Development Update 28.03.2025

Level:
Level artists are hard at work on the Lake Village's interiors, placing props and improving the look and feel of the different houses to better visualize their professions and social standing. Meanwhile, work on the architecture of Adûn is nearing its end. The next phase will focus on set dressing and adding more details to enrich the area.
Over at Pearl Village and the Umbar Mountains, the team has begun a much-needed overhaul of the placed foliage. This involves replacing old placeholder meshes with improved blockouts to enhance the visual quality and overall atmosphere of the region.

Code:
This week, we finished implementing character attributes and status effects. As part of the new status effects, we implemented two new build ups; Heat and Cold. These get triggered by environment zones, which will be placed in the desert. During the day, the Heat build up will increase, and during night, the Cold build up. If either build up reaches its maximum, the player will get the Overheated or Freezing status effect respectively, causing damage over time.
We also implemented the underground mode for the Sandshark, allowing it to burrow under the ground. The underground mode is functionally identical to the hover mode of the Blackwing.

On the sandbox side of things, a few more quality of life features have been added, as well as one big new feature: A skeletal mesh importer!
This feature allows you to import any mesh that contains a skeleton and attach it to any character in the scene to have it match its animation. This could be used for custom clothing, hair, multi-limb attachments or even full custom characters. For the animation to work correctly though, the skeletal structure of your meshes need to match the in-game skeleton (i.e. the bone names and offsets need to be the same). The imported skeletal mesh prop has the same options as any other prototype mesh with texture and material options. Custom morph targets are also supported and exposed as options.

• The prop preview widgets have received some love with an improved design to highlight details better and make them pop out more.
• The functionality of holding Shift while moving an object to have the camera follow has been expanded to rotating and scaling.
• Ambient Occlusion settings have been added to the post process options of the level settings and custom cameras.
• Poses have received two toggles to use the selected pose's vaginal/anal look instead of overwriting it with the vaginal/anal spread sliders.
• Added two render target props where custom cameras can render into, one for in-world and one for UI purposes. FOV, aperture, post process settings etc. will all be included in the rendering.
• Added a "Render Opacity" option to all UI elements.
• Added a tilt slider when a custom camera is possessed.
• Added the ability to push objects up/down in the outliner using Alt+Up/Down.
• Fixed a bunch of small issues all across the sandbox editor.

Character:
After having finished the first pass of hair physics for Maya and Shey based characters, we continued to set up hair physics for the human males on all Max, Sethro and Bol based characters. With the same approach, we transferred a few hairstyles between characters, so you can expect a few more different hairstyles on many characters. We also worked on a very sexy new dress design that is now available for Maya, Shey, Geneva, Koodie, Janara, Jenny, Kim, Milanna, Shiva, and Riv, as well as transferring the Sexy Knight outfit to Maya and Koodie, the Loose Dress to Maya and the Full Knight outfit to several Max based characters.

Animations:
In the animation department, we continue to work our way through weapon movesets, moving on from hammer to the blackrock's power fists. We also supported Game Design with additional combat animations this week, handing over a dropkick animation to be used from Maya's flight, a stagger reaction for being hit with an electric weapon and some other bits and pieces. We also made the flinches (aka non-interrupting hit reactions) of large monsters more consistent in length, so it is clearer which attacks can interrupt their moves and which can not.
On another note, we started improving our control rig setup that we use to process and polish motion capture animations for our cutscenes. The cleanup process is going well and is getting close to the final animation level.
Lastly, our work on animating one of the Max and Maya romance minigames is well underway.

Design:
We started the process of updating the background info sheets for all characters. This will give them additional depth and help us polish the overall dialogue. 
We also made the new HUD and inventory design production ready and finished the design for loot containers. 
On the combat and movement side, we completed the list of weapons, including their movesets, so we have a final list of missing combat animations now. We also decided on which skeletons need to use which weapon, so the respective combat moves can be produced.
We also made a first draft of the final boss fight, including his abilities and move set. 
Additionally, we finished working on the design for underground movement for the sandshark and are currently finishing up the design for Maya`s glide kick.
Lastly here, we started iterating on the design of the Grappling Hook feature to improve on the current blockout stage.
On the level design side, we wrote the direction document for the Pearl Village`s interior designs, so the level department knows which room should have which features. We also updated the Bandit Camp and Caravan Camp blockouts, getting rid of legacy assets and improving on the level design.

