Happy new year! From now on we’ll be posting newsletters on the final Friday of every month instead of the first Friday, that way they can encompass the entire month. Apologies that we didn’t mention that in the previous newsletter before making the change!
Progress
Our latest build of the Combat Arena Beta is in the late stages of testing! Earlier this week, we sent a build to our Advanced Testing Group to find any additional bugs. We’re looking forward to having this build available to all of our Beta players! Here are some of the latest changes:
Prophect has been added as a playable character, including functionality to evolve from Skulken.
Marking abilities can now optionally have their mark transfer to the incoming teammate when a Kinfolk swaps. Tidemark and Tidemark Dash use this.
Fixed a bug where Tidemark dash was occasionally not dealing damage with the dash finisher. It seems like the ability was ending as soon as the dash finisher was fired, and if the frame rate is high enough it could end the ability before the physics got a chance to do their thing.
Tidemark dash has slightly larger finishing slash and damage, increased from 50 to 75.
Polished Tadalon using aqua launcher to prevent footslide. Tadalon now also uses headlook when aiming/firing this ability.
Dark pulse now has a new vfx (from the Prophect trailer) and Kainite has a special animation for it.
Improvements to our lighting suite based on the Prophect trailer.
Bright_Horn’s rigging is coming along well, and we expect to have a first pass on their idle, walking, and running animations over the weekend! We’re updating our rigging process for facial expressions to be lighter and more flexible for Kinfolk we work on in the future.
We’re looking into options for updating the version of Unity we use to develop the game. On the version we’re using right now, our files are so large that loading things takes up a large chunk of time.
Community
In case you don't know, we post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted since our last newsletter:
Updated Evolution Graphics:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3m7omwaqx7s25
Back from the holidays:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mbuwovvsts2d
Awburn bug:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mcgoh77qhk2e
Prophect in the meta:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mcy7rr6eks2p
New Dark Pulse VFX:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mdjwucv57k26
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
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 February 27th!