Combat Arena
We’ve continued improving many of the Combat Arena features discussed in our last newsletter. The settings menu needed a few final touches, mostly to make navigation between menu screens smoother.
We’ve continued touching up the controller settings, in particular for handling flight. The joystick axis has been reworked, we added an option for inverted Y while flying, and added default keybindings for controller in a controller type agnostic way. In addition to improving the flight controller, we also had to make sure our improvements to melee combat would also apply to players using controllers.
Some changes were made to how server characters move with the new control axis improvements in order to keep their movement steady. Initially the server character had very choppy movement, but this has since been smoothed out and shouldn’t look any different than before now.
We’ve made more adjustments to lock-on so that it works more intuitively, including targeting the character you’re actually looking toward instead of whichever character is closest. We’re feeling much more confident about this version of lock-on and are looking forward to sharing it with you!
We made changes to Crescent Strike. With melee attacks launching faster and becoming more fluid with animation canceling, Crescent Strike was becoming increasingly overpowered for burst damage. Crescent Strike has now been modified to have a slower wind up on the initial strike, where the user also has super-armor immunity to stagger.
There were a few bugs in need of fixing related to Shield:
Fixed a bug with shield where the user and the user's shield would occasionally take 0 damage.
Hook's shield damage has been raised so that it always breaks shields.
We’ve started work for some changes to implement after this upcoming patch. One of these is slowing down the move speed of characters casting a ranged ability by 25%. This will allow melee characters to close the gap with ranged characters more easily and prevent ranged characters from constantly kiting melee characters so easily.
This also includes a fix where all of our movement speed modifying abilities were actually applying their move speed modifier twice. For example, Salamurder's Fear Feed is set to double his movement speed, but all this time his movement speed has actually been x4 because it was being doubled twice. After fixing this bug, we went through every ability that modifies movement speed and made sure every other skill still feels the same. But now we have the true speed modification values in the inspector which should be handy for future balancing.
Single Player
Character customization has begun in earnest! We have some initial concept art and are beginning to transfer this to our 3D artists. Here’s an example of some early face options (you’ll be able to customize further from here):
We’re very much looking forward to giving you a more in depth look at character creation as it progresses.
The Nintendo Switch remains a major focus for now, and we’re making great progress! As of last week, the Practice Arena runs stably at 31 frames per second. We’re aiming to bring this even higher in the future.
We’re upgrading NPC patrol paths to be much more convenient and performant. Patrol paths can now optionally set schedules for moving between points based off of time of day, and there is more logic for allowing the NPC to constantly move and interact with surrounding objects when arriving to a desired patrol point. We’re looking forward to putting this in action and seeing our town NPCs come to life!
The terrain now has all of the tiles that will make up the playable area! Many of them are plain and flat for the moment, but we expect to have rough topology and vegetation on everything by the next newsletter! This is largely thanks to the new tools that will allow us to populate vegetation and paint textures in a fraction of the time it takes to do by hand. We also have new stamps that will allow us to sculpt with much finer detail.
Thank you for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on July 29.
