in water, weird behaviors are still expected sometimes, just because ragdoll physics are really hard to "control". Expect to see additional improvements in the future.
AmbZones were updated to account for the new day cycle system, which is not the final system, all that will be improved down the road.
Another important thing we’ve been working on is server performance, which we’ve improved to allow for more stability, more players and decrease the chance of jittering or teleportations.
Client performance has also seen some improvements, but with the addition of the basic day/night cycle we are not going to see a substantial improvement just yet. Keep in mind that the day/night cycle wasn't in our plans for Update 2, so we will continue working on improving it´s functionality and performance. The strange over time fps decay seems to be fixed, which I think will be a major improvement for the client experience overall.
Bleeding has been a very popular topic in QA meetings and discussion, not only related to its functionality, but also how much and how it affects the game. Bleeding uses a mathematical system that simulates individual wounds, each wound has its own time of bleeding and blood "damage", that is stackable. If your blood pool reaches 0 you simply die. That is when wallow comes to help you, to avoid dying from bleeding after a long battle, you can wallow to clog your wounds temporarily, allowing you to survive while your body closes the wounds. BUT, if during the time mud is clogging your wounds you are attacked again, all your wounds open and start to bleed again, so be careful!
UI indicators were also added, but overall the functionality itself is still WIP, so bleeding can still change depending on the balance requirements.
Besides all that I also have been working on adding some more security to the game code, mostly related to admin and dev commands. We will be improving the game security a lot more over time.
[h2]Amarok - Programmer[/h2]
Well, every month seems more crazy then the last it’s been a busy few weeks preparing for Update #2 fixing bugs and working on some last minute additions. I really felt the environment needed some attention so we worked on adding the new Day/Night cycle early and it's been well received by QA and I'm sure a lot of you have seen the screenshots although still a WIP it really improves the overall feel of the game.
I also worked on improving the situation with keybinds, All of you gamepad players can now rejoice as support has been added for those along with being able to set any keybinds that were previously missing.
AI has also seen some needed attention with improved movement and behavior for the Dryo. We have also increased the spawn rate and amount of AI whilst also resolving the issue with AI seemingly not respawning.
Lots of additional functionality to the admin panel. Since we now have time you can control. Along with the overall brightness and night time lighting. There is also an added option to teleport to a specific named location within the current playable area. (names subject to change)
Foliage Interaction and Foliage Fade is back , although not fully implemented yet the fade is in as an interim solution and will be improved over time. Foliage Interaction is also in but not fully implemented and will be further improved over time.
I have also been busy looking at IK(Inverse Kinematics) and coming up with a proper solution that we can scale to our current and future roster. You will hear more about this in the near future and should see it added to the roadmap in Ongoing Content soon.
Fishing has taken up some of my time as we start to move into Update #3 territory. The schools and elite fish are mostly complete as far as functionality goes. It’s over to QA to break it which I'm sure they will!
That about wraps it up for me. I just wanted to add that I’ve been here for almost 6 months now and it’s been a pretty wild ride. I see the real potential of the game now and I'm looking forward to the incredible future The Isle has in store.
[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
I continued work on the hypsi spit ability. We ended up going with the trace based solution for more reliability. I also added an aiming system that indicates whether you will blind your target. It zooms in your camera as well to give you a better angle and it can be cancelled with the R button as well. Recently the range has been greatly extended to allow hitting predators while staying outside their attack range.
I changed the charge ability to be more forgiving. Previously ending it caused you to come to a complete stop to prevent spamming. That has been replaced with a cooldown, so you can cancel the charge and keep running. I also modified what happens when you charge into something heavier than yourself. If your target is not much heavier than you then they get staggered and you have an opportunity to land a bite. Hitting heavier targets will end up with you getting staggered instead and even take damage when running into much bigger dinosaurs. Pick your fights carefully!
I made several changes in the background regarding how we store certain data, this will give us an easier time in the future as we have a growing number of dinosaurs. It doesn’t mean anything to the players, but from a programming perspective these changes help a lot.
There were some periods of time when I didn’t have any tasks related to Update 2 so I had the opportunity to swing back to the ptera and the deino. Both of them had to be updated code-wise to work with systems that have changed over the last 8 months. I got them up and running and jumped straight into working on the pteranodon’s issues that have been bothering me ever since. After finally scratching that itch I moved over to the deino swimming. That one is much more complete mechanically, but getting the animations right is a lot more difficult. For aquatic movement we can’t have sudden snaps that are fine on land. I feel that I made good progress, although there is still work to do. In a way it’s kind of like art, where you feel very satisfied with what you made and then others tell you that it still needs a lot of improvement. After spending a lot of time with something you see it in a different light and then look at it the next day and you see it completely differently.
