It’s a special day for Skymill Studios.
Two years ago today, we launched the Kickstarter for Kindred Fates.
At the time we were practically bursting at the seams with excitement and anxiety. What if other people didn’t want this as much as we did? Had we spent over a year pouring our hearts and souls into this passion project for nothing?
Thankfully, no!
We were relieved and overjoyed to see that Kindred Fates spoke to more people than we ever would have imagined, and that finally, we could make the monster taming game we’ve all been dreaming of. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for believing in us and for sticking with us all this time.
We’ve made a lot of progress since January of 2020. Since then, the majority of the game’s core systems and mechanics have been implemented. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but at this point the bulk of it comes down to adding content, as opposed to creating entirely new features from scratch. That means adding things like new Kinfolk, missions, and locations rather than things like permadeath, Kinfolk storage, or multiplayer PvP. As for Skymill, we gained new members who have made such a huge impact on Kindred Fates now, that it’s hard to imagine making it without them. It has been a joy and a privilege to bring this game to life, and as always, we can’t wait to share it with you all.
Combat Arena Alpha
All of the features we want for the next Alpha patch are in place; all that’s left is to finish bug testing! The patch notes are sitting at the ready as well. You can expect the next patch to release early next week.
Single Player
Over the last two weeks, we’ve continued refining flying mechanics, controls, and animations. We’re actually making faster progress on this than we expected, and are currently ahead of schedule! Aerial Kinfolk are currently capable of everything that terrestrial Kinfolk are capable of, but they can also switch between hovering and flying modes now. Expect more on this soon!
We’ve been tuning up our environment’s color palette to give it a bit more life. Thank you to everyone who gave feedback on this! Our team has been staring at this project for so long that the outside perspective was really helpful.
As for the terrain team, they’ve been playing with the new water!
We’ve added a new water shader that includes volumetric water under the surfaces of our lakes and ponds.
With the new water comes the beginning of swimming mechanics! Some characters are now able to swim across the surface of the water at the cost of Stamina while doing so. If you run out of Stamina while swimming, you’ll start losing health until you eventually drown. In the next few days we’ll begin work on swimming mechanics for characters who are able to swim below the surface of the water as well!
We still have work to do here, but we’re really happy with how it’s progressing and having a lot of fun with it!
We stopped the Mechid in Klinemart from scamming people, thank goodness! Until recently if the player tried to buy multiple items at once, the shop keeper would take all of their money, but only give the player one item. We also made the items and shop interface much more usable.
Our AI has been getting a lot smarter lately! We’ve started implementing a system that will allow NPCs to gather static and dynamic information about the world for more robust decision making. This works by discretizing the navmesh into a 2D array of nodes which can be used to store useful information such as concentrations and locations of hazards, friends, foes, nature biomes, towns etc. We’ve also created NPC logic for more automated ability testing.
A handful of abilities have had their placeholder names replaced with their final names. We’ve also added more passive and active abilities, and each type now has a Jab basic attack that acts a bit like a punch or bite.
We’ve been making improvements to our application build process. This way, it’s faster and easier to get new updates out to our QA testers. Our archivers are more robust now as well, which means saving won’t be affected by errors as easily.
Work has also started on the cutscene that plays when placing candles at the Memorial.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on February 11.
