Development Update 16.10.2026 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, welcome to this week's progress report.

Level: This week, we continued our efforts in the Apoc Canyon and Grassland regions and pushed a lot of minor changes. We also started auditing our assets and textures to plan the improvements we want to make over the coming weeks regarding performance and visual quality, in preparation for an extensive lighting update for the world map. Level Design continues to work on the Cannibal cave systems, and our 3D Artists continued working on additional requested meshes for the environment.

Code:This week, we made some status effects changes. If you have the Tough Skin perk, dashing will reduce the remaining time of the burn effect, and with the Tough Veins perk, the poison effect will never kill you. We implemented some new effects for food buffs as well, e.g. health or exhaustion regeneration, damage or armor buffs, etc.On top of that, we changed how weapon attribute requirements work. Now, instead of preventing you from equipping the weapon if you don't meet all requirements, the weapon will deal significantly less damage, scaling with how many attribute points you're missing.Additionally, a lot of sounds have been implemented, mainly for NPC routines, as well as in-world music for the Umbar Temple.Hovering over inventory items now shows additional details, including recipe ingredients, changes to life stat values, and status effect descriptions and durations.Hitting an enemy with a ranged weapon now also displays a hit indicator on the screen.

Character:We continued work on Maya’s Sandshark Scale armor. We also started working on proper character mesh LODs.

Animations: In the animation department, we are now fully focusing on the Umbar VIP area minigames and the remaining animations that are needed for them to work as planned.

Design:On the quest side, locking characters down for voice recording continues. We've also started with the quest structure for Maya's VIP orgy with Mayor Othys - similar to Max, she will have to get some special guests before the party can start.On the other side of the world, we are finishing up the polishing of the secret lab area. Quests and transitions between chapters are working properly now. Items and new enemies were added, as well. We went over all the interactables with logs and holos, assigned flavorful names, and adjusted positioning. Commander Fox can now be found in the Secret Lab. Spawn logic for all Blackrocks was reworked. As a side quest, we also worked on tooltips for consumables and recipes.We implemented the 5 arena champions now, which are fully functional in the world. If Max is a warrior, he can challenge them. Maya can do it in any case. Winning a duel grants one of the 5 exploration perks related to a weapon.We also did the first implementation of the "Mayday Mayday" quest where Max has to rescue a bunch of crashed survivors. Last but not least, we are working on populating the Cannibal Jungles with their name giving Cannibals, and making sure their camps look alive.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team