[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
Wedge here, new Sound Designer for The Isle. It’s been an exciting and enjoyable first month working with everyone on the team and seeing what they are all working on. My time has mostly consisted of creating supplementary sounds for the new playables, the most interesting of which being the unique attacks for each, Hypsilophodon’s spit, Carnotaurus’ charge and Stegosaurus’ tail attack. Other vocal sounds added for these three include wallow, snore, pain, eat, bite, pinned, pounced and so on. The process has been an interesting one; adhering to Dinosauriac’s existing sound identities for each creature whilst contributing new subtly different and appropriate vocal sounds.
As well as new dinosaur vocal sounds I’ve been focusing on creating foley sounds for a range of elements, ranging from adding mud foley sounds to the wallow to feather rustles for the Hypsilophodon to additional breaths for medium and small creatures to name a few. The footstep sound for medium sized Dinosaurs have been tweaked, replacing a layer of the medium sized Dinosaur footstep sounds to add a bit of weight, driven by the systems already in place to control pitch and volume parameters based on the size of the creature. Mud footsteps have been replaced as well however I think the way mud sounds are approached will be a developing process. Knockdowns and slide surface material foley sounds are in the works with drag foley following after. Small and medium sounds have been created for knockdowns and medium for slides, ready to be implemented.
Getting acclimated to the sizing and growth audio systems has also kept me busy when getting sounds implemented, balancing cues to create a smooth transition from juvenile to adult and small to big dinosaur, with rigorous testing from QA keeping me on my toes and helping me pick it up quickly.
With lots more work to be done I’m looking forward to creating more sounds for what’s in store!
[h2]Gabriel Radić | VisualTech48 - 3D Environmental Artist[/h2]
This month has been a bit hectic but I can finally be proud to have far more assets into the main branch and it's coming to the update soon!
So what has changed/is new? This month I’ve been heavily working on the modular system to get the *ACCESS GRANTED* Utility buildings done, and the *REDACTED* station, and get the whole system finally tested and ready for shipping.
The whole system has been redesigned both for the interior and the exterior of both of them, in regarding to what should’ve been the *REDACTED* a few months ago. We use less, but precise pieces to make the same building but still allowing a lot of flexibility to the whole kit.
This has been a huge challenge to implement and do the proper tile test so I can make sure that everything fits absolutely perfectly, and that it can be reused in future builds, but as well have a versatile amount of pieces so we can do a lot of cool and unique variants. It should be soon clear not only with the 3 new pieces coming to the game for the human environment but in the near future with the addition of the *REDACTED* camp/ huge station.
Alongside that I’ve been adding a bunch of new textures, some you may seen but a lot has been redesigned, like the trim texture, and a few new metal pieces, and a more crispier glass texture, and the all new set of a specialized non uniform texture for the garage, which we can reuse with multiple dimensions and sizes depending on our needs.
Not to mention I’ve implemented some really cool known technologies with normal maps to achieve some of the crispier decals and normal edges, like on the intersections of walls:
And finally, some of the props you’ve seen, you will soon find in-game if you manage to locate them. This and the amount of effort to make it all function and be implemented correctly has been really hard work, but a really pleasant work, as I’m more than thrilled for you, the community, to see it as soon as possible. They will deploy in a patch following the release of Update 2.
Here are some of the new stuff that is in,
[h2]Jack | Hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
*GASPS FOR AIR* . Where do I even begin?! Firstly, I need to apologize for having not written one of these for a LONG time – it’s far overdue and I realize I can only use the dog ate my homework trick so many times…
Since my last update, truthfully, the majority of QA’s duties have not changed all that much. Those poor people expect sunshine and rainbows but they’re really in for nothing but pain and torment. It’s fine, they signed away their souls to us.
As before, we’ve been putting our various testing methods to full use for this update BUT our processes for approaching them have been streamlined. Previously, QA were given massive lists of potential issues to check, one by one. For example, “what happens if a player pounces another player that’s swimming?”, which we would then break down into various sub-queries to check, such as “what happens if a player pounces a (Tenonto, Hypsi, Stego, etc) while it’s swimming?". This process became incredibly tedious and in hindsight was not an effective use of QA’s time; imagine what would happen if we had 20 different playables? Yeah… Let’s not.
Instead, where possible, the queries to test for shared mechanics, such as grouping/wallowing/bleed etc, do not need to be tested by EVERY species at their various progress in growth, they’re instead just tested using one playable. You may believe this to be less thorough, and arguably it is, however the shared mechanics all use the same code regardless of species, so 9/10 times if it’s not an issue for one character, it’s not an issue for all of them.
