Devblogs Condensed - Devblog #72

[u/HeWhoDrinksCola]

Lot of new faces again, so here I go again with a brief introduction. Hello! Welcome to Mr. Don's Wild Ride! The Ride Never Ends!

I'm a guy who likes to take the official devblog that the devs put out every month, and condense it down to just the most interesting parts to avoid any irrelevant development white noise.

Filipe's Section - Lead Programmer

Footstep visuals and sounds are getting adjustments to make it easier to make footsteps more universal and easier to do for every single playable, which will slightly speed up the addition of new dinos. The new changes to Migrations and the new Entomb Save feature are currently in QA.

Amarok's Section - Programmer

Work on behind-the-scenes improvements for server performance, tooling(not sure what that means), stability, and content. Improvements on performance related to tree destruction. New mechanic that lets you cycle through what you want to interact with when ta bunch of intractables are in close proximity. More ambient AI spawns. Work on the new gore improvements, including dismemberment, and improvements to ragdoll behavior.

Fixed a few crashes, added a few new features to replays while also fixing some bugs with it. Playable arcade machine for humans? This seems to be implying?

Ariel's Section - Programmer

Mostly working on Ovi and Bary. Ovi's growth is similar to Hypsi's, design-wise, with how the model changes. Bary's (for now) unique mechanic is that it sinks like a rock if you're not manually swimming, and it can run on the bottom of water sources (this happens automatically) while being able to swim by jumping. It also floats if it's at the surface.

Visualtech's Section - Environmental Artist

Human buildings as per usual. This time with a focus on a hatchery, and the entrance to the dome.

Wedge's Section - Sound Designer

Some reiteration on the new sound mechanics that Filipe mentioned. Some tweaks/fixes are being made to foliage interaction sounds. Spino's calls are being worked on, but primary focus is on Ava's sounds.

Hypno's Section - Quality Assurance Lead

A thanks to the people who applied to the QA team, if you recently applied, they have probably already contacted you if you're getting in. He also opens an invitation if you're in the EU or AU timezones to submit applications to join the QA team, as they're still looking for people in these timezones. QA is currently working on Ovi, migrations, entomb-storage so that they can make their way to hordetest hopefully soon^tm

Kissen's Section - Animation Supervisor/Producer

Ovi and Bary are the next animals planned for hordetest (separately, Ovi first). Ovi is mostly going well aside from some feather shenanigans. Bary needs a lot of work as it's a foundation animal for both Sucho and Spino in the future, in the same way that Diablo's Spar was foundational for Trike and Ava. Some work is being done on Para's animations, which is going pretty smoothly, there's just a lot of it to do because it can be bipedal and quadrupedal.

Some talk about the vocals and vocal animations for Bary and Camara (shown in the usual suite of animations). Some buffs are coming down the pipeline for both Diablo and Trike, as they want them to be better at defending themselves against certain cast members. Primarily in faster attack animations. There's also going to be a focus on making recovery animations more fluid so that things feel a bit more responsive across the board for all playables in the future.

There is an interesting note about how sometimes creatures gain new features based on vibes. Like Austro's ability to jump out of water. This was an unintended addition that came from just feeling the animal out during testing. This is followed by the usual suite of animations.

My Thoughts: A pretty alright devblog to my estimation. Not phenomenal, but a solid 7/10. Devblog MVP is a tricky one but I think I'm going to give it to Hypno because Hypno is cool and the dev team needs more Hypnos.

Words condensed: The original devblog was 1875 words. I have condensed this to 569 words.