Single Player
We’ve added headlook to every NPC when not in combat. This means that once your character gets within a certain distance from an NPC, they’ll turn their head to look at you. It sounds like a small detail, but the world immediately feels more alive now that we’ve added it! The smaller characters are especially cute when they look up at you. Here’s a quick demo!
Concept art pieces for Briar_Runner and a Light Type, North_Star, are currently in the works. Standard animations for Little_Wing are underway, and Tide_Walker just finished the animation process. We’re now starting to implement Tide_Walker, and Puddle_Hopper is fully implemented. Everyone on the team really loves Puddle_Hopper, especially how they move! Tide_Walker is shaping up to be equally impressive. We’ve also decided on official names for a handful of Kinfolk.
We’re currently working out the small details for an important human character’s line art, and we’re almost ready to move on to color choices. We already have some good ideas for colors in mind, so that part should be fairly quick and easy (for once).
There are lots of hair and clothing models for human characters in the pipeline at the moment. This includes multiple sets of clothes for ordinary townsfolk NPCs, two more masculine hairstyles, and clothing models for the child characters.
The concept art for the new biome that we mentioned in the last newsletter was finished last week, and we’re currently working on the concept for another biome that you’ll be likely to encounter within the first half of the game.
With the concept finished for the boss room we mentioned last time, we’ve been working on the room’s 3D set piece models. We’re also modeling the building with different states that we’ve talked about in the past few newsletters.
The writing team has started planning the characters for a new town. This particular town has been really fun to write for, with lots of interesting stories, conflicts, and relationships between characters for the player to discover.
We’ve been updating the VFX for abilities that need to conform to the terrain, like we showed with Scorch on Twitter this week. In addition to that, we’ve recently updated Angelic Ray and Wither.
Phantoms have been implemented! You can now get them in game, and we made the framework for changing their portraits, model, and other various points in the UI.
We’ve cleaned up the leaning for the human player and added foot IK. This helps the human look much more realistic while moving on slopes and around Hinterlock. We expect to make more changes to this over time.
When you talk to an NPC, the camera will now zoom in closer to their face, and both your character and the NPC will look toward each other. This adds a lot to immersion!
We’ve implemented a handful of new gatherables: potato, wild onion, wild greens, and wild berry. These will be some of the most common gatherable plants in the game.
We’ve added additional features to patrolling paths to give designers greater control over how long an NPC stops at specific points in the world. Now they can actually stop and enjoy all of those lovely vistas they previously had to just walk past!
We implemented the framework for item effects that last over a given duration of time. For example, certain cooked foods may add passive health regeneration, or boosts to how quickly a Kinfolk bonds with the player for a set duration.
We fixed a lot of bugs as we move to fully polish for our current internal milestone. This includes regression testing to ensure that all of our previously implemented abilities and features are still working as intended after adding new changes.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll be back with our next newsletter on May 19.
