Combat Arena Alpha
Work on the combat arena has been slower for the past few weeks, in favor of making tons of progress on the single player side of the game. That being said, we’ve made some implementations this sprint that will benefit both the single player and multiplayer. One of the biggest is an optimization to our animators that improves the game’s framerate!
Single Player
We’re continuing to develop the combat AI for NPCs in the open world. Currently, our main focuses are custom behaviors for different species of Kinfolk, and giving them a greater sense of ~object permanence~. We’ve also added several more abilities that are specific to the single player for now.
We’ve been making improvements to our conversation and capture UI this sprint. We’ve also added in the first version of tutorial UI, and given the single player side of the game it’s own unique main menu.
In order to optimize our open world so that most modern gaming machines can run it, we’re implementing a technique called terrain streaming. It’s a really important step with major performance benefits, but it may require us to reimplement some of our features such as trees and foliage in the future. It stands to be a somewhat time-consuming, but very powerful improvement to the game.
We’ve added a ton of new assets and features to one of the game’s towns! It’s beginning to feel much more like a real living place as we continue to build it out.
The first cutscene we’ve created for the open-world portion of the game is very near to completion! We need to add some final touches before we can truly call it done, but it’s very close. Here’s a little piece of what we have so far:
Community
Item Art Contest - Winner Announcement at 12pm EST on June 5 (Discord & Website)
We’ll be announcing the winners of the Item Art Contest tomorrow in a post here on our website, as well as on Discord! Be sure to vote on Discord for the Community pick by 12pm (noon) EST tomorrow!
Prizes:
First place will become an item featured in Kindred Fates
Second place will receive a Champion Package
Third place will receive a Challenger Package
Community pick will be featured in the Cryptic Journal
Kindred Talks - June 12 at 3pm EST on Twitch
Come join Rob and Andrew for another round of Kindred Talks! They’ll answer questions in chat, talk about the current state of the game, and potentially show you some behind-the-scenes features!
Terrain Sculpting Stream - Saturday, June 19 at 3pm EST on Twitch
The terrain sculpting stream has been postponed to Saturday, June 19. It’s a bummer that we won’t get to hang out tomorrow, but we think it’ll be worth it! Thank you for understanding <3
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time on June 18!