“With all this extra time on your hands, what the hell have you been doing instead of the regular testing then?” I’m glad you asked! (Just pretend you did.) - Now that we have so much more freedom to test other areas of the game, playtesting within QA has been ramped up significantly. Playtesting is by far one of our more enjoyable processes, by which QA just plays the game, see how fun it is, and take note of any issues that do occur. The amount of issues alone we’ve discovered from simply playing the game rather than attempting really specific queries is staggering. I believe the quality in playability for this update will blow our previous updates out of the water and I only wish I had started this a lot sooner.
I believe that if it receives the QA grub of approval then I have no doubts that you’ll enjoy the experience that we’ve collectively delivered. (Seriously, these people will sit and test the gameplay balance for hours at a time; I’m like 72% convinced they’re robots.)
Talking about balance, QA have become much more involved in how we’re approaching balance for our game. Suggested topics for balance are brought to me by QA, which are then compiled into polls for them to vote on. When we have the results, we will review them in a meeting, looking at the majority votes and important points that they’ve brought up when discussing it before coming to a conclusion. Note: the conclusion isn’t always a majority vote; if there’s a particularly good idea submitted as to why a creature should be balanced the way it is then oftentimes the team can be convinced to go down that avenue. It is now up to you, the public, to determine how well of a job we’ve all done. By the time you’ve read this, the update should be out - if there is any feedback that you may have for the QA team on the game’s balance or mechanics then please do let them know because they are now actively monitoring those channels.
I just wanted to close my devblog to say how incredibly proud I am of the QA team. In the case that you were not aware, they are ALL volunteers and have given up their free time to make sure that the product you get is of the best quality. A huge thanks to them!
[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
Hey all! The majority of what we've been doing for the month of November has been getting the Hypsilophodon, Carnotaurus and Stegosaurus ready for you guys. We had to do a ton of polishing of their mechanic features, sounds, anims etc and we still have some to do after release. But we feel overall, things are in a good spot for you guys to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Please leave feedback and bug reports per usual so you can help catch the things we may not have. It helps a lot.
As it pertains to the concept team, I have seen a few questions about when/if we're going to show more concept redesigns of the old roster creatures in need of them and unfortunately it will be a little while longer before you see more of those. The concept team has been shifted to elder work for the EVRIMA creatures in preparation for the perk, diet and dimorphism systems respectively as they will all have an impact on elder acquisition. As the designs are approved and models completed, we will roll out some images for you guys on the Public Roadmap under the Elder card in Ongoing Content. Please be aware that while their models may be complete, there is an entire suite of tech, animations, sound, textures etc that will need to accompany their release. So as I mentioned in the previous devblog, you will not see any of them in-game until all of their needs are met. We will likely start debuting some of the images over the next week or so.
The animation department has had their dance card full the entire month of November with the Carno Charge adding approximately 16 animations per creature. OOF! When we develop new mechanics that have never existed in The Isle before, we have a few rounds of R&D (research and development) between the animation and programming departments where we try things out in multiple ways to find that sweet spot. The sweet spot consisting of what works the best for multiplayer, can be programmed optimally, is aesthetically pleasing visually and is the most fun to use. In an effort to achieve all of the aforementioned, it sometimes leads to some hefty overhead with animations and occasionally some mind-numbing programming wizardry. I'm sure when the animation department "wants to try something new" the programmers break out in a cold sweat. But they're always up to the task and always find the most ingenious ways to make it happen which lends so heavily to the feel and style of this game. Each department is a powerhouse individually but their achievements alone pale in comparison to their work together. Teamwork makes the dream work folks! (equal parts corny and true)
Moving forward, we're going to be hitting the ground running on Update 3, Fishing & Fishers. A lot of the content contained within, we've already shown development for so we're not starting from ground zero with our next update. We still have a lot of content to add to it that you have not seen yet though. Believe me when I say, the team is every bit as excited to get into aquatic and avian gameplay as the rest of you. Be on the lookout for its development. We are very excited to deliver on Update 3 in as big a way as possible so prepare to look for danger from above and below when you go in search of fishies.
[h3]Closing Remarks[/h3]
And that wraps it up for the seventh DevBlog! As usual I hope that you enjoyed the insight into our development process and by the time you’ve read this, Update #2 should already be in your hands. We’re all extremely eager to hear your thoughts & feedback. If you encounter any issues whilst playing please be sure to submit a bug report, it goes a long way in helping us create the game we’ve all been dreaming of. - Punchpacket