Progress
With the help of our community members on Discord and Bluesky, we now have an official name for Hull_Piercer! Please welcome Ravanuuk to Kindred Fates! Big thanks to everyone who weighed in on this and contributed their ideas for names.
While we’re at it, here’s a new look at the big guy’s evolution tree, along with another new official name.
With Nyazen’s standard animations nearly finished, we’ve started on their combat animations! We’re keeping a few of their standard animations in a rough form so we can keep experimenting with movement options. Once Nyazen’s animations are finished, it’s Humble_Shepherd’s turn! Humble_Shepherd and Briar_Runner recently got updated rigging that allows for jiggle skeletons, a method that makes it easier to animate more natural motion in limbs and tails.
This month's big focus on the development side was an internal tool we've been calling the Kinfolk Setup Wizard. It takes the rigged 3D model and animations our artists create and walks through the entire setup process, assembling the character components for movement and hurt-boxes, wiring in animations, and configuring combat poses to produce fully functional Kinfolk in a fraction of the time it used to take us by hand. The first Kinfolk built start-to-finish with it is Bright_Horn, who's now up and running as a fully playable character! Every Kinfolk we make from here uses the same pipeline, meaning less time putting characters together and a lot more time designing how they actually play.
We also reorganized how each Kinfolk's animation controller is structured (the chart that decides which movement or attack plays, and when). Every Kinfolk now follows the same consistent layout. Ability animations are in one group, while movement animations are in another. It's invisible from the player’s perspective, but with the whole roster sharing a single structure, our animations are far easier to navigate and maintain as our character count grows
One of the mechanics we recently migrated to the new version of Unity is one we haven’t discussed publicly before: Auras. These are unique buffs that your Summoner can obtain from Chime Towers across the map, significantly increasing their capabilities in certain areas. For example, one aura increases your effectiveness with all Summoning Bells, and another raises the Summoner’s max stamina and stamina regeneration. Pretty helpful when rushing back to save a fallen ally, or bond with an especially powerful Kinfolk! The player can only have one Aura active at a time, and can choose from any they’ve previously attained.
One of the largest pieces of the project left to upgrade in Unity is the terrain and all the systems that handle terrain data (world streaming, texture mapping, automatically placing gatherable assets, etc.). The heightmaps, grass, trees, and rocks are generally where they’re supposed to be, and getting the textures up and running is next on our to-do list. Because these are such complex systems, upgrading the terrain is fairly time consuming, but it’s a clear sign that we’re most of the way finished with the Unity upgrade!
While the upgrade is underway on the development side, we’ve been taking a look at the game’s story with fresh eyes. We’re going back through everything we’ve written to improve organization, check for contradictions/plot holes, and ensure that the story we want to tell for the early access is suitable for its scope. We know the story is one of the most important aspects of the game to many people, ourselves included, so we want to make it the best it can be!
Community
In case you don't know, we post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted in the last month:
Kinfolk Beach Party
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mp3saiuqtc2i
Nyazen Improved Textures
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mojzx44uyk2j
Happy Summer!
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mnycjkrp722y
Nyazen Animation Before & After
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mngktfng3c2j
Lexicon
The full lexicon can be found here.
Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
Summoner: The people in Hinterlock who can summon Kinfolk.
Texture: A 2D image that’s applied to a 3D model to give it color and shading.
World Streaming: The process of breaking up large terrain into smaller tiles that can be unloaded if they aren’t visible from the player’s current perspective. Reduces processing power needed to run the game.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on July 31st. Until then, stay hydrated!