Progress
Like our other recent newsletters, we’re working on mostly non-visual tasks at the moment. With that in mind, we’d like to share some of the new abilities we’ve been working on over the past several months that are likely to be featured in the Beta!
Aqua Launcher:
The user launches a series of fast moving blasts of water. If all three hit the same entity the user's cooldowns are refreshed, and they gain a small boost to their movement speed for 3 seconds.If used in snowy weather, this attack deals Physical damage instead of Special damage.
Confusion:
The user emits a strange wave of energy in a target direction. Entities hit by this wave have their inputs inverted for a short duration.
Burn Bane:
(Passive ability) If the user strikes a burned target with a fire attack, the burn is cured and the target becomes stunned for 1 second.
(Awburn used for demonstration. This is not Awburn’s usual passive ability.)
We’re making good progress on the revamp of multiplayer functionality. A large part of this effort involves moving the multiplayer side of the game over to our single-player Unity environment. It’s now possible for two players to join a world together and move around in this new environment, but there’s still plenty left to do. We’re currently working on synchronizing the clothes and Kinfolk teams for each player.
As part of this, we’ve made it so the all the necessary terrain tiles are loaded while the game is hosting multiple characters. Previously, we only had to show the terrain that one player could see at a given time. Now our world streaming can accommodate multiple players looking in different directions.
Now that we have easy-to-use tools for making automated tests, our QA testers can create and run these with far less assistance from developers. While the devs are building out larger features there is less manual testing needed than usual. We’re using this as an opportunity for QA to create a strong base of automated tests that can be deployed alongside manual testing.
We’ve started planning a new game mode and its related mechanics that we plan to include in the Beta. A few months ago we did some preliminary work and got it to a roughly playable state, but we need to work out more of the logistics before it can be added. It’s something we’ve seen fans express interest in and that we’ve been looking forward to for a while!
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Automated tests: Tests that are programmed to run automatically whenever a new build is made. Reduces the need to manually test features repetitively (ex. making sure every ability works as intended for every character).
Build: A playable version of the game. We usually create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.
World Streaming: The process of breaking up large terrain into smaller tiles that can be unloaded if they aren’t visible from the player’s current perspective. Reduces processing power needed to run the game.
Thanks for checking in on us! See you for our next newsletter on February 23.
