AlpHA Combat Arena
We apologize for the radio silence regarding the Alpha. We’re full steam ahead on our current internal milestone at the moment. Once that finishes, we’ll have a ton of very exciting things to show (many of which will make it into the Alpha!). Unfortunately for the time being, we have to shut down the public servers for now. You will still be able to play in the practice room and use Private matchmaking, so this isn’t the end of the Alpha! We’re extremely sorry that we can’t continue to keep the public servers running, but the expense can’t be justified with the amount of active players currently. Again, we apologize for how long it’s been since the last update and for the need to take the public servers down, but please trust that we’re doing everything we can to make Kindred Fates the absolute best it can be. Thank you to those of you who have spent so much time playing the Alpha!
Single Player
We’ve started the process of modeling Violet_Fang. It’s looking good so far! We’re also continuing to work on North_Star’s model. We finished modeling a variety of clothing outfits for townsfolk NPCs.
The unique models for both Mr. L.K and Mr. Green_Collar are complete! Mr. L.K is rigged, while Mr. Green_Collar is up next. The animations for Mr. L.K were completed earlier using a placeholder model, so it will be fairly easy to hook those up to the custom model now that it’s rigged!
Speaking of animations, we’ve made some progress here! Little_Bandit is in the early stages of animation, and several generic player character/human NPC animations are either complete or in review. These include things like Foraging, Surprise, Talking, Laughing, and more! The child models we referenced in the last newsletter are mostly using modified adult animations, which have now been hooked up to the rig. Briar_Heart’s animation set is complete!
We have a ton of new VFX in the works! The VFX for an unrevealed Light type ability is in progress. The impact VFX for this one in particular looks really good! Shield has a new VFX, which you can see on Twitter. We’re also nearly finished creating a VFX that will be used in the opening cutscene.
We began using a new visual shader that improves the look of both humans and Kinfolk! The improvement is significant, and we believe that it helps both types of characters look more “present” in the world. We think it’s an especially big improvement to human characters. It needs some more tweaking before we can show it off on human characters, but we’d like to show you how it looks on some Kinfolk!
Changing our character shader included reimplementing all of our character customization, changes to dodge color, and changes to damage visualization. The new shader comes with some major feature improvements that give the characters more visual flexibility.
Outlining for the opening and subsequent cutscenes continues. This process includes animating placeholder models and characters to the specifications of the cutscene, which we can then replace later when the custom models are ready. We implemented the dialogue related to the opening cutscene, so the animators can more easily follow the intended timing.
The current boss fight we’re working on is shaping up nicely. The boss room is almost completely modeled, pending some final changes. We’ve created the combat AI for this boss, and two new attacks that they will use. This fight is already looking super cool, and we’re excited for it!
Our internal builds now upload to Steam! This speeds up QA tremendously, since the team can download each update at a time automatically, instead of needing to redownload the entire game every time there’s a new build.
Kinfolk descriptions are in the process of being implemented into the Compendium. We also added some new townsfolk NPCs along with the dialogue for them.
We also spent some time on general implementation and polish!
Implemented child characters into the game.
Polished animation implementation for Puddle_Hopper, Little_Wing, Tide_Walker, and the player character.
Polished the in-game UI.
Made several improvements to our NPC AI in regards to how they move while in combat.
Added greater control over when NPCs use headlook in combat.
Added more flexibility in our Combat AI action selection framework for adjusting when/why NPCs choose to do a particular sequence of attacks.
Community
Tailor backers have until June 29th to submit their designs. If you have this tier, check your email! If you’re confused, send a message to support@skymill.com.
Scribe backers have until July 31st to submit their titles. If you have this tier, check your email! If you’re confused, send a message to support@skymill.com.
Thanks for stopping by! Our next newsletter will be out on June 30.
