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Artificer Backers:
The Artificer Designer challenge has come to a close and we’re thrilled to share the results! If you’re trying to avoid spoilers, we recommend skipping this next section, but for everyone else:
The boss has been titled: Shade-Walker Atka.
It will be a Dark Type Kinfolk that is currently unrevealed.
The encounter will take place in a spooky forest with low visibility, where certain trees move while the player isn’t looking at them.
Atka will have a surprise-attack brawler fighting style and will hide in the shadows of trees. It will use direct melee attacks, AOEs, rooting, and subtly telegraphed ranged grappling attacks from shadows in order to root or pull and then combo. Direct combat will be interspersed with “hide and seek” phases where the boss creates fake shadowy decoys to hide itself before disappearing into the shadows.
The player can use nearby trees for cover, and if they attack the real boss instead of its decoys while they’re still active, the boss becomes stunned. If Atka touches the light from one of the several lanterns around the encounter area, that will also cause it to become stunned.
Defeating Shade-Walker Atka will grant access to a new area that is otherwise inaccessible.
With the design challenge at its end, we won’t be checking the account system as frequently for backers who want to be added to the Artificer Discord channel. If you’d still like to be added, reach out to our moderator support on Discord. The challenge may be over, but we still plan on posting updates or little bits that don't quite fit for Twitter, and you’re more than welcome to join us!
Single PlayerThe character customization system is coming together more and more every day! Most of the UI is working, and we smoothed out a few issues with changing between different options. We’ve also tweaked the colors to work well in our new lighting setup. From here we still need to add more clothing and hair models, as well as animations tailored to the new character model. For our clothing options, each model will have multiple colors for you to choose from. Here are the colors we currently have for our sneakers:
We created a system allowing our world map to expand to support the full size. It was previously only able to capture about 1/9th of the full area!
We’ve added the concept of area markers on the map. Sometimes we may want to indicate a general region rather than a specific point during a mission, and this will allow us to fill that use case.
Creating moving surfaces that the player can walk on has been a surprisingly involved task, but one that’s necessary for several story missions. We’ve had to make changes to a lot of different areas of existing code, on top of adding new functionality.
The moving surfaces need to interact with our character controller, track if the player or any spirit flames are on them, and reset their positions on player death.
The NPCs’ ability to pathfind along a moving navmesh has been finalized for the moving platforms, which we started in our previous sprint.
We made changes to our attacks to accommodate for the firing Kinfolk being on a moving platform. Otherwise, a character could fire off an attack and it would start behind the character’s position as it moves away from that point.
We added a spline tool with easy to use methods for moving objects along a path at set speeds and rotations.
We created necessary utility actions and conditions so that the Kinfolk on NPC summoners’ teams can do combos that include swapping between team members. We’re looking forward to how this will influence the feel of combat against NPC teams.
The environment we’ve been focusing on most recently has received more polish. We’ve also made some improvements to the visuals for various weather conditions.
We’ve finished up the modeling for one Water Type Kinfolk, started the modeling for another, and finished concept art for another new Air Type.
Community
We’re so excited to be participating in GymLeaderEd’s Monster Taming Direct! We’ve been working very hard to put our video contribution together and can’t wait to show you. There will also be reveals and updates for tons of other monster taming games- you can find teasers on Ed’s Twitter page. We hope to see you there!
Thanks for stopping by! We’re going to take a break from posting newsletters for the holidays, so we’ll be back on January 13. Thank you all for another wonderful year of your support, and Happy Holidays!
