Combat Arena Alpha
We're continuing to plug away at the bug-fixing and cleanup stage of the single-player side of the game, and getting a lot done over there. However, we've begun to turn our focus back to the Combat Arena Alpha as well! Since we've been making a lot of changes to other parts of the game, we're checking that everything in the Combat Arena is still running smoothly. We've made tons of changes to the NPC AI that will affect the Practice Room, implemented impactful and long-requested balance changes to existing Kinfolk, added several new abilities, and made optimizations that will allow the game run more smoothly! We can't wait for you to see everything we've been working on!
Single Player
Our first in-game dungeon is almost complete! It’s finally playable all the way through, and just has some bug fixes and polish remaining.
Worked on puzzles in the dungeon, including some camera fixes for one of them.
Our Kinfolk AI have seen a lot of improvements that make a big impact on immersion!
Created a system that allows NPCs to roam around the world when the player is far away.
Upgraded NPC predictive aiming for abilities.
Changed NPC behaviors in how they react to the player. They now feel more natural in an open world setting.
Worked to allow for more degrees of freedom in movement for the AI, which also helped us improve how they aim their abilities.
Updated and improved several NPC behavior trees.
Made additional improvements to Kinfolk spawners.
Added logic for NPCs to shout messages to communicate with the player in the open world. In the future, these messages may dynamically change to reflect an NPC's personality.
We’ve made a ton of general improvements and additions to our single-player game, including balance changes and some new VFX!
Added fall damage to the game.
Improved text fonts for dialogue.
Changed Awburn’s camera so it’s easier to aim attacks while in tall grass.
Improved the visuals for a series of items.
The basic aiming reticle is now only displayed for Kinfolk that have a ranged attack as its basic attack.
Animated several single-player set pieces.
Adjusted how damage scales from level 1 to 100 (damage scaling at level 50 should be unchanged).
Added many new shrine locations to the overworld.
Created new VFX that occurs when interacting with a shrine.
Improved the VFX of several single-player abilities.
Made many modifications to Kinfolk attacks in the single-player.
Made balance changes to the first single-player boss fight.
Added several new hand placed Kinfolk as well as many new Kinfolk spawners to the overworld.
Updated the dialogue of several NPCs.
Improved lighting at all times of day and unified all weather condition visuals.
Added character portraits and expressions to all remaining currently implemented conversations.
Added new animations for Restless flames. Since you haven’t seen them in awhile, we’d like to show you our current VFX for Restless Kinfolk, as well as a spooky point of interest! Everything shown is still WIP.
One of the members of our terrain team had left on a short break, but they’re back in action now!
Fixed colliders inside multiple buildings.
Polished up the river floors so they aren't too deep and feel more natural.
Fixed a graphics issue that was causing terrain textures to flicker as you walk by them, especially on mountains.
Created a new point of interest.
Worked on improving our in-game mountains by adding foothills and rock erosion details.
We’re still working on the standard animations for two new Kinfolk, one being Avieon! Please enjoy this picture of adorable sleepy Avieon loaf.
On the technical side of things, we were able to track down and fix a lot of bugs and performance issues this sprint.
Fixed many visual bugs and oddities in the single-player.
Fixed wobbling behavior on several Kinfolk.
Made several bug fixes to our first dungeon.
Fixed several bugs that prevented the player from progressing through the first 3 missions in the single-player.
Fixed issues with Shield, as well as some unrevealed abilities.
Fixed problems with shadows. Before, shadows were incorrectly appearing where they shouldn't be. Now it looks great!
Major performance increase in our world streaming. We discovered a problem deep in the bowels of Nature Renderer and reported it to the developer, who promptly fixed it.
Fixed more memory leaks which could cause the game to stutter.
Fixed a problem in Unity's NetCode where it was spewing a lot of messages to the logs and causing memory leaks.
Added ability to throttle the NPCs' CPU requirements so we now can have more NPCs in the game at one time.
We upgraded to the latest stable version of Unity, which released about a week ago. We have a pretty unique tech stack that leverages a host of packages across different Unity releases, and so we expected some headaches. Our solution this time was to actually make some local versions of these dependencies with small changes and adjustments to make it compatible with the new version.
Moving around in the open world feels a lot smoother lately!
Community
We have a new contest well underway! The Emote Contest for our official Discord server will end on November 15th, so make sure to join now for more details!
We’d like to give a shout-out to the Kindred Fates Tournament Server, who are organizing a community tournament in the Combat Arena Alpha. The tournament will take place on December 4th, in celebration of the Alpha’s anniversary. For signups and more information, join their Discord server! This is not an official tournament organized by Skymill.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on November 19!
