Combat Arena Alpha

We’ve been focusing less on the Combat Arena Alpha these past few weeks in favor of making extremely important strides on the single player side. That being said, several of these changes will be making their way to the combat arena as early as next patch! The big one is the animation rig system. With our latest changes, we can do cool things like have a character turn toward the direction of their attack with just their head and continue moving in a separate direction. We can also make them lean into their direction of motion as they turn, which makes movement feel much more realistic in general.

We’ve also been looking where balance changes are needed to improve the experience in the current meta. Expect a fresh batch of buffs and debuffs when the next update to the Combat Arena Alpha does go live.

Single Player

After a ton of work, our save game system has been implemented! You are now able to pick up right where you left off in the game’s single player after you leave and re-enter the game. The game also supports auto save now, and will save at regular intervals as well as after important events. A lot of time and effort went into this, so we’re really excited to have it in and functioning.
We added 2 new cutscenes to the game's single player story. We still have plenty to go, but our tools have gotten a lot better so that the process for creating cutscenes can be much easier going forward. We’ve also added 7 new dialogue trees for single player missions. Character dialogue trees tend to be branching and complex, while some dialogue trees are simpler due to being functional or navigational in purpose.
Here’s a peek at one of the trees we finished last week:

We’ve implemented the memorial UI and functionality, as well as several additions to our xNode framework for cinematics, dialogue, and missions that we've shown off previously.

We finished several new abilities for the single player. This included 2 Dark Type abilities, 2 Light Type abilities, and one each of Air, Water, and Null. We also fixed a bunch of miscellaneous issues with attacks in the singleplayer when used by NPCs.
The terrain has come a really long way the past couple of weeks! Large swaths of land are reaching a playable state.
- We finalized and further refined our tools for loading into the world at a specific position immediately. This makes it much easier to start testing from a particular point or in a certain state.
Big improvements were made to Gladias's face, model, and support for her ghost hand. There was a lot of wonky-ness that needed to be fixed.
Our first dungeon has seen a lot of progress. We’ve finished construction on 2 new dungeon rooms, and started work on door logic for dungeons. We also improved the feel of this dungeon’s boss fight. This involved lots of play testing, adjustments and improvements to the boss’s AI, and fine tuning the boss’s stats.
Finally, we added new visual effects and logic for The Fog. It rolls into new areas now, looks much more substantial than in earlier dev builds, and we’re able to customize its appearance much more than before to get it just right! Time permitting, we’d love to use this in the background of some Combat Arenas moving forward.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on September 24th!