Art/Design
- A few familiar abilities have newly polished VFX! Some of these have looked the same since the beginning of the project, and as the visual style has progressed they felt increasingly out of place. We’re thrilled with the new results! Here’s a before/after on a few of these abilities (Fireball and Quicksand):
- North_Star has been fully implemented as a playable Kinfolk! We also created a new variation on one of Tide_Walker’s animations for polish purposes.
- The major human NPC we mentioned previously has a finished model now! We’ve also created a few variations on human idle animations so different characters can have more unique personalities. Some of these animations are also for specific characters in the story.
- The concept art for the large set piece we mentioned last time has been completed! We’re now in the process of creating the concept for another major structure and deciding between a few options for its construction style. Whichever we pick, we’ve got something pretty unique in store!
- We finished adding the new buildings and outer walls to the town. We also spent some time placing ivy on the walls, which really brought the whole town together. All that’s left now is some landscaping, but even now the town has a lot of personality.
- In addition to the abilities, we also created updated VFX for the capture mechanic. It’ll be more dynamic and much easier to tell how close you are to completing a capture!
- We’ve started implementation for many of the cutscenes we’ve been animating. Transferring the files into the project can take a few attempts, but with persistence a few scenes are very close to their final version!
- This sprint we wrote, story boarded, and began animations on a small but important cut scene. It’s going to make a huge difference.
- We’ve written a sizeable selection of short dialogue lines for Summoner NPCs to shout at the player before entering combat. These cover various situations and motivations, and should help different encounters feel unique.
Development/Combat
- We made it easier to see the cooldown on throwing Summoning Bells! Since this isn’t in an ability slot, it needed a new indicator, and it’s already a good step forward.
- We improved the timing and graphics for our mission logic. Previously, we showed multiple pieces of information at once on the screen after completing part of a mission. Now we break it up so it’s easier to follow what’s going on.
- The headlook AI we use on our NPCs received some fine tuning this sprint! We added logic that changes the intensity of the animation depending on the player character’s distance. Patrolling and idle NPCs have a timer for how long they look at the player before losing interest and disabling headlook. If the player fires any abilities, the timer resets and they look again. If the player moves outside the NPC’s view distance and then back into the NPC’s view distance, they will become interested and start using headlook again. If the player starts a conversation, the NPC always looks toward them.
- Multiple aspects of the logic for a scripted encounter in the story have been adjusted. We’re able to handle different outcomes to the encounter with much better stability now.
- We’ve continued creating new abilities and fixing bugs with things like grass bending, NPCs falling through the ground, Tadalon not appearing in the Compendium, and the surprising ease with which you could push NPCs from one place to another just by walking into them.
Thanks for checking in! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on October 6.