Combat Arena
A huge amount of our developer and QA focus has gone toward fixing bugs in the Combat Arena Alpha this sprint. It’s been an especially long process to sort some of these bugs out. (So much so that it was the bulk of the work on the dev side for this newsletter, haha.)
Many of these issues are related to a recent Unity version upgrade we made, as well as some issues related to Switch and P2P. We don’t want to make any promises about when the next patch will be released, but getting this patch out for the Combat Arena is and will continue to be our main goal until it happens.
Based on what we’re seeing in QA right now we expect it to be soon (TM) but we don’t want to count out the possibility of something unexpected showing up still.
Single Player
We’ve been making steady progress on the game’s music for quite some time now. At the moment we have about 14 different music tracks that are either complete or nearing completion, and many more that are in progress or still in the planning stage. Since we want to save many of the game’s songs for when you play the game for the first time, we try to hold back on showing new ones very often. That being said- it has been a while.
Here’s a WIP snippet from one of the songs we’re working on:
We’ve started development on a component that will allow NPCs to drop items when defeated. Items dropped this way could be anything from money to food and everything in between! Some NPCs might even drop multiple items at once.
The concept art for the new town is complete! From here, we’ll be creating concepts for the next town as well as for the buildings and props that can be found there.
Previously, we talked about how we added new tools to improve our terrain sculpting. This sprint, we focused on combining these tools with some new hand sculpting techniques we developed. Our goal is to create more detailed and interesting terrain than we have in the past, while also matching our specific environment designs laid out in concept art.
We’ve started implementing dialogue trees for the characters in our story missions. We also added some new elements to our dialogue system that make it cleaner, easier to read, and more performant for writers/editors. It’s much easier now for writers to create and organize dialogue trees for NPCs, especially ones that you’ll be revisiting and having various conversations with throughout the game.
In character customization news, we have initial models now for all of the facial hair options! We’ve also updated the shading for the eye textures, as well as some details for the skin tones and the shapes of a few of the noses. Lastly, we’ve updated the body shapes with a few improvements to the proportions. We’re looking forward to sharing a more in-depth preview of character customization once we have more options for hair and clothing!
We’re nearly finished with the model for a new water type Kinfolk.
After a long time, we’ve settled on the first version of the design for a very important character.
The design team has spent some time generating ideas for more points of interest that you can find throughout the world, particularly in different towns. As always, we hope to add small details that will bring locations to life.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll catch you next time, on October 21.
