Kickstarter Rewards
Artificer Backers:
The Skymill dev team Discord channel is open to you, and the “design challenge” portion of the Artificer-tier backer reward will begin soon!
The design challenge will start on November 14th and will last until December 6th. If you want to participate, it’s very important that you join the server before the end date.
You can use the account system on our website to let us know what name you want us to put in the game and where you’d like it to be put!
See this post for more detailed information on how to access the dev team Discord channel and submit your name.
Combat Arena
Our latest patch was released this week! Thank you to everyone who has tried it out so far and provided feedback. We spent a lot of time this sprint fixing and testing bugs for this release, and we’re currently looking into ways to reproduce and fix several more.
In addition to the fixes, here are a few of the other things we’re currently working on that will be making their way to the Combat Arena Alpha:
Improvements to the Cavern arena layout.
Optimizations for the code that computes the path for ranged attacks.
Improved hit boxes for Iron Fist and Rockslide as the projectiles fall.
Improved consistency of projectiles between clients and server when ping is high.
Single Player
Our terrain team has a new tool that allows us to easily create color maps for grass. These color maps cause the base of the grass to change color and more closely match the color of the ground underneath it. We hope you’ll agree the result is a massive improvement! Here’s a before and after:
We’ve also been experimenting with new settings to give large grassy areas a greater feeling of depth. By layering two different colors and using noise masks, we’re able to give these areas more of a painted quality.
For character customization, we’re currently finishing up textures on the facial hair models and sculpting the models for several new hairstyles. The new human character rig is also very nearly complete. Once that’s finished, we’ll finally be able to add all of the new body part assets we’ve created over the last several months to the game, and begin implementing a playable feature complete version of character creation!
Concept art has started for a new town. At the moment we’re working on getting the layout just right, and afterward we’ll be creating more detailed versions of the buildings. We have a very strong sense for how we want this town to look and feel, and the progress so far is looking very promising! New concept art is also underway for two new Kinfolk: a Water type and a Gaia type.
The game’s music continues to progress smoothly with updates being made to 5 of the game’s tracks. We’ll be recording live instruments for several of these tracks in the near future!
The initial versions of all dialogue trees for the first story mission have been added to Unity. We expect to make many revisions to the text throughout the mission implementation and play testing process, but we’re really happy to be able to play through these conversations and start breathing life into some of the game’s characters. In addition to giving them dialogue, we’ve also assigned the pitches and speeds at which these characters will speak.
We have continued work on the Summoner AI and now, we have a detailed set of parameters for our first trainer so that we can test how well the AI works. Our main focus so far has been getting the human character to move separately from their Kinfolk.
We’re upgrading the version of Unity the project runs on again, and we expect this to be our last version update for quite some time. With this update we’ll finally have access to a feature we’ve been desperately missing for the last 2 years of development:
The ability to have more than 6 lights sources in a scene.
Yeah, really. While there have been Unity versions that support having as many light sources as you want for a while, we haven’t been able to upgrade to them due to Netcode (a library code developed by Unity and a critical pillar of the game’s architecture) not being compatible with those versions until fairly recently.
Being restricted to such a low number of light sources has been a big hindrance on our ability to create the eye catching atmospheric environments we want for this game. We’re very excited to start adding more lights to our scenes and, in time, sharing the results with all of you.
community
Two weeks ago, we changed the visibility settings for all of our previous newsletter videos from Unlisted to Public. Our goal was to make the videos of our progress more easily accessible, but we didn’t realize subscribers would get a notification for every video as though it was newly released. We’re really sorry about the annoying number of notifications- thankfully, we won’t be “releasing” that many videos all at once again!
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll catch you next time, on November 4.
