PROGRESS
We’re in the final stretch of preparing for the Beta release (which comes out on April 26!), so we’ve been working on scrubbing the floors, polishing the candlesticks, and dusting the shelves for your arrival!
Bug Fixes: This took up the majority of the month, since we want Beta to be a fairly polished experience. These were mostly related to newly explorable areas, NPCs, cooking, inventory UI, gatherables, capturing Kinfolk, Kinfolk evolution, saving and loading, asset management, and cutscenes. We won’t bore you with a full list, but here are some highlights:
When the player character blacks out, there’s no longer an option to respawn at a shrine further away than the bounds of the observable universe!
Removed an exploit that would allow for Kinfolk duplication as well as attaching one to your cursor in the box menu.
Ensured that the player character always spawns with the default outfit (for now) to avoid situations where it might spawn in naked.
Gameplay Improvements:
Improved our inventory UI to provide a smoother experience when using items on Kinfolk. Item effects or lack thereof can now be previewed on hover, and then the item may be used with a single click.
Improved our item quick use bar to support access to every inventory tab. The player can now cycle vertically through different inventory tabs and horizontally through items of that category. This allows the human character to use any item in their inventory without having to open the inventory UI, and even allows the human character to quickly use items in battle.
Improved how "impactful" abilities feel by polishing effects like camera shake.
Polished one of the Beta Kinfolk as a playable character which uses a few new abilities.
PVP players will be happy to hear that control inputs have improved yet again! The server now assumes that a button is currently held if the button has been pressed more times than it has been released. Previously we networked every frame that a button was held, and this was prone to input errors if a single frame was dropped and the server thought the button was no longer being held down. By only tracking the more reliable press and release events, held inputs can be communicated much more reliably. Said simply, holding down buttons should be more reliable now.
Controller Support:
Added better controller support for the item quick use bar. The player can now hold L2 to activate the menu and navigate with the D-pad.
Added controller support to almost all the remaining UI in the game. This includes the help menu, NPC shops, and the cooking UI.
Added controller support to all of our tutorial popups. Any tutorial images that display button inputs now update the button image to show controller buttons if the player is using a Dualshock or Xbox controller, or they show keyboard keys if the player is using keyboard and mouse. Tutorials were the final area of the game where controller input display didn’t update automatically, so it’s nice to finally have this in!
Single Player:
Created final art for a puzzle that can be found in one of the small exploration areas.
Improved the flow of the tutorial with a new area, including encounterable Kinfolk, gatherables, and pickup items.
Added two new short cutscenes to the new tutorial area to help guide the player through the introduction.
Walking to the edge of the campsite location (where players currently begin when playing the Alpha) now allows players to travel to one of two small explorable areas.
Worked on adding several Kinfolk spawners to areas of the map that previously had none, and fine-tuned some of the existing spawners in other areas.
Added a new NPC to the campsite that the player can interact with and purchase items from.
Refined the different configurations of Kinfolk that it’s possible for bandits to have, and removed non-Beta Kinfolk from the pool.
Many of our points of interest in the world were using placeholder art, but we’ve been working on replacing all of this with new final artwork (greyboxes begone!). As an example of this, we’d like to show you an interaction with a bandit camp. Keep in mind this is work in progress, as keen-eyed viewers will be able to notice a few remaining bugs.
Up next (other than bug fixes), we need to work on reimplementing character customization, reimplementing Red Letter Mode, implementing the new arenas, and thoroughly testing these and the mission related to Red Letter Mode.
This is the last newsletter before Beta comes out on April 26! However, we will be making another post like this when Beta drops, detailing how to access your key and going over what the Beta contains. We’re excited to see you then!
Community
We had a lot of fun making this video for April Fool’s! Check it out here.
We recently asked fans on our Discord server and Bluesky for their opinion on what we should name the Kinfolk shown in the last newsletter, codename Briar_Heart. We’ve narrowed our favorite options down to Bryroar, Brihorn, and Veratops. What do you think of these? Feel free to suggest alternatives as well!
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Point of interest: An area given special care and attention, intended to draw the player’s interest. An abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods filled with strange notes would be a point of interest.
Red Letter mode: The codename for an unrevealed game mode to be included in the Combat Arena Beta.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on May 2. (By then players will have finally had a taste of single player gameplay. What a beautiful thought that is. <3)
