Progress
When you completely run out of time to retrieve your Kinfolk’s soul flame, a brief cutscene now plays where they speak their final words. Long-time fans will find it reminiscent of the old Final Hope Message trailer. This gives your fallen party members the proper sendoff they deserve. We’ve written 60+ unique possibilities for the dialogue in this cutscene, so far. There are several factors that impact what a Kinfolk chooses to say in these moments, with one of the most notable being your Bond level with them.
During your playthrough, we expect that you’ll lose multiple Kinfolk. However, you’ll likely never see the vast majority of dialogue possibilities. A large part of the reason why we’re writing so many variations is to help ensure that when you do lose someone, it feels meaningful. Losing a Kinfolk you’ve grown close to is a very emotional experience, and we’re definitely leaning into that here. Below you can see a comparison of the graphics for the original Final Hope Message video and the cutscene you can expect in the game:
Jumping has been given some needed TLC. We fixed issues where it wasn’t costing stamina properly, and could send the character in odd directions if they weren’t on solid ground. Previously we had also introduced a .15 second delay to the upwards velocity of jumping, but now it’s closer to being instant again.
We added the concept of "Coyote Time" to our character controller. Coyote Time is a term in game development for a small window of time in which the player is still able to jump after they have already walked off the edge of a platform. This improves the feel of platforming when the player is often jumping off the very edge of platforms, and ensures that their character always jumps when the player intends to jump.
We removed an inconsistent delay at the start of shielding, so now it activates sooner and feels more responsive. We also fixed a bug where the cost of holding shield was not framerate-independent, meaning that if Player A ran the game at 30 fps and Player B ran the game at 60 fps, and both started holding shield at the same time, Player B’s shield would run out twice as quickly.
During playtesting we noticed that it was very easy to accidentally use all of your stamina when sprinting, which resulted in characters often becoming fatigued. To help improve the feel of sprinting, we added a visual indicator where the stamina bar turns orange as you sprint while under 30% stamina. We also made some adjustments to the stamina costs of sprinting to give the player a bit more time to cancel sprinting before the character becomes fatigued. Reminder: The "fatigued" state happens when a character reaches zero stamina, and characters cannot jump, dodge, or sprint in this state. You can see our old preview of the fatigued state here!
On the multiplayer side, we are making tons of improvements and additions to our current systems. A lot of our work has gone to reducing the time it takes to test these features, and we're better than ever in that department. We can now test multiplayer without having to load the full world, which saves a ton of time when you're just interested in hopping in and trying a quick battle.
Account system v2 is in the works! We're hoping to roll that out in the next few weeks in a smooth fashion (i.e. your experience using the account system on the website, checking inventories, etc. should be unchanged). The new account system has major benefits for player data and synchronization around the world. The major improvements are going to fix issues that you may remember from the Alpha, such as:
Seeing that you won, and your opponent also sees that they won
The system says it awarded points for the leaderboard, but neither player’s score changes
Not showing your end of match summary
The new system will be a lot more reliable and capable of showing more stats about your match. In the future, we also expect it to be able to show cool similar data for single player games. We're really excited about what this will allow us to do, and we'll probably show more in future newsletters as we continue work on it.
We fixed several bugs related to Kinfolk that are set to follow the player not obeying the current state of the player's team. For example, when you set up camp, there might be two of that Kinfolk— one follower, and one sitting at camp. They would also continue to follow after they died or you moved them into a storage box. Now your Kinfolk should only follow you when instructed. (We saw some discussion in the community about this after we updated the progress board— there might be more here later, as we’re taking some ideas into consideration.)
Just a short note about the post we made at the end of last year: All of our efforts are still being directed entirely toward either work on the Beta or securing a publisher. This is still the case. As soon as anything changes, we’ll be sure to let you know. Thank you for your patience!
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Framerate: The number of frames that play per second, determining the smoothness of motion.
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on June 28.
