Single Player
We’ve completed a series of new human animations! Many of these will be utilized by NPCs as well as the human player. Here are a few examples:
Violet_Fang has been rigged for animations, and North_Star is almost finished as well! Little_Bandit’s combat animations are in their final stages, and Briar_Heart has been implemented as a playable character.
We’re currently implementing the previously modeled hairstyles and outfits in the project. This opens the door for creating a ton of new NPCs with more unique looks! We’ve also implemented the animations for elderly human characters. Mr. Green_Collar has been fully implemented, and we’ve finished the concept art for another important human character.
Concept art and modeling are complete for a unique set piece that’s significant to the beginning of the story. We’re currently in the early stages of revisiting another important set piece’s concept art. Since this piece will be implemented in multiple locations in the world, we want to make sure it sets the right tone.
The VFX we’ve been creating are now fully implemented for nearly a dozen abilities and characters. We also have SFX in the works for many of these abilities. As we implement new abilities, we get to move many Kinfolk over to using their actual abilities instead of placeholders!
As new characters are being finished, we’re adding them to their respective cinematic scenes. We’re making unique animations for these characters, as well as continuing to polish the cinematic animations we’ve been working on. Many scenes are close to completion!
The encounters in early story missions have been using placeholder art and fairly basic logic until recently. We’ve gone through many of these encounters and placed final art, improved the logic, and added more developed dialogue. Many of these needed to account for the player accidentally getting into weird states if they didn’t follow the mission directions in a particular way.
The terrain and path designs for the side mission we mentioned in the last newsletter are finished and looking great! We polished the terrain in town, and now we’re looking at the surrounding areas and points of interest as well.
We now allow melee and ranged attacks to use different attack origins on a per-Kinfolk basis. We’ve also updated certain attacks to use a higher attack origin for shorter Kinfolk to avoid immediate collisions with the terrain.
Our character controller has new and improved handling for root motion. Now we can set which portion of an animation uses root motion, whether the root motion overrides velocity or is additive, and which axis the root motion affects. Also the root motion's magnitude is affected by player movement input. Root motion particularly helps melee abilities feel better, so we’re looking forward to showing these improvements to our Combat Arena players in the future!
We swapped Hull_Piercer over to using our new combat AI framework. This also included changes that help swimming and flying Kinfolk to better maintain a target altitude. For example, flying and swimming NPCs often match the altitude of their target enemy, but flying NPCs also need to keep some altitude above water when flying in order to avoid falling in while fighting a swimming Kinfolk.
We improved how the character controller handles movement while dashing and dodging. Originally for each frame of a dash or dodge, the character controller was calculating how far the character should move in that frame, and then teleporting the character to that position. Instead, we now allow dashing and dodging to set the velocity of the character. By setting velocity instead of incrementally teleporting the character, we achieve the same motion. However, now we have better collision handling, so they are no longer able to phase through walls or terrain. Also, dashes are better at traveling over uneven terrain and down slopes.
We now show status effects in our Use Item UI so you can see how a party member would be affected by an item. We also added a display for buffs and debuffs (finally), and a bond increase/decrease notification.
A lot of our menus are getting new improvements! We cleaned up our inventory tabs, and moved quick use to a hold-to-use system. This makes it so much easier to use multiple items sequentially. We’ve also improved scene loading and loading screens.
Community
Scribe backers have until July 31st to submit their titles. If you have this tier, check your email! If you have any questions, send a message to support@skymill.com.
Thanks for stopping by! Our next newsletter will be out on July 28. See you then!
