Combat Arena Alpha
You’ve already seen some of our handiwork from the past couple weeks! We spent a sizeable chunk of time putting together the April Fool’s Day celebration for this year. We hope you’ve enjoyed the new game modes (yes, they’re real!) as much as we enjoyed putting them together for you! In our next patch, we plan to put the party modes back on the shelf (to be brought out for future special events), but the weather and time of day modes are here to stay! If you want to get a few more rounds in with the party modes (kaiju, sumo, and toybox), we recommend that you do that this weekend! Fun fact: Toybox has been the most popular party mode!
Aside from preparing the April Fool’s Day modes, we’ve continued working on bug fixes as well. Stagger and/or knockback while aiming the last Wicked Thorn no longer causes the cooldown timers to disappear from UI, Stunner Flies and Wicked Thorn can’t be damaged by your team members, and issues with slow down when using Quicksand have been resolved.
Single Player
The two major focuses for our team at the moment are developing the capture mechanic, and our enemy AI. The devs are hard at work on both, but these are large systems that will likely take some time.
We’ve developed a Character Wizard to automate some of the process of adding new Kinfolk into the game! This way, we won’t have to devote as much time to manually placing colliders, adding necessary components, and implementing combat features, which could add up to months of dev work.
In the coming weeks, we’re planning to implement something similar for other non-Kinfolk objects that need colliders. We also hope to have a button that creates a fully implemented character, though that might be a few months from now.
The wizard applied to Lumala. Shown is the ‘marshmellow stage’, which helps correctly place colliders on the model’s animation bones.
We’ve continued working on the art mentioned in the last newsletter! More 3D set pieces are being added, lots of new UI designs implemented, and Awburn’s animations are being touched up on top of the new model! We’ve also added several new VFX for single player abilities.
A lot of time and research has been dedicated to, of all things, the grass for the single player version of the game. We wanted to use methods and tools that would balance aesthetics with large-scale performance. While the grass currently used in the Combat Arena works well at that scale, its performance isn’t quite good enough for the full game. After a few weeks of hard work, we think we’ve come to a good working solution.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on April 23!
