Development Update (16/05/2023)

Hi!

Here's a quick development update.

Teaser Trailer
I finished a small 60 second teaser trailer for PC Gaming Show (June 11th) last week and all the preparations for that are done in my part.

New Textures & Assets
I visited multiple IRL-locations last weekend and captured +500 new reference images and textures. I'm currently building bunch of new assets and POI's based on these images.

Shelter & Save System
The first Shelter ("Civil Defence Shelter Bunker") is visually almost ready and the first save system version also done. This save system allows you to place and storage gear/items on this Shelter and everything will be saved even if you die in Area 05.

Ammo System
This week I'm finally starting to implement the ammo system and some inventory details related that like ammo stacking. Like mentioned before this first iteration is based more on Stalker's approach where different ammo gets automatically stacked on your inventory and you change the ammo type through the weapon UI.

Map Details
Every map for Public Demo 2 is currently in active development and there's good progression in each one of these. I'm currently modelling one major building for Shipyard map and multiple POI-elements for the Highway map. I'm still going to revisit the Village map before Public Demo 2, it needs few additional element and different approaches to few of the buildings etc.

New Weapons & Attachments
Like shown in the previous post, there's multiple new weapons in the game and I'm also adding 4-6 new attachments before Public Demo 2. I have also done few tests with flares / flare guns and since those are pretty cool at night time, I'm also considering to add one of those in the game soon.

Test FPS-Animations
There have been few discussions behind-the-scenes for FPS-animations. The time isn't yet to implement those in large scale for every weapon but I think some kind of test animation set would be nice to have for Public Demo 2. This basically means that I'm planning to get one weapon animated (reload animations) to test how the system blends with the procedural weapon controller, so there will be one weapon with FPS-animation in Public Demo 2.

Project Clean-up
I just finished cleaning up the project files for Road to Vostok. Game development is sometimes pretty ''messy'' since you have all kinds of test and placeholder files lurking in different folder structures. After this clean-up more that 200 files were removed and this makes the development a little more efficient and enjoyable since back-ups are faster to make (less files) and visually it's more streamlined to work on the existing files.

This week there will be multiple new features in place, so I will keep you updated and share few screenshots along the way.

- Antti (Developer)