DESIGN
We’ve got the squad running in formation! With this, we can have a group of characters that walk in a specific shape. It won’t be used for every wild Kinfolk herd, but we do have a few specific applications in mind. This is also helpful if we want groups of characters to stick together while walking on winding paths. Here’s a proof of concept video with a herd of Lumala using this logic and making some sharp turns.
In the last newsletter we were focusing on adding one large and complex point of interest. With that area mostly wrapped up, we focused on adding lots of simpler points of interest that can be interacted with in a number of ways. The area we’ve been working on is in a decent state, but we’re planning to add a bit more to improve variety.
This week, we’ve made tons of progress on mixing our SFX and music for cutscenes and other important story moments. Some of this has involved writing entirely new tracks, as well as reincorporating and remixing some that we use elsewhere. This was the final piece we needed to add for most of these scenes, and it’s a treat to see them so close to their final form. Having that last puzzle piece in place really made a world of difference.
The town we’ve been working on has been in fairly good shape, but we found a few more improvements to make! We added some new characters, and updated our townsfolk to walk around more instead of standing in one place for as long. We also made it easier to make them look a specific direction, and gave them the ability to pivot their whole body towards you while in a conversation. These changes helped the town to not only feel more lively, but made the individual interactions more immersive as well.
Previously, the character creator’s randomize function wasn’t properly randomizing a few facial features. (For some reason it really liked the red eye color? Very weird. Not at all unsettling.) We fixed this and are now seeing much more variety in the characters as a result.
Our tutorials have been seriously spruced up! They now use up to date pictures, are triggered at much more appropriate times, and keep the flow of gameplay going much smoother than before. It makes a huge difference when starting up the game for the first time.
Development
We’ve polished up the combat AI for NPCs in the story. One focus was on making NPCs more reactive to the player. They are now better at dodging and blocking player attacks, and may modify their behaviors based on active abilities in the world.
We revamped our world loading system to improve frame rates. Now instead of needing 9 huge chunks of terrain loaded at all times around the player, we can just load 1 or 2 occasionally, greatly saving resources without reducing visual fidelity.
Enemy NPCs now have the ability to show a "Warning Indicator" before firing a powerful ability. This indicator is a useful way to give players visual feedback for incoming attacks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to dodge or block.
Some characters’ walking animations weren’t blending well into their standing still animation. When using a controller and pushing forward slightly on the stick to move slowly, the character would just slowly slide along the ground. After a few improvements, small movements with the control stick now have a minimum threshold, preventing sliding and making sure the animations look good when moving slowly.
We’ve added some super-sized world bosses that need special accommodations. Namely, when scaling a character to much larger sizes than normal, that character's animation needs to be slowed down to fit the larger size, or else the animation will have a lot of foot sliding.
(Interestingly, a good rule of thumb is slowing the animation speed by the square root of the new size of the character, divided by the original size. …Okay, who let the software developer into the writers’ room again? We talked about this, they can reach through the bars, you have to use both locks. Sorry about that. Basically, the bigger the guy, the slower he goes.)We’re very close to finishing the internal milestone we’ve been focused on for the past few months. We passed a critical benchmark for it today, and are looking forward to having it complete soon. We’re working really hard on tons of stuff we’re not able to talk about in detail, and it’s coming together beautifully.
Phantom update: We’ve run into, no joke, 3 more naturally occurring Phantom Kinfolk while testing: A Lumala, a Shovlet, and a Kodoki! Hopefully this is just a crazy lucky streak, but we’re also considering adjusting the spawn rates if this keeps up. The current likelihood is supposed to be roughly 1/8000, so it’s kinda sus at this point.
LEXICON
Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Editor: (aka Unity Editor) The program developers use to make changes to the game. Developers can test their changes here before their changes are added to a build.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
Headlook: Code that tells an NPC to look in a specific direction.
Logic: The programming side of any feature. For example, “cooking logic” would be the base level programming for the cooking mechanic.
NPC: A non-player character.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Phantom: A rare Kinfolk with a different color scheme.
Point of interest: An area given special care and attention, intended to draw the player’s interest. An abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods filled with strange notes would be a point of interest.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
SFX: Sound effects.
Set piece: A model used in the environment, such as buildings, statues, etc.
Shader: An effect that changes how things visually appear in the game. Shaders can do many things to alter overall appearances.
Soft lock: A situation where the game becomes impossible to progress due to a bug, glitch, or flawed logic.
Spawner: Code that spawns Kinfolk or NPC Summoners into the world. We can give them a multitude of settings to spawn based on time passed, or enemies defeated, etc.
Sprint: A two week period used for organization. Our newsletters are released on the last day of our sprint.
Summoner: The people in Hinterlock who can summon Kinfolk.
Texture: A 2D image that’s applied to a 3D model to give it color and shading.
Tiling: A noticeable repeating pattern on a model or terrain due to using a texture to cover a large area.
Tooling: Dev tools that help improve efficiency.
VFX: Visual effects. Kinfolk attacks, dust clouds, water splashes are all examples of VFX.
xNode: The software we use for handling our dialogue implementation.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on December 1.
