Combat Arena Alpha
We’ve continued placing a lot of focus and care on the game’s single player for the past few weeks. However, many of the improvements we’ve made will soon be added to the Combat Arena for everyone to enjoy! We’re planning to have an update next week for you.
Single Player
We’ve had a lot of progress on the art/writing side recently:
The writing team finished many key structural components for the game’s narrative this sprint, focusing in particular on completing the story outline for the first third of the game.
One of our artists has finished concept work on a new unannounced water type kinfolk and is starting on the next!
We finished 2 new music tracks and started work on another.
The sound design has also received a lot of attention the past few weeks, with many new SFX being added to the game!
In the single player version, we’ve added voices for every kinfolk. These voices play when they do things like jump, dash, use certain abilities, or take damage. We plan to add these to the combat arena soon!
We added SFX for every attack in the new audio engine. In the single player, attack sounds are much more space-filling and more naturally interact with other nearby sounds. Like voices, we hope this will come to the arena soon.
We’ve also added SFX for footsteps on different materials, as well as all of the UI buttons.
NPCs and their AI got a lot of love this sprint, both in the form of upgrades to their behavior, and numerous bug fixes! We’re at the point now where you can run up to them and initiate combat in the open world. Some of them can be quite vicious!
We’ve greatly improved the responsiveness and visual feedback for the capture mechanic. While there are still several important improvements we want to make, it feels much better now and allows you to make inputs much faster. We’ve also started concept art work on the thing that makes capturing possible in the first place! While we can’t show you what those concepts look like yet, we can show you how work is progressing on improvements to the gameplay mechanic itself:
Work in progress footage of the capture mechanic
Our QA command console now has several quality of life commands such as applying or curing status effects, healing or damaging a kinfolk, and even swapping moves out. This makes it easier for QA to test under specific settings.
We’ve revamped a lot of our UI, including adding detailed stats for the Team List such as 'Dex No.', 'Species', 'Type', 'First bonded at', 'Met at', and 'Nature'.
We also added UI tutorials when you do specific actions. They take the forms of instructional popups that pause time and give you some information on the particular action the player is taking.
The whole team has been working really really hard this sprint on a major goal for the studio. Although we can't say much more about it now, we managed to reach it on time, and we're pretty excited about that.
Community
Terrain Sculpting Stream - Saturday, June 19 at 3pm EST on Twitch
At last, the time has come! Join us for a chill stream as Tori works on terrain sculpting for a piece of the open world for the single player portion of Kindred Fates.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time on July 2!
