Single Player
With their concept art phase complete, we’ve started on the modeling process for North_Star. Animations are finished for Little_Wing, and they’re now fully implemented! It’s been fun to fly them around town in the overworld.
A lot of our character art progress has been on the human side this sprint. We’ve finished up new clothing models, and the child model is rigged and ready for animations!
We’ve made a lot of progress on the concept art for the game’s opening scene. There are a lot of important details to include, so we’re taking our time to make it right. Gotta make the best first impression we can!
We’ve started putting together early versions of the animations and camerawork for multiple cinematic scenes toward the beginning of the game’s story.
We finished writing the first round of dialogue for the NPCs in the new town, and the dialogue trees are implemented in the project! We’re looking forward to coming back to them later and developing their stories further.
The mission logic for the tutorial section of the game is close to finished. This one is especially full since we have to be more hands-on in leading the player through this section of the game. We also put emphasis on incorporating the story in this section.
The animation for the cooking pot is finished! Now we’re blocking out the animations for the player character interacting with it. It’s a cute detail that we’re excited to include!
We’ve modified how rotations are handled when controlling a flying character so they can lean to match the direction they’re flying. Previously we did this with Avieon by creating leaning animations for every direction, and then blending between animations. The code-based leaning looks very similar, but now fliers take much less work from our animation team and dev team to set up.
Our human NPCs have been modified to be more like our other combat NPCs. Human NPCs can react to being damaged and flee from the player. Currently we don't allow human NPCs to die from player damage, but this may change in the future.
There’s a new detail for the NPC "Fleeing" state. Now a fleeing NPC can optionally flee to predefined positions, or flee directly from the assailant.
We fixed an issue with our Hierarchical state machines. These are used for NPC AI decision making for which state they should currently be in. Substates were not always being properly cleaned up after a state change, which was leading to some subtle bugs.
Our NPCs have a newly polished combat state. A new substate of slowly strafing while looking at the player has been added. Now NPCs in combat can optionally use this substate to size-up the player before attacking, and if the player is already crowded by enemies, they can wait in this substate before jumping into the fray. Additionally, some other small changes have been made to make player vs NPC combat feel better.
We started implementing the unique combat AI for a new boss fight, and we created two new abilities made specifically for use by this boss. We’ve also completed VFX for multiple unrelated abilities, including updated VFX for Shield.
Community
Scribe Tier Backers: We've begun collecting your titles! To find out how to submit, check the email we sent to the address associated with your pledge. If you're a Scribe backer and you haven't received an email, send a message to support@skymill.com
Tailor Tier Backers: We've decided to extend the Tailor cosmetic item deadline one more month so that more people have time to submit. The new deadline is June 29th. If you have any questions, please send a message to support@skymill.com
Thanks for stopping by! Our next newsletter will be out on June 16.
