Progress

The Beta needs to look its best, so we’ve upgraded our lighting and post-FX systems! It’s a far cry from the Alpha visuals now, and we’re pretty excited about the changes and the new depth and variety they bring to the lighting, especially in the distance. On top of the visual improvements, the new version of this system is much easier to work with in engine. We’re still making adjustments and trying to find the best way to keep the environment’s visual style consistent with the characters. Sometimes it can be tricky to get cel shaded characters to look at home in a non-cel shaded environment, especially across various types of lighting (ex. different times of day, weather, indoors vs. outdoors). Here’s a video with some before/after shots showing our current progress.

Multiplayer is improving by the day! We’re making good progress on verifying that important fundamentals are working as expected after being brought into the new project. Ensuring a Kinfolk is in the same spot and firing the same abilities on both players’ computers isn’t something you want to regress on. At the moment, multiplayer is functioning a bit like an early version of co-op, so we’re also dealing with some issues related to the human player and summoning as well.
This week we hooked the Beta project up to the account system so players will be able to join the same way they did for the Combat Arena Alpha.
We’ve solidified our plans for how to go about bringing the old Alpha arenas into the Beta. There are a few more pieces that need to be in place before we can start in earnest, but it’s on the horizon.
Our QA testers have been playing together to look for bugs in the multiplayer, which has been an exciting change of pace. While waiting for new bug fixes, they’re continuing to familiarize themselves with the tool for creating automated tests.
We’ve fixed some surprising bugs that have likely come as part of bringing code over from the old Combat Arena Alpha project. For example, the human player was using fireball when they were supposed to be summoning their Kinfolk!

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).
Post-FX: Changes made to the game’s appearance after everything has been rendered. Sometimes similar to a filter you could put on a photo or video.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.

Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on March 8.