Single Player
We’ve created special flocking behaviors for NPCs. Certain skittish Kinfolk that prefer to stay in groups now have more coordinated movement in their fleeing state. Here’s an example with a herd of Lumala:
Briar_Stomper’s model is finished and ready for rigging! North_Star’s standard animations are in progress, and Little_Bandit has been implemented and given combat AI. We’ve also polished the movement of all Kinfolk followers. Followers also make use of our headlook feature now.
We’re continuing to model new hats and hairstyles, and we’ve implemented the completed hairstyles and clothes in our character creator; this has been a huge help for creating more varied townsfolk. NPC humans also have a new pivot animation when starting a conversation. It used to feel awkward when NPCs would face away from the player while conversing with them, so it’s great to have more natural interactions.
We’ve added more final details to the first story mission, including replacing all of the placeholder dialogue. We hesitate to call this the final version, but it should give the player a much better introduction to the game.
As the animators continue creating and polishing the cinematic animations, we’ve started implementing rough versions of the scenes in Unity using the current animations and camera movements created in Maya. We’re also adding the final VFX to these scenes.
There’s new concept art in the works for areas and set pieces related to a new town. We’re also continuing to create house and set piece models for other areas in the world. More has been done to polish the current town, while the sculpting and set dressing for an important location just outside of town is also wrapping up.
We implemented a Wind Up VFX setting which allows us to play VFX at the beginning of certain attack animations where we weren’t able to before. Additionally, we’ve changed some beam attacks' colliders to better match their VFX, and fixed an issue with AoE attacks not doing damage when invoked multiple times.
Aside from the flocking behavior we showed above, we’ve added a lot of other new features to our NPC AI!
NPCs have a newly-created “Truce” state. Now when certain NPCs’ health is reduced under a certain threshold, they will run away while displaying a white flag VFX and slowly fading out. This gives the player an opportunity to spare the NPC while still receiving many of the benefits that they would have received for defeating them. Depending on the situation, choosing to spare or finish off an NPC can seriously impact how your team members view you.
We’ve created improved tooling for smart objects. Smart objects are the main way for NPCs to interface with the world in unique ways. The smart object holds all the context of what the NPC should be doing and saying, and can even coordinate behaviors between multiple NPCs. For example, the player could stumble on multiple NPCs conversing and investigating a weird hole in the ground, only for a Shovlet to jump out and surprise them when the player comes close!
We cleaned up the NPC patrol state to use hierarchical state machines like the rest of our AI states already use. This gives us more flexibility in easily swapping in and out of different patrolling sub-states such as interacting with smart objects.
We also cleaned up our nav agent component, which is responsible for moving our NPCs along the path returned from a pathfinding request, and for incorporating local avoidance into that movement. This component now has better defined variables which can be set by NPCs to change how the NPC follows the path, or interacts with local avoidance. This also fixed some bugs that were causing NPCs to stutter in certain situations when the local avoidance was pushing the NPC in the opposite direction from its target position.
Currently, we’re adding new VFX to our menus and UI. It’s in the early stages just now, but we expect it to give the game a much more polished look.
As always, we’re working on tons of bug fixes, such as preventing a series of crashes we were seeing in our test builds last week. Also, we fixed an issue with Skulken's passive ability reducing its own special and physical attack modifier.
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! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on August 11.
