Progress
With action combat being a core pillar of Kindred Fates, and especially for the upcoming Combat Arena Beta, we want combat to feel better than ever. We gave a lot of careful attention this sprint to planning out the specific feature improvements and polish needed to make the feel of combat really shine. A few of these improvements include:
Adding some amount of forward motion to any melee attacks that currently have none, and maintaining a bit of momentum when using melee attacks while running. This prevents you from feeling stuck in place while using melee attacks, and helps combat feel more fluid.
Adding a feature that’s often called “hit stop” or “hit pause” to a lot more of our melee abilities. Hit stop is a feature that very very briefly pauses a character’s attack animation right at the moment they damage a target. This makes hits feel more chunky and satisfying.
Adding a very small amount of camera shake to more abilities when you hit a target. This further helps make hits feel more weighty and satisfying, but keeping the effect subtle is key! It’s easy to overdo screen shake and when that happens it’s more disorientating than it is satisfying.
Adding the concept of “super armor“ to certain abilities. While using an ability that has super armor, your Kinfolk cannot be staggered, stunned, feared, pulled, knocked back, or knocked up during that ability’s attack animation.
Bigger and brighter impact VFX on attacks that need it. Some of our impact VFX are a little underwhelming, which in turn makes hits feel less impactful than they really should.
A whole host of tweaks to AI combat behavior to keep NPCs challenging, while making their attacks more react-able.
A lot of these combat feel improvements fall under the old adage of “if you’ve done it right, they won’t notice you’ve done anything at all.” Basically, when it’s there it feels good and you don’t think about it. When it’s not, you notice that it feels bad but it can be hard to put your finger on why. We’re looking forward to implementing these improvements and more in the near future!
But it hasn’t been all planning! A good number of improvements have already been made and are having a big impact on the game’s feel. Here are some of the more interesting changes:
Combo abilities like Swipes now allow you to aim each individual hit, instead of locking you into the rotation of the first swipe.
More melee abilities allow the player to aim for the entire duration of the animation leading up to the ability firing, instead of locking the character into the initial camera aim when the ability key was first pressed.
The melee lock-on camera follows moving targets more smoothly, and aims slightly downwards when the target is very close, making it easier to gauge melee distance and preventing dizziness when rotating around nearby targets.
Shielding and jumping inputs are more responsive.
We have been exploring the idea of adding more "wow" factor to our abilities, and having more interesting projectile movements. We now have a way to treat the spawning and movement of ranged projectiles more like a particle system, which allows for some interesting variations on ranged projectile behaviors. It’s too soon to say how many of these abilities will make their way into the Beta, but at very least they should make for some cool boss fights in the future! Here are a few experimental examples of this type of attack. Keep in mind these visuals are not final.
We’re continuing to make solid progress on our revamp of multiplayer, with critical stability improvements and bug fixes being at the forefront of our efforts. Development is in a kind of loop where we need to make a bunch of fixes, then wait 30 minutes to an hour for the new version to finish baking- then make a bunch more fixes and wait 30 minutes to an hour again. This type of work is a slow grind, but today we think we may have found a solution to the cause of many of these headaches. We’re still working through the kinks and verifying that the fix is actually working and not just a one-off exception or fluke. We’re expecting to know for sure sometime this weekend, and hopefully have multiplayer behaving significantly more reliably by Monday. Sometimes game dev is building new things to make the game fun, and sometimes it’s squashing bugs to make the game run. These past two weeks have been a lot more of the latter.
Other important fixes include:
A bug where Kinfolk wouldn't rotate completely toward their target when firing abilities with the lock-on camera active.
A bug where the "Unaware" passive would trigger its visual effects every time the user hit an enemy. Now, it only triggers when it correctly ignores an enemy's stat boosts.
Final models and textures for one of the Beta’s major set pieces have recently been completed, and we’re especially happy with how it turned out! It’s one of the tallest set pieces we’ve created for Kindred Fates so far and it looks just as good off in the distance as it does close up. While this set piece will be included in the Beta, some of its most notable features will be saved for later.
We wrote a lot of camp dialogue for standard conversations, including comments on your surroundings, the human’s well-being, how they’re feeling, and more. We also added more lines for the final words cutscenes.
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.
NPC: A non-player character.
Set piece: A model used in the environment, such as buildings, statues, etc.
Sprint: A two week period used for organization. Our newsletters are released on the last day of our sprint.
Texture: A 2D image that’s applied to a 3D model to give it color and shading.
VFX: Visual effects. Kinfolk attacks, dust clouds, water splashes are all examples of VFX.
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on July 12.
