Combat Arena Alpha
We’re putting the finishing touches on the upcoming Combat Arena patch now, and planning to release it this weekend! The patch notes are going to be a beast, so we’ve already gotten started on them.
There will now be visuals to indicate Passive Ability activations and stat changes. Note that Mechid and Slyphur won’t have Passive Ability visuals since their Passives are constant and don’t have activations.
We’ve finished fixing all of the critical bugs that were present in the new arena. It’s feeling good to play in now, and we’re really excited to finally share it with you!
With sprinting, we needed to add a few checks to ensure it didn’t increase the speed of abilities such as Dig and Fear Feed.
Work has officially begun on the features required for the Combat Arena Beta! We’re looking forward to bringing you more updates on these features as they progress, and the Combat Arena Beta’s release in early 2023.
Single Player
Our AI system has received a major overhaul, and now uses a behavior tree and Utility AI hybrid. The result is a more designer-friendly, flexible, and scalable system. This upgrade allows us to create a greater variety of AI for different Kinfolk across different levels, and will likely save us hundreds of hours of work in the long run!
We recently found an optimization that could dramatically increase the responsiveness of the single player game, and eliminate several important issues at the same time! This would be a huge improvement for the feel of the single player, and save our dev team a lot of time. There’s more testing that needs to be done here, but it’s looking very promising.
All Kinfolk now have swimming animations that activate when they enter deep water! If non-aquatic Kinfolk run out of stamina while swimming along the water’s surface, they start to play their struggling animations.
We’ve finished adding all the character model updates! Each Kinfolk also has a pair of rare idle animations now, as well as slightly smoother animations overall.
We’ve added an interactive compass to the HUD! We expect this to be a major help while exploring without being too intrusive. There are still more features to add, but the basic functionality is in place. Here’s a preview of its current state:
The visuals for interaction pop-ups (talk, rest, etc.) now appear in front of the ground and other models instead of hiding behind them until you stand at just the right angle.
We’ve added 3 new Active Abilities specific to the single player. These happen to be particularly complex abilities, so they’ve taken longer than average to create. That being said, we think the result is worth the effort!
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on May 20.
