Kickstarter Rewards
Artificer Backers:
The design challenge with the Artificer backers has started! We’re having so much fun seeing everyone come up with ideas, and we can’t wait for the final outcome. The challenge will continue until early December.
Combat Arena
We fixed issues with the Auto Fire on Press and Auto Fire on Release options for attacks with multiple charges and some other ranged attacks.
Homing attacks now act as Fire With Same Key when the Auto Fire on Press or Auto Fire on Release options are selected. The attack will wait for you to press the same key to fire the projectile.
We removed the ability for Shield to be invoked when the Kinfolk is stunned or in its damage animation.
We also fixed more issues with Iron Fist when attacking flying Kinfolk.
Single Player
We’ve created "Dispositions" for NPCs. They can now be Aggressive, Neutral, or Skittish. When an NPC senses the player character is nearby, these dispositions define how they will respond. Also, they can dynamically change their disposition. For example, a neutral NPC could become aggressive or skittish depending on how you interact with it, or an aggressive NPC may become skittish if it feels like it's losing in battle, etc. This video demonstrates an Aggressive Skulken, Neutral Shovlet, and Skittish Lumala reacting to the player’s presence.
Character customization has come a long way the past few weeks! The UI is implemented, so you can pull up a menu and choose features to change. We now have it to the point that the character you're customizing is your actual character, so you can customize, then move around in the world, etc... Now we’re working on adding more options and fixing up the animations when you change between facial feature options on the model.
On the art side of character customization, we’re currently working on clothing models, and several of them are nearly finished! We’re also adjusting the hair and skin colors in the new lighting setup so they match the concepts.
We’ve started work on the next dungeon, and are creating the logic for various damageable objects that will be used within it.
The first iteration of Summoner AI has been finalized. The most time-consuming portion was allowing Summoners and their Kinfolk to send inputs for movement and abilities at the same time from the same PlayerData without interfering with each other's inputs. We have finally reached a point where that seems to be working well. Next we’ll be working on having increased cooperation between the Summoner AI and their Kinfolk.
A few of our story missions have their mission logic implemented now. The tasks for each are laid out and a player can go through early versions of the tasks to complete the mission. We’ve also started writing dialogue for several minor NPCs you’ll encounter early in the game.
We’ve upgraded to a newer version of Unity, which came with some nice upgrades for our lighting, AI pathfinding, and fixed a pesky Unity editor bug from the previous version. We spent a lot of time adjusting our lighting and post-processing settings. In particular, we improved the shadows at nighttime and the shading for characters so they better match the lighting of their surroundings.
One side effect of updating Unity was that it made some changes to the appearance of the game’s grass. It took a bit of time, but we’ve got it back to looking the way it did in our previous newsletters.
The profile for our first biome is finished! While we’ve sculpted multiple biomes already, the profile allows us to select a terrain tile and populate it with trees, rocks, bushes, grass, flowers, and other environment objects to the specifications laid out in the profile. It’s going to be a huge time saver moving forward!
We’ve finished 2 character concepts for Water Type Kinfolk, and plan to start rigging several new Kinfolk for animation soon.
Most abilities have now been optimized to be more efficient and no longer make use of a more expensive enemy targeting system.
We created a system that allows for moving AI NavMeshes. This means that NPCs will be able to find their way when walking on moving surfaces now.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on December 2.
