PROGRESS
Now that we have most of the essential abilities taken care of, we're implementing some of the more complex attacks, which are coming along really well.
This sprint we added more stats to each kinfolk, as well as abilities that can modify those stats. Now each kinfolk has values for Physical Attack, Special Attack, Physical Defense, and Special Defense that can increase or decrease the damage dealt by attacks.
We also upgraded our sound effects processing for attacks so that each attack can more easily play the intended sound effect at the beginning of the attack, during the flight of the attack, and when the attack hits a target.
More held items have been added! Expect to see around five or six in the alpha’s initial release, with more progressively added as we go. In this sprint we added our first 'passive' items, which stay in your kinfolk's inventory and keep working as long as they are held.
We improved the visuals that signify when a kinfolk has taken damage. Previously their whole model turned red, which often made it unclear which kinfolk was damaged and where they were looking. Now we apply an effect over their existing texture instead- making it much clearer.
Battle rounds now have time limits. Currently, each round has a maximum time of 7 minutes (meaning the longest possible match would be 21 minutes). This will prevent players from extending matches indefinitely and eases the load on our servers a bit too. If a round runs out of time before all the kinfolk on one team are knocked out, the winner is decided based on which team has the most kinfolk remaining. If a tie occurs, the winner is decided based on which team has a higher percentage of their health remaining across all the kinfolk on their team.
Username and titles are now displayed in-game! Previously when you were matched against someone, you didn't actually know who you were playing against. This change adds that information above your opponent’s health bar.
You will be able to set your title to any of the titles you received from Kickstarter tiers, or packages you purchased from our site.
There are also a few different special titles you may see in-game. If you see a red [Skymill] in the arena, you'll know you are playing against one of us! G O O D L U C K
We spent a lot of time testing and bug fixing this sprint. This is a good sign for us because it lets us know that we're beginning to move out of the phase where we focus on adding new features, and into the clean-up phase before release. The areas we cleaned up most this sprint were: character position syncing, attack syncing, and server responsiveness.
Character position syncing in particular saw massive improvements!
You can think of it like this. Each character exists simultaneously on three different computers: the one you’re playing on, the one your opponent is playing on, and the server. One of the most challenging aspects of developing a multiplayer game is keeping all of those in sync. Our new code does a much better job of ensuring that characters are at the same coordinates on all three computers, at the same moment in time. So ultimately, what you see on your computer matches what your opponent sees on theirs.
We also added some useful UI that tells you how many roundtrips are happening per second with the server you are connected to, and the time each round trip takes. The more roundtrips per second, and the less time for each round trip, the faster we can exchange data with the server, and the smoother your opponent moves. You'll be able to hide/enable this overlay using the settings menu.
COMMUNITY
We hope you enjoyed watching Rob play a heavily modded version of Fallout 4 courtesy of Andrew last week! The recording is now available on our secondary YouTube channel.
Since we’re going hard in the paint getting the alpha ready for launch, we’ll be skipping our Kindred Talks stream that would have been next week. Thank you for understanding, we really think it’ll be worth it!
We’ve been having an awesome time seeing your creativity in the pumpkin* carving contest! (Seriously, there have been some awesome ideas we never would have expected!) So if you haven’t already, feel free to submit your entry on our Discord! We’ll be closing submissions tomorrow at 12pm EST.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on November 20!
