DESIGN
Kinfolk are now able to use group behaviors. This means when the player interacts with a single NPC in certain ways, it can affect an entire group of NPCs. For example, if the player damages an NPC, surrounding NPCs may become angry and also start fighting the player. Here’s a quick preview of the concept (shown on an isolated terrain tile, hence the odd background):
A major focus this sprint has been adding more unique combat encounters to the overworld. Most of the battles we’re focusing on deal with fighting other summoners, so we’ve made lots of improvements to how summoner NPCs work. In some cases, combat is only one of the possible outcomes of the encounter.
Our cut scenes received more touch ups to their animations and lighting. As we’ve been making small tweaks to fix these animations, sometimes they lead to other animations breaking in more noticeable ways. That’s always fun. Thankfully, most of these have also been fixed.
We performed an extensive spell check on NPC dialogue and wrote a few new conversations as well. Some NPCs’ dialogue will intertwine in unexpected ways. Small choices can make differences that will surprise you. We also updated many of the soul flame messages to be even more heartbreaking. Writing them nonstop for the large part of a day was… not easy.
We implemented more SFX for various items like beds, money pickups, and various abilities. Once implemented, we also spent a lot of time balancing the new sounds. There are still a few abilities that need touching up, but we’re making good progress there.
We got the elderly animations working for our older human NPCs! It suits their personalities so much better and adds more variety to the people you see walking around town.
We’ve done a balancing pass on the prices for certain in-game items in our shops throughout the game. They were somewhat out of hand. (If we can’t control inflation in the real world, at least we can do something about it here…)
Development
We’ve adjusted how far an aggressive Kinfolk will chase you while you’re running away from them. They used to be a bit too relentless, and we don’t want to excessively punish players for choosing to avoid a fight.
We’ve made it so the player can interrupt their character’s attack animations with movement inputs. Many of our attacks had long endings to their animations where the player would be stuck animating after the attack was finished. With our new changes, the character is able to transition back into running animations sooner. This gives us more flexibility with longer animations and has a big impact on combat feel. Also, it helped fix foot sliding in many cases.
We made some slight modifications to how our saving and reloading works in the editor. Now it allows developers to easily load small portions of the world for rapid testing without having to change a bunch of settings beforehand.
Some of our more interesting bug fixes: characters stuck in their shield animation, the player losing their glass locket (an important key item), NPCs falling through the terrain and disappearing, and evolution spawning two of the evolved Kinfolk. And soft locks. So many soft locks.
So, we finally checked. The Phantom likelihood was set to 1/400, not the intended 1/8000. Sorry to the aspiring Phantom hunters, but we’re fixing it. It was really fun for the devs while it lasted and we’re looking forward to (eventually) finding another Phantom with the proper odds.
As the holidays roll around, many of us will be taking some time off. With that in mind, our next newsletter will be on January 12. Thanks for sticking with us, and happy holidays!
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.
Clipping: When objects in the game intersect in unintended ways.
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 work here before their changes are added to a build.
Framerate: The number of frames that play per second, determining the smoothness of motion.
Foot sliding: When a character’s movement animation doesn’t match the speed with which the character moves across a surface. This can often result in an “ice skating” effect.
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.
Key Items: Unique items the player only obtains once and keeps for the rest of the game. They often play an important role in progressing through the game.
Logic: The programming side of any feature. For example, “cooking logic” would be the base level programming for the cooking mechanic.
Movement input: Pressing a button that causes a character to move in a certain direction. (For example, using the WASD keys on your keyboard are often for movement inputs.)
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.
World building: The process of constructing a world, originally an imaginary one, ofren associated with a fictional universe.
xNode: The software we use for handling our dialogue implementation.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on January 12.
