Combat Arena Alpha

We've started playtesting the next combat arena! It's the biggest arena yet, so the finishing touches are taking a bit longer than usual. During playtesting we identified a few areas that need touching up, but we're very much looking forward to sharing it with you as soon as it's ready. We hope to get the next Combat Arena patch out as soon as we can.

Single Player

We’ve done a lot of touch-ups on our UI, and even added a new menu!
- We improved our world space UI by adding constant scaling. This affects things like mission markers in the world, health bars, and damage numbers, which all now scale to look good and be readable at different distances.
- Created the ability swapping system. It’s a menu that will allow you to change your Kinfolk’s abilities with ease! It’s in a very early stage right now, but we hope to bring a similar form to the Combat Arena as part of its future UI overhaul. Here’s a very W.I.P look at what we currently have!

We added a number of new abilities, new passives, and fixed up a bunch of issues!
- Created three new active abilities, two of which being new Water type moves.
- Added two new passive abilities. One of them was added to a Kinfolk you know!
- Added a small amount of vertical momentum when using Fling, so that the user is able to hover a bit in the air when firing it multiple times in quick succession.
- Fixed an issue with Homing Blast targeting the player character when following a Kinfolk.
- Fixed an issue where the player character was running VERY far away when feared, even when not the targeted character.
- Fixed an issue that caused some attacks to linger longer than intended, even after the Kinfolk that used them was recalled or defeated.
- Fixed some bugs involving cutscenes and our dungeon.
We updated all of our character animation controllers to make them blend a little better. This is the start of some overhauls in the animation department that both make it easier to create new Kinfolk, and smooth out existing animations. As part of this, we started going back and removing visible seams that some of the character models had! Those have been around for awhile, so it feels good to finally fix them. Here’s an example!

We continued work on our Kinfolk AI! Avieon’s NPC AI is now implemented, and we also started on smoother NPC movement with adjustable speeds, as well as looking into adding acceleration/deceleration curves.
Created Kinfolk size variance. We'll be able to specify a weighted range of sizes for each type of Kinfolk and even in different parts of the world. It’s very adjustable, so we’ll be able to determine the exact size ranges we want each Kinfolk to have!
Something we’re very excited for: we started work on the camping mechanic! It will be a place where you can socialize with your Kinfolk and rest. It’s still too early to show off, but we’re happy to finally be working on it!

Community
We’ll be at GDC! It runs from March 21-25. We won’t have a booth, but if you happen to see anyone walking around with a Skymill shirt, come say hi!
On February 28, we celebrated our end of Kickstarter anniversary with a progress video of Hull_Piercer and our swimming mechanics! Check it out!

Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you next time, on March 25.