I spent the last couple of weeks entirely on visuals, in order to get the video and screenshots ready in time, so after last week’s deadline I now moved on full time to gameplay and scripting. Bianca Savazzi joined me to help out with scripting and programming. We are working next to each other actually, first time I work on one of my own things with someone else working next to me in person.

What we did this week:

• We researched and thought out how the entire survival aspect should be done. Wrote some documents, looked up a lot of information, and made a simple overview map that will help us with figuring out what you should talk to what (script wise).
• World now correctly updates and communicates environment temperature, humidity, wind.
• Player now has a PDA/tablet that holds his vital stats, instead of a HUD (Oculus and immersion preparation).
• Player’s body temperature now gradually drops or rises dependent on environment temperature, humidity, wind.
• Humidity updates realistically dependent on environment temperature and weather. Wind also picks up dependent on conditions.
• Standing in sunlight is now actually warmer.
• Local temperature/wind/humidity offset zones added (fires, shelters, etc.).
• Fires, wind sounds and particles now increase in speed dependent on the wind values pushed by the atmosphere control system.
• Player now has a compass.
• Visors and damage events improved.
• Voice acting evaluation and figuring out how to approach it.
• Managed to improve FPS on the beach (you could see in the video that it was noticeably choppy) by about 80% through a combination of playing with shadow range, foliage shadows, and cubemap capturing.

Also I received word my Oculus is due to arrive on Wednesday.

Next week we will implement the basic sleeping system, food and water system. Possibly make a start on the item systems, and continued polish of previous things. Our deadline is end of December for a first playable build. Survive the beach. 15 minutes. That is it.

So design wise the major features and elements we figured out are:

• Wilson. The volleyball from Cast Away. This was the element I was looking for for a while. The game doesn’t has a clear icon, so I knew I had to find something that could help give it character (like the ball in The Ball, the heli in Unmechanical, the masks in Payday). A symbol similar to WIlson (Wilson being the working name) would do that. Also the problem is that the game relies on quite deep psychology, and I needed a way of portraying the impact the ordeal has on the player’s mental health somehow. Wilson fits that perfectly.
• Decided to push through Water and Food. At first I did not want this in because it may make it too chore like to play the game, but I figured that a scavenging game must have consumable items or else there is too little to scavenge for. Thus there must be food and water. Also surviving is pretty much all about finding food and water in real life, thus it should be part of the game also. I do want to make sure it doesn’t get too annoying though.
• Rebalanced the world so that the cave world has opposite dangers and opportunities from the exterior areas. Neither of the two should be perfect or save, but they should be different. Areas in general should all come with their own problems and dangers, challenges. Been going over how to balance them out to each other.
• Humidity and wind got added. At first I had just temperature, but surviving is about identifying a problem, and trying to find some kind of solution/work around for coping with it. Thus I added additional variables. It will also lead to a more dynamic complex world.
• The player’s mental health was mapped. He is expected to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for one, plus various physical health problems such as dehydration and starvation will also have an impact on his mental health (confusion, hallucinations, etc.).

Right now everything we got working was done without any programming at all, pure visual scripting, which shows the enormous power of UE4′s scripting system.

I will post another update on progress next week. Hopefully some pictures also.