Single Player
We’ve continued to make progress on porting the Single Player portion of the game to Switch. Reducing our RAM usage is and was critical for performance there, and we've so far moved from 11 GB to 1.29! More work continues here to make the Switch run smoother.
After finalizing the details for gatherables earlier this month, we’ve started work on creating the functionality to support them in Unity. These are collectable items spread across the environment which will have different uses for the player.
We’re currently beginning to work on implementing the UI for our Compendium! Here is an example mock-up of how the Compendium menu will look (the numbers and descriptions are not final and only provide an example).
The concept art continues to roll in for several objects that will be found while exploring multiple locations. We’re looking forward to sharing some of these with you in upcoming newsletters!
Modeling is currently underway for a Fire Type and a new Water Type. Two Gaia Types also have concept art in their final stages!
For character customization, we’re continuing to build out different types of clothing items. At the moment, we’re working on models for socks, headbands, and a story-related clothing set.
We’re currently working on a new standard running animation for human characters, as well as some new crouching animations.
Our writing team has been consulting recently with another writer to make sure our story is up to snuff! He’s an accomplished novelist with over a dozen published works, and many of them feature monster taming as a theme! It’s been really validating to talk shop with him and get an outsider’s professional perspective after developing this story for so many years.
A particularly complex Story Mission is nearing completion! Because it’s possible to take many different paths to get to the end, both the dialogue and the mission logic have required more time and planning than previous missions.
In addition to this story mission, we’ve started writing dialogue for multiple NPCs that will be found in a particular location. Most of these will be relatively minor characters, but a few will be capable of giving side missions.
We recently put the final touches on our new NPC spawner framework. This will be much more extensible for setting the conditions in which a spawn should happen, and in adding any additional logic/VFX during the spawn.
We added the option to toggle animation curves for attack animation speeds for specific Kinfolk. This allows us to more easily fine tune the speed/feel of certain attack animations in the game editor. It has options for globally affecting only NPCs of a specific Kinfolk, only players, or just a specific instance of a Kinfolk, such as a boss version.
After resetting the center point in a previous sprint, we needed to re-bake our navmesh to include our latest additions to the terrain and new locations. Now our NPCs are once again able to navigate the world properly.
This sprint, we also created some new useful commands for testing/debugging. These include: becoming invisible to NPCs, locking all NPCs to their idle state, killing all active NPCs, toggling NPC spawners on/off, and resetting all NPC spawners.
We’ve implemented mission logic to allow a Kinfolk to be 'occupied', meaning they cannot be spawned or swapped to while in this state. This will come in handy for some of the missions we have planned.
Thanks for stopping by, everyone! We’ll see you next time, on February 10.
