Community Newsletter: March 25, 2022

Combat Arena Alpha

• Sprinting will be coming to the Combat Arena Alpha! You’ll be able to activate it by holding down Left Shift, while tapping Left Shift will still be used to dash.
• We've made improvements to our automatic build processes for both the Combat Arena Alpha and the Single Player. Now they run without any manual steps, which is a big help for our QA testers.

Single Player

• Our follower AI saw some new developments!
  • When your Kinfolk is in combat, the human player will follow them at a safe distance and avoid enemy attacks. We’ve also added code to prevent the human from being targeted by a homing attack when they’re not the focused character.
  • When exploring as the human, your follower Kinfolk won’t get too far ahead or behind. Your follower smoothly interpolates its speed to match the player, and walk/run animations now correctly blend while NPC characters move at various speeds.

• Bug fixes galore this sprint! Many of them were for details we haven’t made publicly available yet, but they’ve improved the Single Player experience significantly.
  • Door interactions in our dungeon weren't properly being deactivated when a Kinfolk is summoned and the player follows the Kinfolk.
  • One of the puzzles in our dungeon needed some more polish, which we added this week! It runs way more smoothly now.
  • The key logic in the dungeon needed to be tuned up. There were extra keys being dropped, which can make things pretty confusing!
  • A few new abilities were causing the framerate to drop noticeably, so we implemented a fix to smooth those issues out.
  • We made adjustments to a few enemy NPC animations that weren’t functioning properly. In addition, one enemy with a teleport ability was accidently teleporting to the edge of a cliff they weren’t supposed to reach, leading to some rather comedic battles when they fell off.

• We’ve been adding polish and details to the terrain around a few points of interest. Because of this, we’ve re-baked the navmesh so that NPCs can intuitively navigate around all the new obstacles we’ve added!

• The camping function got a lot of attention at the beginning of this sprint, and now it’s in a place where we can show off a few details about selecting where to make camp. There are a lot of little pieces that go into making this function work!
  • When selecting an area, a sample of your camp will appear and change color depending on whether or not the location you’ve selected is suitable. (We still need to set more parameters for what makes a location suitable or not- at the moment you can set up camp in the middle of a river, and the system takes 0 issue with that!)
  • The campsite sample will hug the ground smoothly, so pieces aren’t randomly floating or sunken into the ground.
  • When you set up camp, it will alter the terrain so you don’t have grass growing in the middle of your fire. It definitely needs some adjustments so that it doesn’t take away too much grass, but the functionality is in!

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on April 8.