Exoplanet: First Contact - Development Update

In a development update for Exoplanet: First Contact, information is provided about some of the guns in the game, experiments with armor and landscape design and decoration.

In our previous updates we've already talked about the process of creating a level and also showcased our heightmap editor that supports terrain patches with holes in them, which allows us to create a more complex geometry such as caves, overhangs and other types of advanced land patches for player to walk on. However, the current generation of gamers wouldn't be satisfied by a simple heightmapped terrain painted by a couple of different textures as it was done in years before 2006, since generic hills and valleys wouldn't look convincing even with the help of advanced terrain projection algorithms. Surely, we at Alersteam wouldn't want to create such simplistic pathetic excuses of levels. Our goal is to create locations that are fun to explore, that have a vertical aspect to them as opposed to plain old and boring runway strip level design, that literally screams "You've reached the end of the world" at you, when you hit its invisible borders. All Exoplanet’s locations will have natural boundaries that don't make the player feel as if he isn't allowed to go somewhere because of, ahem, reasons.