Six years ago today, our Kickstarter campaign came to a close, and with it, something incredible happened. Over 11,000 of you believed in the vision of Kindred Fates enough to back it, and that moment changed everything for us. It's a milestone worth celebrating, and we want to start by saying thank you. Genuinely, thank you.
We also want to be honest with you, because you deserve that.
We know progress hasn't moved at the pace any of us hoped for. There's no sugarcoating that. When you backed this project, you put your trust in us, and we carry that weight every single day. As many of you know, everyone on the team has taken on work outside of Kindred Fates this past year to support ourselves. While that's meant less time to dedicate to the game, it's also what's kept the project alive. Those jobs allow us to keep the lights on, keep the team together, and fund critical work like new art assets that move the game forward. It's not the path we envisioned, but it's the path that lets us keep building.
We want you to know: this team has never stopped working, and we've never lost sight of what we set out to build together. Kindred Fates isn't just a project to us, it's a promise. And we intend to keep it.
So today, we're looking back with gratitude and forward with determination, starting with some progress updates! Let's get into it.
Progress
The latest version of the Combat Arena Beta was recently given to the Advanced Testing Group for bug testing. We’ve gone through a few builds with them now, and the current one is a release candidate, meaning it will be released to all Beta players if no major issues are found. Here are some of our latest changes:
Fixed the follower version of Prophect having Restless eyes
Fixed an issue that caused darker lighting when choosing a starter
Fixed Prophect’s passive giving buffs with unlimited duration
Fixed additional scenes loading when returning from evolution
Ability Shards can't be assigned to the quick use menu anymore.
Items like bells can no longer be deleted by using them on Kinfolk in the menu.
Tide mark should go on cooldown properly if there isn't a target left alive with the mark anymore.
Tide mark's cooldown should display as intended if the projectile attack was missed.
Since Prophect will be available soon, we wanted to highlight a few of their moves that players might not be familiar with yet.
Confusion: The user emits a strange beam of energy in a target direction. Entities hit by this beam have their inputs inverted for a few seconds.
Photon Barrage: The user fires a stream of charged particles that explode with electric energy upon impact.
Deadly Premonition:
The user marks a target with an ominous ball of energy. The ball explodes shortly after, staggering the target and damaging based on how much damage the target received between the start of the ability and the explosion.
Deadly Premonition is currently a Dark Type ability, but we’re somewhat torn on whether it should be Light Type instead, since it has aspects of both. The Dark Type aspects are that it feels like it fits the “fighting dirty” style, and is an attack that you can’t dodge or avoid in most cases. Once it hits you, it acts like a debuff that amplifies damage, which feels right at home with Dark Type. On the other hand, the way that this mark acts like a buff for the user (in this case Prophect) feels like a Light Type ability. To add to this, Light Type abilities are currently short on Abilities that buff the user’s attacks. We’d love to hear your thoughts about where this ability belongs!
As mentioned in our January Newsletter, we’ve been considering upgrading Unity to the latest version to improve both our efficiency in developing the game and the game’s performance in Early Access. We’ve decided to move forward with this path and will be starting to implement the upgrades in the next few weeks!
Bright_Horn’s model is fully rigged, and their idle, walk, run, and sprint animations are in their final stages! We’re also in the early phases of their combat animations, so we expect Bright_Horn to be ready for implementation in the coming weeks. Next we’ll be moving onto a familiar face: Humble_Shepherd! We’re looking forward to sharing their animations as they come through the pipeline.
Community
In case you don't know, we post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted in the last month:
Engine Upgrade:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3me3pmp7nt22r
Valentine's Day Season:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3men73dvhv22g
Benefit of Bonding:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mf6laldvhs2s
Update on new Art:
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mfqjc5fjh22p
Lexicon
The full lexicon can be found here.
Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds frequently in order to test new changes.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on March 27th. Until then, take care!