Hello Noxcrew community,

May is here at last! It’s shaping up to be a very busy month, with lots of fun things ahead of us, including (I hope) a few completed maps! We’re certainly pushing hard for it.

Work continues on Codename: COW with the builders finally being happy with the greybox landscape! Greyboxing is the development of the initial shape of your landscape, where you use a single colored block, usually stone (hence grey-boxing) to build up the hills, valleys and roads of an environment to make sure that the world looks visually interesting even without the set dressings of your world’s theme or atmosphere.

Now that this portion of the build is complete, we can start giving the world its’ color! The most interesting section built at the moment is this dramatic mesa valley, transformed from a grey corridor by the ever-talented JakeL! There is still a long way to go and a lot of stone to transform, but with areas like that, Codename: Cow is shaping up to be one beautiful looking map (If we do say so ourselves)

Talking of long ways to go, we’ve not got much longer on ‘InterestinglyFreakyWomen’ (See what I did there) Testing and refinement is finally underway, with the first full run through going ahead earlier in the week. It revealed some very interesting quirks and led to a very tense moment over one of Epic_Landlord’s puzzles not behaving as it should. After a bit of back and forth, we figured out what was going wrong so everyone kissed and made up. (We can get very passionate about projects and it can get a little scary but we always make up in the end)

Thanks to this testing, we’re fine tuning a lot of the monsters behaviours and how players travel through the map, making sure they don’t miss anything important (or exciting) on the way! There’s also a little bit of rebuilding, but it’s nice to be on the home stretch at last!

Next we’ve finally shipped Skyao’s secret skin pack! It took us a spell to be completely happy with the pack, but now it’s in Microsoft’s hands and one step closer to you guys! Hopefully it doesn’t get tied up with them for too long and gets cleared straight away so Skyao can get her prize! (Still need to decide what she’s winning but we’ll figure that out)

Finally, as revealed on Instagram, Arsenic and Skyao have been hard at work updating Tiny Footprints, adding all of the new villagers and pillagers to the pack and updating it with a fancy new thumbnail. I’m told they were aiming to get more textures in this thumbnail than they did with the last one, as well as show off the brilliant new mob textures! They even fully rendered the scene to get the layout just right! The update is running through Microsoft as we speak so hopefully it’ll be released to you guys soon!

And that’s your lot!

May’s going to be a very exciting month and I can’t wait to give you all the news! Have a great week (especially those enjoying monday’s bank holiday) and I’ll see you all next time!

Noctis

Here comes the colour!