PROGRESS
We’ve been working on some wide-reaching changes to the alpha. While some of them won’t be especially visible, we expect them to improve the gameplay quality in major ways! These improvements include:
A few new abilities… :)
Changes to our Netcode that made a significant impact in lowering ping times!
Revamping the method that detects exactly when an attack projectile should be launched. We no longer use animation events, which are unreliable because of frame dropping. In the past, if an animation event wasn't received, we had to do all sorts of coding gymnastics to launch projectiles, and even then sometimes it wouldn't launch, so your character would just be stuck, not able to fire any more attacks. Instead, we now use two separate animator states, and detect when a post-launch animation state has started, so the attack projectiles fire reliably.
Proper hurtboxes for all characters. Previously some of our abilities would miss even though you could swear they should have hit. In a lot of cases this was caused by issues like network synchronization, but it certainly didn't help that characters were all operating on a simple cylindrical collider when receiving damage. This change allows you to do things like fire (small enough) projectiles under Skulken. Overall, it should make attacks a little bit more reliable.
A portion of our QA team unfortunately came down with COVID recently, but we’re very thankful to say everyone is on the mend. Because of this, the team hasn’t been able to test as efficiently in the past two weeks, and we’ll be returning to our normal work cadence as everyone fully recovers.
The writing team is getting back into the swing of things! The main focus these past two weeks has been to write a trial version of a quest and play through it “on paper” with the developers. This helped to get a better understanding of all of the components we’ll need to add for the single player campaign. Over the next few months, we’ll start developing:
Dialogue trees and a Conversation Engine
Mission logic
AI for combat and NPCs
New Kinfolk and abilities
One developer has started implementing Kinfolk beyond the Combat Arena Alpha, (which we've got pretty well worked out thanks to the Alpha Kinfolk), as well as implementing the human player and NPCs.
We’ve made some great progress on our terrain development strategies! A lot of time was dedicated to developing a method that will deliver high resolution terrains based on real world heightmaps for the map of the entire game.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you again on January 29!
