Progress
Babe wake up, new movement tech just dropped.
One thing that’s always been clear is that melee-focused characters frequently struggle to close the gap against ranged opponents. We’ve made a number of changes to help address this so far, but the latest is lunging. Now, activating any melee attack within a short window after jumping will cause your character to jump forward while using the attack. This addition helps to extend the effective range of melee characters and has generally improved the feel of combat overall.
A few important things to note: This isn’t some frame perfect input that only the best players will be able to execute. The move can be easily executed by anyone, and more importantly, it’s consistent. You can also influence how high and how far your character travels by adjusting how quickly you press the attack button after jumping.
Over time, the game’s “Time to Kill” (or TTK) has gradually gotten shorter and shorter. Changes like new active and passive abilities, varying Kinfolk levels, EVs and IVs, and regular balance adjustments have all contributed to Kinfolk generally hitting harder, and taking fewer hits on average before they go down. This is especially noticeable at lower levels where a difference of 2 or 3 damage points has far greater impact.
In the Combat Arena Alpha, we restricted all Kinfolk to level 50 and used that as a benchmark for finding the right pace for combat. We settled on a pace where, given an even matchup, players would trade blows in a healthy back and forth- anticipating their opponent’s next attack, dodging, shielding, and swapping between party members to continue the fight. It’s very important to us that we keep that same feeling going into the Combat Arena Beta.
So with all that in mind, we took some time to carefully readjust the game’s damage calculation, bringing the TTK back in line with where it was previously. At level 50, the pace feels right back where it should be. At level 6 the pace is slightly slower, but in a way that we’ve seen is helpful for brand new players trying to get a feel for combat. It’s a stark difference from before the change, where 1v1s at that level would regularly end in 2 or 3 seconds after only a few basic attacks, or in 1 Firespin against an Air type.
The accuracy of projectile paths has been greatly improved. Projectile aim was sometimes being skewed a bit off course if the path intersected with a character in certain cases. This was less noticeable in open areas, but became more apparent in confined spaces. We also recently uncovered an issue that had been lying dormant since the early days of the Combat Arena Alpha. Instead of firing the projectile where the player is currently aiming, it was causing them to be fired in the direction they were aiming at a whole 8 frames in the past. These attacks feel much more responsive after the fix. In addition, we raised the default camera position for several Kinfolk, particularly the shorter ones with lots of ranged attacks like Kodoki and Awburn. This has made aiming with these characters more comfortable in general and helps keep the grass out of their view.
NPCs have a few new tricks for closing the gap between themselves and the player now. Melee focused NPCs used to really struggle at hitting players who strafed in circles around them, but now they predict player movements more effectively, running ahead to cut them off. Additionally, some melee NPCs can perform the new lunging jump attacks to increase their melee range.
A new process has been implemented that makes it significantly easier for the design team to designate various locations in the overworld as new playable arenas.
Sneaking has been re-enabled, with modifications to if and how NPCs are able to see the player while they are attempting to avoid detection. Players now have three visibility levels: regular, sneaking, and sneaking in tall grass. These visibility levels each affect the distances at which NPCs can see or hear you.
We are exploring animation masking to allow players to perform certain actions while crouched. We can essentially take the lower body portion of the crouching animation and combine it with the upper body portion of other animations, which would enable players to throw objects or summon Kinfolk while sneaking. It’s working to a degree already, but looks a bit funny with some animations at the moment.
Several big improvements were made to our animation and rigging pipeline. Exporting animations from Maya with all the correct settings that are specific to our project can now be done in one click. This is pretty significant on its own, as even a small mistake like forgetting to check a box used to require re-exporting an entire animation set. Additionally, we can now add complex controls with a single click and ensure those controls match up with their intended positions on existing character rigs, saving hours of work on each character.
A bug has been fixed that caused the lock-on camera to spin rapidly when the target was very close to the player. We also resolved an issue where Quicksand would only pull one entity toward the center, despite being an ability that should pull anyone within its AOE. You can see the final results here!
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Maya: Software for creating in-game models and animations.
NPC: A non-player character.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on June 14.
