Art / Design
We’ve completed some new outfits for child characters! These are the more formal clothing options for children, with a variety of color choices. Here’s the model preview with standard colors (note that they will look different in-engine due to lighting and material shaders).
We’ve polished Tadalon’s animations for Bounce and Tidemark, and added VFX for North_Star. We also improved the rigging and shading for Avieon so their wings don’t clip through each other as much. Many Kinfolk have been given new animations for specific cut scenes.
The human NPCs have a newly-adjusted array of colors. This has been a balancing act, and we’ve finally reached a good point! A few months ago the colors were too light and washed out, and then we had the opposite problem after switching to the new shader.
Concept art has been completed for a new set piece that will be featured in multiple biomes across the overworld. We think this point of interest will add a unique touch to our world building.
A major set piece model is in its final stages, and we’re preparing to implement it in its first of many locations in the overworld. (Thank goodness, since the greybox version was getting stale!) We also adjusted the wind speed settings to improve the appearance of the trees when they move in the breeze. Previously, it looked like they were shivering!
New VFX have been created for multiple abilities, on top of the improvements we made to existing VFX like the fountain we showed earlier this week. We also have a lot of new SFX in progress for cut scene sequences, Restless soul flames, and new abilities.
Many cut scenes are currently in progress, and a few are fully implemented. We experimented with a different method of switching cameras between shots that had the potential to save time and complexity, but found that our current method is more reliable. Some scenes need to be stitched together with others, which can be surprisingly complicated! The fully realized scenes are looking epic, which is especially satisfying after working on them for so long.
We’ve added new dialogue for some townsfolk in a particular situation if you revisit their town. We also finalized some important dialogue for a cutscene that has needed fleshed out after being in the concept phase for a long time, and it came together surprisingly quickly! It’s going to be a big moment in the story.
We wanted to give you a heads up that our upcoming newsletters will be lighter on new art and features as we get deeper into the polishing process for our internal milestone. The team is working as hard as ever (if not even harder) to make progress, but the changes we make tend to get less interesting to read about as we hone in on this milestone. On top of that, a lot of the more interesting changes involve story details we don’t want to spoil before you get to play the game for yourself. We apologize in advance, and thank you for understanding!
Development / Combat
We’ve added functionality that keeps the player from wandering too far outside of a tutorial area. An NPC can call out to them, and the player automatically runs back inside the area. We also needed to add a command to turn this off for testing purposes, since it got in QA’s way pretty quickly!
We’ve spent a lot of time this sprint improving xNode’s ability to consistently synchronize our dialogue with animations, audio, and camera movements regardless of frame rate. While challenging, this has made it significantly easier to perfect the timing in cut scenes, since many of them require meticulous synchronization between all these elements to leave the right impact.
One of our boss fights got lots of tuning up this sprint! The enemy’s movement during an attack animation had a few bugs that needed addressed, and some of their abilities are harder to dodge now.
New logic has been added for one of the rare instances in the game that allows you to restart a scripted combat sequence. We’ve also improved logic for specific NPCs and who they can (and more importantly, cannot) attack.
Our devs have made some helpful new commands for testing newer game features. Some of the noteworthy bugs this sprint were fixing Tadalon’s dash, hiding the party UI during certain scenes, and NPC summoners disappearing when their Kinfolk are out.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on October 20.
