Combat Arena
We’ve updated the settings menu to match the one we recently added to the single player. It features a vastly improved rebinding screen, a more streamlined aesthetic that more indicates the UI in the final game, and built-in default controller support.
Controllers in general have been improved greatly. You can now use them in conjunction with a keyboard and mouse, no need to toggle settings. The game will also ship with several default bindings, so your controller will work with sensible defaults from the very start.
We also added lock-on back in! Controversial feature we know, but we feel that it dramatically improves melee combat in particular. We've made it so that ranged attacks are much less precise with the lock on tracking to help address the concerns of the previous version. In addition, we heard the feedback that lock on made abilities like Teleport worse, so now certain abilities will break an opponent's lock when used by an enemy. Teleport will be the first of these. Here’s a quick preview of how the new lock-on looks:
A lot of focus has gone toward improving the feel of combat animations for melee characters. We’ve adjusted the character controller so the last 10-20% of an animation can be interrupted to do anything else (a different ability, dodge, shield, etc.) Some of the team even feels that melee characters are more satisfying to play than ranged characters now!
We’ve disabled swapping while a character is snared, to make it feel more snare-y.
Here are the most recent bug fixes:
Fixed an issue where righteous light had too much additional end lag
Fixed an issue with the setting menu increasing the brightness in the arenas
Fixed issues with status conditions not timing out when the Kinfolk is swapped out
Fixed an issue with the beacon for Avieon not displaying in the Practice Room
Single Player
We’re really happy with how the Switch Port is coming along! In just the past 2 weeks, we’ve gone from just being able to open the Combat Arena menu to playing at up to 30 frames per second in the practice arena. There’s still a massive amount of work ahead of us, but the progress so far has been encouraging.
Our sneaking mechanics have been set up to automatically work with how we draw details such as tall grass on the terrain. This allows the human player to crouch down and hide in tall grass to sneak around NPCs. Anywhere the terrain artists place this tall grass, the human player should be capable of sneaking through it as long as the grass is dense enough. When the player is sneaking, NPCs will either not be able to see the player at all or have very limited view distances depending on the current state of the NPC.
We’ve also created a very handy boundary tool. This tool makes it extremely easy to set positions in the world that create the vertices of a polygon. This polygon then has an adjustable height and efficient methods for querying if a given target position is within its boundary. This is no longer used by the sneaking mechanics like we originally planned, but will most likely find use cases elsewhere in the game. Possibly for setting boundary "leashes" for NPCs or for creating patrolling areas or paths.
Currently we’re working on NPCs being able to target multiple players when in Co-op.
Community
Our New Wiki page is live! Some of our community moderation team has been hard at work setting up the new website with updated information, so it’s really exciting to be able to share it with you! If you’d be interested in contributing to the Wiki, join our Discord to find out more!
Thank you for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on July 15.
