PROGRESS
We’ve resolved several major issues/shortcomings with the “Arena Boxes” feature, and have since renamed it to “Team Loadouts” to better communicate how this feature is used. Now Loadouts function much more like what our Combat Arena players are used to. For those who aren’t familiar, Team Loadouts allow you to create presets of Kinfolk teams with set abilities and held items. They now also have the advantage of allowing a single Kinfolk to appear in multiple different loadouts at the same time. For example, you can have a single Awburn exist in an "Offensive" loadout, and have that same Awburn exist in a "Sustain" loadout, which wasn’t possible with the old Arena Boxes. Each of those loadouts could also have Awburn using different abilities and held items. Loadouts should give players more flexibility in team building and promote experimentation with different team compositions and abilities. Players can also name their loadouts whatever they want.
Our main focus continues to be the remaining features and bug fixes necessary for the next Alpha update. We're very close to releasing, with essentially just bug fixes to our new account system remaining before we can release. Our current rough estimate is that the update will be ready next week.
We made several improvements to interaction prompts. These appear whenever the player approaches an object they can interact with. Previously this featured had fairly limited controller support, but it now supports a much wider array of controller types as well as mouse and keyboard.
We’ve re-implemented regional matchmaking! If there have been more than 3 matches recently, players now automatically send a list of the servers near them with the lowest ping when queuing up for matchmaking. The matchmaking algorithm then uses this to match people regionally.
We re-enabled saving/loading in the Combat Arena Alpha (we had previously disabled it while working out multiplayer matchmaking). Saving/loading works with the new team loadouts, and we fixed a recent regression where some characters were not working with save and load.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed an issue where the remote player's attacks did not respect the maximum firing distance of abilities on the server. This meant the remote player could fire Scorch and Explosion at 100+ meters.
Fixed default usernames that are used for testing UI occasionally appearing during multiplayer matches.
Fixed host's name overwriting both players’ usernames in multiplayer matches.
Fixed dash abilities sometimes locking up the character when used directly after another dash ability.
Fixed a bug that caused the frame rate to drop to roughly half of what it would ordinarily be after rebooting on some computer setups.
Community
Kindred Fates is coming to GalaxyCon Columbus December 6-8 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center! Like previous events we’ve attended, you can talk with the devs about the game, enter a raffle for a free plushie, and play an early version of the upcoming Combat Arena Beta with us! During the show, the Combat Arena Alpha will also be on sale again at a significant discount.
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
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.
Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server.
Remote Client: (aka Remote Player) Any player whose data is being networked across the server to simulate a character's actions. In P2P multiplayer, this is the opposite of the host.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on December 13.
