Backer Update
Thank you to everyone who submitted designs for the Cryptic Journal! It’s been a joy getting to see everyone’s creativity and passion at work. We’ve reviewed all of the submissions, so if you sent one but haven’t heard back from us, please send an email to SkymillCrypticJournal@gmail.com.
Art/Design
We have a few new concept art pieces for the new town we’re working on. This one is right on the water, so we need to include set pieces like docks and piers!
North_Star has a selection of combat animations in the works, and will be ready for implementation soon. This is the final Kinfolk we need for our current milestone.
We’re in the process of modeling a few more hairstyles and outfits. They’ll be ready for rigging soon, and the implementation process from there will be quick compared to other models that need unique animations. The model for an important human character is also in progress.
The current round of cinematics have nearly-finished animations! At this point, making changes almost feels like a movie director giving notes to an actor. “Show some more anger when delivering this line,” “Be more subtle with this gesture,” etc.
For VFX, we’re currently focusing on multiple types of environment and set piece effects, such as the fountain streams we showed earlier this week. We’re adding some atmospheric dust and pieces of grass floating through the air, as well as new water splashes for when a character enters a body of water. We expect this to make wandering through the world feel more dynamic.
A few important characters toward the start of the game have updated dialogue when you meet them now. We needed to inject some personality into their conversations, and the results are a huge improvement!
We’re continuing to iterate on the writing for the beginning of the game. It’s important to balance exposition and action! We’re trying a few new ideas that we think should be pretty interesting.
Development/Combat
NPCs are now much better at following a schedule, and have increased options for different kinds of behaviors while they go about their daily schedule. All NPCs in one of our towns have been set up with day/night schedules where they go to their homes at night and then return to their daily schedules come daytime.
We’ve made it much easier to swap through items in the quick use bar, which makes a big difference during combat. We’ve also cleaned up the appearance of the swapping animations.
We polished the colliders and trajectory of summoning bells when the player throws them. The collider was too large previously, which allowed the player to capture a Kinfolk too easily. The trajectory also follows a more predictable path now.
Bug fixes have once again been a major focus this sprint. QA and the devs have been hard at work to ensure a polished experience. These were a few of this sprint’s bugs:
Fixed issues with Fling, Stunner Flies, and a few unrevealed abilities.
Fixed issues with attacks that slow the enemy down erroneously immobilizing them, as well as knockback not being applied when it should be.
Shorter characters now use a higher attack origin for Volley attacks, so they don't collide immediately with the terrain when the Kinfolk is on uneven ground.
We changed how Shovlet avoids collisions with other characters when using Dig, preventing Shovlet from becoming permanently immune.
Thanks for checking in! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on September 8.
