Flashing Lights: Floating Orb Circles From Above!

Hello everyone! The GIF above will surely make more sense as you read further into this post.

Over the past few weeks we have been working on the visuals for Flashing Lights. We are in negotiations with a character modeller to improve the look of all in-game character models. We are also still moving towards populating the map. Therefore any images currently shown are subject to change and are likely not final. So please stick with us as we continue to share development progress, and work towards Early Access release in the first half of 2018!

So let's continue! One of the things that we've been working on is a mini map, which will appear in the corner of the screen. You can see the first draft of the in-game map below:

Of course, there are a few circled icons which represent the location of the police department, fire department and the hospital - but the map will also display the player's location, indicated by a blue arrow. This also factors in the direction the player is facing, so if you are driving a vehicle, you are able to plan your route.

The green circle is the location of the player's objective, but we'll get to that soon!

We are looking at street names and may have a larger map which can be brought up and reveals more information about Flashing Lights' open world. As you can see, there's not much room for street names on the mini-map at that size!

Now onto that mysterious floating orb!

The gravity-defying orb is actually part of a development test which makes sure that the mini-map's objective marker is working as intended. If we look at the mini map while the orb is circling, we can see that the map is updated in real time. You can easily image where this would be used in-game - perhaps when you have to track a suspect's travelling car, for example.

Of course, if you've played GTA or any other open world adventure game, this is all pretty familiar to you! This system will allow us to create more interesting missions and update the player in real time.

We understand that this is a relatively short dev blog, so we wanted to show you a couple more shots of the open world you'll be protecting in Flashing Lights. Keep in mind of course that a lot of the assets in the screenshot below are placeholders, and that we will be working to update an replace a lot of assets in time for the Early Access launch in the first half of 2018.