Combat Arena Alpha
The past two weeks, we’ve had to prioritize some extremely important aspects of the single player side of the game. We just completed our goals there, and the dev team is focusing their attention on getting the Combat Arena ready for release. All that’s left are a few important bug fixes related to the new arena and other new features, as well as a few balancing adjustments.
We’ve made a few adjustments to the Practice Arena!
The Practice Arena beacons now support changing back to the Kinfolk you started with.
We made some more room in the practice arena for future Kinfolk beacons.
Shovlet had a few ability bugs that needed to be squashed.
Fixed issues with Dig that caused Shovlet to fall through the ground or get stuck inside objects like rocks.
Fixed issues with VFX, improved the VFX, and adjusted the timing of Rock Wall’s knock up.
We made several improvements to key binds. We still intend to do a lot of work on this screen, but for now they should be better. It is still advisable to do minimal rebinding during a match.
Single Player
We made big improvements to NPCs’ health bars. Now they only show up when in combat (or all the time, in the Combat Arena) and are visible through walls or other obstacles.
The Fear status now cancels any attack that the enemy is currently aiming.
We’ve made some major improvements to the game’s lighting and tone mapping, and are planning to continue adjusting it in the upcoming week. One aspect we’re especially excited about is re-adding volumetric lighting! We had to go without it for quite a while after changing render pipelines back in early 2020, but we’re finally able to add it back in.
Our NPCs are getting smarter by the day!
When an NPC is following you, they will change their speed to match yours more closely. This way, a much faster Kinfolk won’t sprint up to you and stop multiple times, which looks clunky.
We made progress toward more scalable combat AI via combining utility AI with our behavior trees.
We tweaked the suspicious state to be a little better at finding the player and fixed a bug where NPCs could become stuck in a suspicious state.
There are a bunch of new camping features to show off!
The VFX for setting up camp have some new pizzazz! We also adjusted the terrain changes slightly so the grass won’t be destroyed as far away from your campsite. We still have some improvements to make, but we’re very excited about the progress this feature has made.
The player can now interact with certain things at the camp site. Sit on the logs and look at the campfire, rest in your tent until a selected time of day, or talk with your teammates.
We’ve added the player’s party members to the camp! We knew this would make the game more immersive, but even so we’re pleasantly surprised with the amount of personality we’ll be able to add through conversations with your team!
There are multiple spots where each Kinfolk on your team can hang out while you’re at camp. We’ve also made sure that no 2 will occupy the same spot.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on May 6.
