Our newsletter is a little lighter this time, as nearly all dev work this sprint was focused on fixing bugs that came from Nintendo Switch compatibility changes. More on that below.
Combat Arena
We made a whole bunch of bug fixes to the internal version of the Combat Arena Alpha and Beta. Both were broken by merging the Switch changes in, which we did because of the huge performance benefits they had. Thankfully, it’s gone more smoothly than we expected! We're approaching a good version here, and look forward to releasing it soon.
Single Player
We also fixed many bugs in the Single Player that stemmed off of our recent optimizations for the Switch, as well as the recent overhauls for NPC patrolling and targeting. While it went better than expected, it still took a lot of time from most of our dev team this sprint. Work on these bugs has nearly completed now, and we expect things to be back to normal before our next newsletter.
We’ve completely changed how NPC targeting works to be more efficient and flexible. NPC targeting in combat now supports the idea of "Teams," and each individual game mode has the ability to filter which NPCs and characters are on which teams. NPCs are then able to target enemies from opposing teams for attacks, or allies on their team for healing abilities. This allows NPCs to fight in a 2+ vs. 2+ setting against either co-op players or other NPCs. Here’s what it looks like right now when we spawn 3 NPCs to fight in a free-for-all:
We continued work on our NPC patrolling, and fixed up some final bugs to complete our new schedule-based patrolling that we mentioned in our last newsletter.
We’ve started on new concept art for the region of the map that players will start in, and it’s coming together really nicely! Next up will be more major regions featured in the first third of the game’s main story, which is where we’re focusing the majority of our art/writing assets at the moment. We’ll be translating the environment concept art into the 3D terrain starting next week.
There have been some exciting developments for the music of the game! We have the beginning framework of a new Title Theme, as well as some other songs for important points in the story. It’s extremely important to get the feel of these songs just right, so we’re taking it very seriously.
The writing team has made major progress on the mission outlines for the first third of the game. These outlines go in much greater depth than the high-level frameworks we made for missions at the beginning of the year. It’s really exciting to make everything come together at this level of detail!
Character customization art continues to develop smoothly! We’re in the process of modeling all the nose and mouth options, and up next will be some of the hair options. We expect to begin on the programming side of this feature next week.
The UI art for character customization has also been completed! We’re looking forward to showing this once character customization is implemented in-game.
Community
Rob, Andrew, and Tori joined IceCubeMaker on his first podcast of The Backstage+ Show to go behind the scenes on Kindred Fates! We had a great time talking about what the process has been like making the game so far, new tools, our monster design outlook, and much more. You can watch the VOD from the stream here!
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you next time, on August 26. Until then, take care!
