This newsletter will be a bit shorter than normal. Many of us have been out of town visiting with family for the holidays, but we’re all back and on track now!
Since we skipped last sprint’s newsletter for the holidays, we will include information from both this sprint and last sprint so that we’re all caught up.
Single Player
Last sprint, we finalized our current version of character customization. If you haven’t yet seen our video showcasing this, check out the Community section at the bottom!
Related to that, we'd like to show you some of our new clothing models! We’ve been working on new categories of clothing, such as hats, glasses, headbands, and more! Some of these will alter the way the hairstyles look. In this example, the beanie changes the positioning of the ponytail we showcased in the Character Creation trailer.
We’ve been putting a lot of care into getting the single player version of the game up and running on Switch. The Switch has a pretty low RAM limit, which we have to spend some extra time and effort accommodating. We’re making steady progress though, and hoping to have this version loading in the single player overworld within the next few weeks.
As our playable map has grown, we’ve needed to adjust where its center point sits. The physics begin to misbehave when the player moves too far from this point. This change required adjusting a few of our coordinates-based systems, and fixing some bugs that popped up as a result. It took some time to get everything right but it’s working great now.
We implemented a few new unrevealed attacks for the single player game. In addition, we changed Reflect so that when it reflects a multi-charge ability, the remaining charges are canceled and the ability is put on cooldown.
We’ve made a ton of adjustments concerning our AI, some of which also affect the player character.
Finalized some aspects of the AI system that allows enemy Summoners to swap out their Kinfolk mid-fight for interesting ability combos.
Fixed some AI input issues so that inputs from a previous AI character never bleed over into the next character when swapping.
Modified all characters’ animators to be more stable by changing from animator bools to animator triggers.
Fixed an unintended swap delay so that swapping characters is basically instant again, and also made it so that the new character's velocity inherits from the momentum of the previous character when swapping.
Made several sweeping changes to NPC spawners which should allow easy setup of spawning waves of NPCs when desired. This also eases the process of making new spawners that can perform any logic and can be triggered by any custom conditions.
Worked on projectile paths and positioning updates for attacks when Kinfolk are using them while on a moving platform.
We finalized the details for many of our items, including gatherable plants, consumables, and the meals you can create at camp. This will be especially handy as we begin working on the Gathering and Cooking game mechanics in the near future.
The models of two unrevealed Water Kinfolk are now complete. The first pass on the model of a new Air Kinfolk is also finished.
Concept art work was started on two unrevealed Gaia Kinfolk, with the line art nearing completion on one of them.
Community
We had the pleasure of participating in GymLeaderEd’s first ever Monster Taming Direct! There were so many great games and we had an amazing time. Click the link above if you’d like to watch the entire Direct. If you want to see our contribution, check the video below!
We hope you had a good holiday, and we’re looking forward to making 2023 a huge year for Kindred Fates! See you next time, on January 27.
