Progress
Recently our primary focus has been on making optimization improvements to the game’s multiplayer connection quality, including for lower end computers. One way we track our progress with these improvements is by monitoring the game’s framerate when two players are connected and playing together. If the frame rate is too low, it can have an even bigger impact on connection quality than ping. Over the course of the last two weeks we’ve seen frame rates increase from an average of 24 frames per second to 83 frames per second on some of our test machines. The demo below was recorded on higher end machines with a good internet connection.
The start of this sprint was largely devoted to finishing up the slate of combat and quality of life improvements we’ve been working on for the past few weeks.
After firing the last charge of a basic ranged attack, the ability will now go on cooldown for a short time before refreshing all of the charges.
We have greatly improved the quality of our camera shake. Now the shakes are much more compact and do not accidentally move the camera off-center, or cause an abrupt snap back near the end of the shake.
We added smooth camera transitions for summoning and recalling Kinfolk. This makes the transition between playing as a human and playing as a Kinfolk much smoother. You can take a sneak peak on Twitter!
When you stagger an NPC as they’re starting an attack, they will now attempt to fire that ability again after the stagger animation ends. If the NPC is continuously stagger locked, they may attempt to dodge away or try a different ability. Previously, NPCs had a tendency to stand still like a punching bag if they were staggered frequently enough.
The ability bar UI is getting a makeover! In general, there’s a lot more visual feedback, making it easier to tell at a glance what’s going on with your Kinfolk’s abilities.
Ability slots briefly animate and flash white when their key is pressed. Ability slots that just came off cooldown also play a small VFX. You can see these changes in our Twitter post from this week.
Ability slots that are disabled or on cooldown play an error animation and flash red when their input is pressed while still on cooldown.
Combo abilities like swipes display a white version of the cooldown bar to visualize time remaining between combo hits before the combo is automatically ended and put on its full cooldown.
If an ability is currently being aimed, or if the ability can be reactivated to cause a secondary effect, its ability slot will now pulse white.
Bug fixes:
Our water had a pretty noticeable but low priority visual glitch for some time that is now fixed. We were under the impression it was related to the upgrades to our lighting system, and that it would take some digging to figure out, but thankfully it ended up being a simple fix!
We fixed issues with characters occasionally locking up after using a dash attack, as well as a bug where tutorial popups could lock up the player.
We fixed several errors that would occur if the player swapped Kinfolk while an ability was active.
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Framerate: The number of frames that play per second, determining the smoothness of motion.
NPC: A non-player character.
Optimization: Making the code run more efficiently, so it takes less processing power to achieve the same effect.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.
Sprint: A two week period used for organization. Our newsletters are released on the last day of our sprint.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.
VFX: Visual effects. Kinfolk attacks, dust clouds, water splashes are all examples of VFX.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on August 23.
