Progress
The Alpha arenas are officially on their way to the Beta! We’re able to replicate the exact placement of objects within the arena bounds, so Alpha veterans will feel quite at home in these arenas. While we want the layouts to feel familiar, we’re also excited about this chance to update the look of the terrain. We’ve planned out where to place the arenas within the game’s overworld, meaning 1) you’ll be able to find these spots while exploring in the open world, and 2) some of the distant landscapes in the Beta will be different from those in the Alpha arenas. Here’s a quick look at the Forest arena after about a day of putting it together (meaning it’s very much a work in progress):
In the Alpha, gameplay was mostly restricted to a single game mode aside from the occasional April Fools’ event. This is something we’re planning to expand with the Beta. More infrastructure is being built for the unrevealed game mode we mentioned last month. For ease of reference, we’ll be calling this game mode “Red Letter mode.” Initial setup is underway for things like entering and exiting this new game mode, mode-specific UI, and spawning characters.
Now that we have a lot of the basics set up for multiplayer, we’re fixing up oddities that were flagged as a part of initial QA testing. We’ve found things like the guest player using unintended animations, human characters’ appearances not being synchronized across clients, both players seeing the menu any time one person pulls it up, etc.
It took some elbow grease to make the lighting updates from the last newsletter cooperate with other changes we’ve recently added in multiplayer. The new lighting was somehow turning the water all kinds of colors until we fixed it earlier today. This fix not only has our water looking better than ever, but has sanctimoniously fixed a completely separate long-standing bug! Gotta love a happy accident.
We’ve made some updates to the rigging for hair and clothing. We adjusted the rigging on the hair to make it easier for certain hairstyles to move realistically (ex. long hair should behave more naturally and shouldn’t pass through the character’s shoulders as easily).
Our QA team is continuing to make automated tests and use the single player portion of the game to manually test their tests. (Can’t tell if the auto tester is getting it right unless you also test it yourself the first time around, right?) The devs have continued to fix bugs and build out new functionality for the test maker.
We’ve been going after bugs related to Kinfolk stat modifiers, as well as shrines not working in the single player (found as part of testing QA’s automated tests).
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).
Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
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.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on March 22.