Wild Life Community Announcement: The Path to Our Destination 1.0 

• We went over the entire setting and lore in detail, really nailing down all factions, locations, important characters and plot points of the main quest.
• We went with a smarter blockout approach for building the new world map. This allowed us to make changes quickly and test quests and pathfinding without a location needing to be finished first. 
• Code went to work on making the core systems cleaner, more robust and easier to edit before we would throw more content into them. 

• Strengthened Team: Finding the right people for your team is always a difficult process. After some growing pains, we’ve assembled an amazing crew over the years, also bringing in seasoned game developers with a track record of shipping successful titles. Their expertise makes us more confident than ever that we can overcome any obstacles thrown our way.
• A Smarter Workflow: Our improved, iterative process makes asset creation more straightforward, predictable and structured, ensuring a steady speed of development.
• Core Systems Locked In: Dialogue, combat, NPC routines and navigation are no longer just plans or prototypes - they’re stable, tested, and maintainable systems.
• Unreal Engine 5 Power: UE5’s tools are now well integrated into our pipeline, unlocking capabilities that we couldn't achieve with Unreal Engine 4.

• Rooted in Reality: This isn’t a wishlist of maybes and nice-to-haves. It’s a definitive task list based on finished systems, a proven workflow, and a clear endpoint.
• Launch Window Locked: Wild Life will launch on Steam as a FULL RELEASE—not Early Access—between August and December 2026. Expect the complete story of Wild Life on day one, with the sandbox editor following shortly after as a free update. This will ensure that both modes can each receive our full attention for their releases.

• Rough Planning: This has already been completed for the entire development period. We analyzed all tasks and desired game content and roughly distributed them across the sprints.
• Detailed Planning: The detailed plan for the first half of the year is finished. Once the first half concludes, we’ll create the detailed plan for the second half. In this phase, we dive into each task, discussing its content, dependencies, estimated duration, and who will handle it.

Development Update 14.03.2025

Level:
This week, we returned to the Lake Village to kick off work on the A Blockout. Our team created a first batch of blockout props and imported them into the project. On the Warrior Village side, we received the first work-in-progress meshes for the houses, which are now under review for feedback. In parallel, the level artists utilized tools developed by Tech Art to begin adding more details to the Pillar Region and the tropical area around Pearl Village. As part of this effort, they replaced old placeholder foliage with new blockout meshes to improve the overall look and feel of these environments.

Code:
This week, we started implementing character attributes, which are Strength, Dexterity, Spirit, and Technology. These attributes both determine which weapons you can equip, as well as scale the damage output. Armor items can give attribute, damage, max health and experience gain bonuses. Weapons give damage bonuses per point of a character attribute.

• Introduced screen-space ambient occlusion which is not only character relevant but it does make them look a lot better.
• Adjusted skin material specular values and behavior so the skin looks better now as it transitions from low to high wetness values.
• Fixed female roughness texture map, that visible seam on back of the arms is gone now.
• Introduced a system that recomputes character mesh-normals in real time. This means no more weird shadowing under raised arms, the crotch region, between butt cheeks, boobs, and more details in facial and body posing fidelity for shadows and reflections.
• Added a reflection method option to the video settings to pick between screen-space and lumen reflection types as oftentimes lumen reflections don't look as good as screen space reflections.

Animations:
In the animation department, we put the finishing touches on the heavy hammer move set this week, making it ready for hand-off to Game Design. We also started work on the central Max and Maya romance and its minigames. We discussed with our quest writer on how to best include this in the main quest in such a way that it would feel natural, yet also remain optional for players and started brainstorming three scenes of increasing intensity that will play over the course of it.

Development Update 07.03.2025

Code:

Development Update 28.02.2025

Level:
Over the course of this week, the environment team continued adding wear and tear texture details to assets in the Alpha Camp. In parallel, we prepared everything for the full production of the Warrior Village meshes, introduced new tools for our level artists, and also started work on spaceships, shuttles, and statues for the Lizard Settlements.

Code:
This week, we have finished implementing the finisher move mechanics for the combat system, which the Animation and Game Design departments can now create and implement assets for.

The Media Player prop has also received some love - we've implemented a new plugin that makes external sounds play much better and more reliably than the previous system, even allowing for the same sound to be played multiple times at once by a single Media Player. This also now adds support for OGG and FLAC files, as well as re-enabling MP3 support.