Combat Arena
We hope you’re enjoying the new patch for the Combat Arena Alpha! This patch brings some much needed improvements to controller support, the feel of melee combat, and how smoothly you can string abilities together. We’ve also given the settings page a complete overhaul with new settings, art, and improved key binding. Last but not least, we’ve introduced Lock On 2.0, a new version of the lock on mechanic that aims to improve the feel of combat while correcting the shortcomings of its previous incarnation. You can read all the details in our Patch Notes.
We’re already looking ahead to what we should include in our next patch. The main feature to look forward to is a significant improvement to performance (nearly double the current performance). We want to fix up some bugs, and are considering adding P2P to private matches in order to test its connectivity while still allowing players to play public matches on dedicated servers. Because we’ll be working with a lot of new tech for performance improvements, we expect this patch to take some time to be ready for release. Thank you in advance for your patience <3
So far, we’ve already made a handful of smaller improvements and bug fixes that will also be included in the next patch:
The minion health bars have been updated to only show when the minions are damaged, and friendly minions now display green health bars while enemy minions display red health bars.
Dash attacks will now use different origins for their colliders, so the Kinfolk has to collide with the enemy instead of using a collider that is in front of the Kinfolk.
Twister now travels much better along uneven terrain, and will continue to travel along the ground when launched from the air towards the ground.
Single Player
We have finished our current stage of compatibility and optimization work with the Switch in the combat arenas. We're definitely going to revisit this constantly as we go forward, but for now we've reached a stable 30 FPS (even while in combat with multiple enemies). Next sprint we’ll be spending a fair amount of time fixing bugs on the PC version that have cropped up from Switch compatibility changes. After that we’ll be working on any compatibility issues the Switch version has with the single player side of the game.
We’ve completely overhauled NPC patrolling to work with the new patrol paths that we mentioned in our last newsletter. NPCs now have the option to follow daily schedules!
NPCs can play defined animations at points in their patrol paths. This framework should also hopefully allow NPCs in the future to be able to interact with defined objects in the world via animations, inverse kinematics, and HeadLook.
We’ve made some additions to the Utility AI:
There are now "Combat-Entry" actions, which are actions the NPC will take only when it first enters battle.
We added the ability to define action combos in the Utility AI editor interface, so that a series of actions can be defined for an NPC to follow during certain conditions.
These improvements allow us to make NPC encounters more varied and interesting.
In addition to these NPC AI improvements, we’re also working on allowing NPCs to better target multiple players when fighting in Co-op situations.
We’re really excited about how character customization is progressing! We’ve picked out all 16 skin tones, 12 eye colors, and 24 hair colors, as well as 10 eye shapes and 8 jaw shapes. We have a 3D base model capable of swapping out the different skin and eye color options, and are currently in the process of modeling the different eye and jaw shape options. Next up will be mouth and nose shapes. Here’s what the 3D base models look like right now:
The new terrain tiles that we added last sprint are looking much better now! They’ve gone from perfectly flat planes to defined mountains, foothills, grasslands, lakes, and forests. We also added details like trees, bushes, rocks, grass, and flowers. Everything is still in a rough state and we’ll be spending tons of time adding unique touches to all the different biomes, but we’re thrilled with the progress we’ve made this sprint! Previously, only about half of the map was traversable. Now the full map is!
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you next time, on August 12. Until then, take care!
