Combat Arena Alpha
We’re approaching completion of the big single player milestone that we mentioned in our previous newsletter! We’re still focusing on the single player side of the game right now, but development on this milestone has reached the final bug fixing phase. As we’ve said before, even though we’re putting most of our energy there, many of these improvements will have a heavy influence on the next Combat Arena Alpha patch (it’s going to be a big one). In the meantime, we really appreciate everyone’s patience as we wrap things up on this critical milestone. We wouldn’t go this long without an update to the combat arena unless we really thought it would be worth it to you all in the long run. You can expect performance improvements, balance changes, visual improvements, new abilities, and more!
Single Player
We’ve added portrait support to our dialogue system, so you can see the speaker’s 2D picture during dialogue like we showed in our Kickstarter trailer. We’ve also spent some time polishing the dialogue itself. Here’s an example (Note: the conversation in this video would usually happen at a different location.)
We’ve finished constructing the rest of the rooms in the dungeon we’ve been working on. It’s really satisfying to finally see the whole place put together!
More support for building interiors, including sliding doors and additional interior locations. We’ve also improved one location’s interior colliders to be more performant.
We’ve continued work on multiple music tracks, and also integrated new sounds into the game itself.
Further polished the capture mechanic to add more SFX and visual feedback for what's going on.
Added contextual music support, such that when you start combat a different theme can start fading in; when you leave combat it can fade out.
We’ve been working hard to improve the AI for NPCs while also trying to make it easier to create and edit them.
Continued to refine NPC pathfinding and setup NPC patrolling in the Overworld.
Gave NPCs more variety in which skills they use. A Kinfolk’s level now determines which abilities they have at their disposal in combat.
Improved NPC behavior tree structure so that it’s easier to swap out different move sets for their combat abilities.
Limited NPCs’ attack range to the max firing distance of the abilities they use, and fixed some bugs with NPC ranged attacks .
Created a system for handling the visuals and death rewards of a specific type of NPC, and created logic for the ability to trigger cutscenes upon an NPC's death.
We’ve added some important functionality to the single player’s UI and maps.
Added buttons to the pause menu to resume or start the game over.
Storage system is feature complete (for now) after wrapping up some bugs.
Updated our in-game map's visuals and functionality. Now it shows mission objectives among other small improvements.
We’ve made TONS of optimization improvements this sprint!!
Made improvements to world streaming to reduce stuttering. One of the challenges in an open world is to break the world into tiles of different quality and then stream in high quality tiles for nearby terrain and low quality tiles for land that is far away. We fixed a stuttering problem caused by trying to stream in and activate too many high quality tiles.
Fixed a pause that was related to garbage collection. Unity's ECS is heavily based on lambdas, which can cause temporary memory allocations that need to be cleaned up by the c# garbage collector. Restructured the code to eliminate these temporary memory allocations.
Thanks for stopping by, lovely people! We’ll see you next time, on October 22nd!
