Kickstarter Rewards

The design challenge is still underway in the Artificer Discord channel! We’re getting into the fine details now, but there’s still time if you’d like to be a part of the design process. We’re looking forward to sharing the result of the challenge with everyone after the event ends on December 6th.
We’ve also extended the deadline for Artificers submitting their names to be included on objects in-game. The new deadline for Artificer name submissions is January 5.

Combat Arena

A lot of time has gone into enhancing melee attack combos to move more quickly through the animations and not pause between them. We expect this to be a serious improvement to melee combat.
Call down attacks, such as Rock Slide and Iron Fist, will now cause flying Kinfolk to fall to the ground when they take damage.

Single Player
We’ve made a lot of progress implementing character customization. We’ve implemented smooth transitions between facial feature options and finalized the UI for body options. The rigging is complete for facial hair and several new clothing models, and the color variants for those clothing models are also nearly finished. Apart from adding more hairstyles and clothing options in the future, we’re very close to the end of it now! There are just a few more pieces that need smoothed out.

We’re working on new optimizations for the Single Player mode on Nintendo Switch. This is something we’ve been eager to get started on and will have a huge positive impact on PC performance as well!
The new AI for NPC Summoners and their Kinfolk has been updated so they cooperate with each other better when searching for the player and in entering combat.
- In adding the improved Summoner AI, the overall structure of our behavior trees was completely overhauled. The AI has now been split into two different layers: Decision Making and Actuation. Decision Making is the act of sensing the world around the NPC and deciding what they should do. Actuation is the sequence of actual actions the NPC must take to complete a task. This includes actions such as sending pathfinding requests to be calculated from the navmesh, sending inputs for movement and abilities, etc.
- By distinguishing between these two layers, we can use a finite state machine for all of the Decision Making across NPCs- deciding which state the NPC should currently be in. The behavior tree is now only for the Actuation layer. The result is much smaller, more scalable, and more manageable behavior trees for individual NPCs. In the example below, all of the highlighted nodes in the before image are Decision Making nodes.

We’ve added property mapping for behavior tree variables. Now instead of having some variables exist on the behavior tree, and copies of these variables exist on another NPC component (NonplayerGO), we just map the behavior variables to the variables on the NonplayerGO.
Our map UI has been updated to include the full playable map. Hopefully this will help our QA testers get around the newer areas! While there’s still a lot to be done here, this is a major step.
There were a few bugs caused by updating Unity that we uncovered and mercilessly squashed this week. Aside from those few bugs we’ve been enjoying the upgrade, especially the improved functionality of a few key parts of the Unity editor.
The large scale sculpting for the game’s first area is complete! It’s so exciting to see a large section of terrain this close to final quality. We’re currently working on adding set piece objects as well as roads and footpaths throughout the area.
The dialogue for story missions is progressing well. We’re currently working on a mission with several branching paths, which means writing a lot more dialogue to account for every situation. Here’s a piece of the conversation with a major NPC for one mission so far:

We’ve completed concept art for a new Air Type Kinfolk and are nearly finished with the model for a new Water Type Kinfolk.

We have new concept art sketches for an important dungeon and world building object. There will be multiple versions of this object, and we’re looking forward to making them into points of interest across the map.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on December 16.