Dear post-apocalyptic fans! We present for your attention the second chapter of the developer diary for the game Last Frontier.
This time we will talk about the results of the outgoing year of 2014.
DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS
Roughly speaking, all year we worked in two directions: creating a large starting location in the “newbie” territory, and working on the game mechanics.
The starting location is one of the key places, the point of departure where players begin their adventure. On the one hand, by the laws of post-apocalyptic classics, the player should not linger at this stage, since many interesting places await them ahead (which, however, are not mandatory to visit). On the other hand, it is precisely at the start that the game has to prove itself, open up, and manage to capture the player’s attention — something that a blatant pass-through corridor cannot handle.
Through long discussions, we chose a compromise suitable for a multiplayer CRPG — a large, autonomous, densely populated location where strangers do not stay for long without a weighty reason to do so. Starting with the concept of a multi-level vault, over time we arrived at the necessity of creating a full-fledged protected city located underground. More than two dozen multi-level floors, more than a hundred residents with strictly distributed rights and responsibilities. A practically isolated high-tech society, like a fragment of the old world, able to provide itself with everything it needs after the apocalypse, even during the nuclear winter. The overall level of realism forces us to explain the presence of food, water, and energy with specialized levels dedicated to producing them, and the course we have taken toward graphical variety multiplies the development time several times over. In addition, a hive like this makes a lot of noise, so players will be able to find a large number of quests in the starting location to complete both alone and in company.
Let us return to the game mechanics. Over this year, a lot has been done to transform Last Frontier from a number of ideas set out on paper into a pre-alpha that, from afar, resembles the game we envisioned. We created our own skeletal character animation, the long-awaited body-damage system (as fans of classic RPGs, it was especially important for us to create a vivid body-damage mechanic applicable to 3D models), we are actively introducing new windows of the personal interface, we have begun designing the clan interface, cooperation has begun with the authors of the sound and music accompaniment (a separate topic for a future update), and, in addition, graphic content is being actively created both for the current and the future locations.
The current prototype of the Pocket Personal Assistant (PPA)
THE EARTH IS SPLIT, THE BRIDGES ARE DESTROYED
This year we tried to make the news feed rich and vivid. In addition to screenshots, we published a number of articles about the equipment of the vault residents (the KS-1T Jumpsuit and the KS-2 Set) and the survivors (the Raider Armor), demonstrated a four-legged representative of the post-nuclear fauna, showed one of the first-generation sentry guns, and, finally, presented to you several models of vehicles that fear neither the blizzard nor the inhabitants of the wastelands (the “Besford” aerosled and the KM-12T “Buran” all-terrain vehicle). Unfortunately, there were not so many purely text promo materials (the article about the end of the nuclear winter), due to the fact that our scenario writer was busy working out the quests of the starting location, so in the coming year we will definitely correct this shortcoming.
AN UNCHANGING RULE
To sum up, we would like to note that this was an eventful year. The pace of development increased, the number of project participants grew, and the cherished alpha test came even closer. Of course, it was not without unpleasant random events — the site going down right before the New Year holidays, an unplanned increase in the number of levels of the designed locations, long discussions about the look of the graphical interface, and a countless amount of skepticism from the community regarding the project’s age rating. But the development of the game continues, the pace shows no sign of slowing down, and we still will not change our view on full loot.
The Last Frontier project team thanks the community for the activity, perseverance, and the desire to help us make the game better with advice and deed that you have shown. Your feedback and criticism kept us in good shape and charged us with faith in a bleak post-apocalyptic future where cities are more dangerous than any wastelands.
This reporting chapter of our diary is closed by the game’s first promo art, authored by serg4d (http://serg4d.deviantart.com/). Enjoy, and don’t forget to check your radio receivers more often, because there is still a lot of interesting stuff ahead!
30 December 2014