Combat Arena Alpha
We’re putting the final touches on the new arena! The main playable area is in its final polishing phase, and all that remains is to bring the surrounding area up to snuff!
Many Kinfolk have had improvements to their animations and models.
Almost every Kinfolk now has multiple idle rare animations!
Every Kinfolk got a slight visual overhaul to reduce seams and make some animations more fluid.
We added better sprinting visualizations, with a slight FOV zoom, faster animations, and a color change on the stamina bar.
Party modes are back on and we now have the ability to control those without having to release a new build. That way, you won’t have to wait for a new version of the combat arena the next time we want to bring them back.
A camera offset has been added that was previously only in the single player version. This should make aiming easier since your character’s head won’t be in the way.
Single Player
We’re very excited to share a newly revealed Kinfolk: codenamed Bashful_Strider! This is the first unveiled evolution of Kodoki. (The picture also features two still-unrevealed Kinfolk.) Be sure to check out the Community section of this newsletter to see how this reveal came about!
Our NPCs have some impressive new pathfinding AI!
We made progress towards allowing the navmesh to be tagged for different types of terrains so that only certain NPCs can move through certain areas of the world. This is important because it prevents things like non-swimmer NPCs from following you to their watery demise and other funny/horrifying situations.
Improved the efficiency of NPCs who are actively pathfinding by removing some redundant calculations and some unneeded post-processing on paths that were already calculated.
Began work on combining our current behavior tree approach with Utility AI in the hopes of making our combat AI more flexible, designer friendly, and easier to author new NPC combat behaviors.
Prevented NPCs from walking through each other by incorporating local avoidance into their pathfinding using velocity obstacles. NPCs now take into account any future collisions with other NPCs given their current velocities and self-correct so that NPCs actively avoid colliding with one another. This is useful for when they move in groups. Here’s a preview:
We’ve added a few new abilities to the single player, as well as a status effect with some new mechanics! We also fixed some more various bugs in the single player and missions.
We continued work on the camp, adding features like resting, sitting on the logs, and interacting with your Kinfolk. Getting to interact with the camp is bringing a new level of immersion to the exploration side of the game, and we’re really excited about how it’s coming along!
Community
A hearty thanks to our valiant builders and defenders at r/Place on Reddit this week! (For those who don't know about r/Place, it was a giant pixelboard where anyone could place one colored pixel every 5 minutes. The goal was to try and coordinate to make collaborative pieces of art.)
We gave the community a challenge: keep this image on the board until the end, and Skymill would reveal a new Kinfolk. It was quite a journey. We were making great progress in our first spot when we were suddenly and heartlessly blocked out. I’m not bitter. What are you talking about? After some trial and error, we found a comfy spot and began to build anew. Through repeated attacks, we held our position to the end!
Not only was it exciting to reveal Bashful_Strider as a reward, but we also loved seeing the community come together to make this happen. It was also really fun to see the unlikely partnerships we forged with other communities along the way! We’re so proud of you guys, and you absolutely earned the new Kinfolk reveal. We hope you had fun too!
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on April 22.
