Hello everyone.
As I always do, I'd like to say a huge thank you to our amazing @backers. The support we’ve received in the last few weeks and months has been amazing. Likewise a huge shoutout to our awesome moderator team here on discord.
So the big news at the moment is that our Alpha is underway! If you haven't seen the details of this, we’re doing it in three waves.
Wave One consisting of our Heroes of the Wall and Fallen Founders has gone out.
On the 22nd/23rd (depending where you are in the world), the next wave consists of each tier from The Landsknechts to The Merchants. To confirm, this roll out will be occurring in the next 24 hours.
The final wave will be the Loyal Supporter wave coming the week following. Sadly the Loyal Support bundle pack purchasers will need to wait for wave Three. We apologize for the unclear nature of any previous posts, and this delay.
After the waves have come in, we’ll be enabling and disabling different sets of armour and weapons on a weekly basis, so we can rotate focus testing on specific items. This way we can set up various “scenarios” each week to test more survivalistic type areas.
The team is currently also working on new maps for testing, alongside the prototypes for gamemodes to keep things fun. We hope to use this, not only to keep the game fresh and enjoyable in testing, but to also help us gather specific combat data.
This week K.Z himself has done a write up for us regarding his recent armour and arts work. Of course his work speaks for itself, but we figure you folks might like some details.
In the last few weeks coming upto alpha, I have started the armour overhaul with tier 2 and 3. This is nearly completed, with additional skins to mix it up a bit. There will be more added down the line. The biggest challenge has been getting every piece of armour to work with every other piece of armour, which as you can imagine takes some time.
Due to the demands of the upcoming alpha, I have put creation on hold for now and put my focus into fixing things like touching up existing armour. This includes fixing up hair, customization, player models, fixing texture issues and the like. Armour clipping still has some way to go but I've been slowly and steadily eradicating the problem, bit by bit.
I have also put a lot of focus into optimization and helping get that fps up as much as I can. Of course optimization is a thing that should be thought of from the start of development and it has. Don't worry, these fixes are just helping to get that fps as high as we can and I'm sure this will continue through alpha all the way till release.
I know i said i've put a halt on the Armour but i've managed to squeeze in a new tier 2 tabard with cloth physics as demonstrated below. Overall all aspects spoken about are well in the works and going well and looking on track for alpha.
K.Z.
If you’re interested in hearing from K.Z. more regularly in these blogs opposed to just images, let us know in chat.
As always Mr.Z has written up his own progress for you folks to have a read over.
From Mr. Z
Over this past month one of the things I’ve implemented is Durability mechanics on both Weapons and Armor. Weapons lose Durability when hitting things and parrying incoming strikes. This means that after the weapon takes a bit of damage it starts to do less damage, eventually in the future a weapon fully breaking will cause it to shatter into pieces forcing you to drop it.
Armors on the other hand start to protect less the more damage they take, eventually not protecting the player at all. In the Survival game you will be able to repair these weapons and armors back into working condition though be aware that every time they are repaired they will lose a good amount of maximum durability to dissuade players from using items forever. They will also be able to be scrapped back into materials so they can be used to forge new items.
Now that Armors have durability proper I also decided to rework the damage resistance formula to take into account armors being layered on top of each other. What this means is wearing a gambeson under a chestplate provides additional damage resistances, all based on total durability. This has created the effect of making the Neck, Hands, and Feet the most vulnerable areas on the player since these areas do not have multiple armor layers. In the future I will be adding a Face Hitbox so the open faced helmets have the weakness of being completely bypassed by hitting the face.
As we approached launching the first Wave for Alpha, I spent a lot of time this month optimizing the game. We had some very serious hitching issues caused by the amount of Armors each character had on them. Fortunately these issues were resolved in time for the Alpha.
One of the last things the Melee combat needed from a feedback perspective was animations for when Melee Weapons impacted surfaces or when they were deflected by Parries. I was able to add a unique animation for each attack type in the game and I’m very happy with how they turned out. Also I was able to add 2 new weapons to the game, the Katzbalger which is a later tech arming sword and the Sax which is one of the first swords players will be able to forge.
In the last week I spent some time on the animation systems of the game, trying to polish up what I could in time for Alpha. I was able to add new Idle and Running animations to the character and I even revamped the holstering animation, the character now walks around with his greatsword resting on his shoulder.
I was also able to quickly get in a simple Emote system, and I have to say I was impressed at how much some simple emotes increased the immersion of the game. Going forward into the Alpha I hope to get more animation sets done for all the different weapon types Renown will support as some of the placeholders I have are not in an acceptable state to be used at this moment. We hope to get an animator in the near future to go back and redo my placeholder animations, we expect this to make the fights look a lot more dynamic and lively but unfortunately we have yet to find a suitable candidate.
Currently all my time is being spent polishing up Melee Combat systems as with the first tester wave I’m getting some very valuable feedback from our testers. I’ve already made some changes to Morphs and Feints so they are easier to read and more consistent and I’ve also tuned the balance on a few weapons, based on tester feedback. I’m also developing some tools for myself to quickly rebalance weapon values so I won’t have to do countless patches getting the Weapon balance right.
A lot of time has gone on into making the Combat Alpha as polished (for an early alpha) as humanly possible and I’m very glad to see how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time.
We’ll likely get another dev blog out to you folks in the next fortnight, after the 3rd wave has come in, and we’ve seen how things went.
I should remind all our readers and backers that this is a Combat Alpha Test. We’re doing everything we can to keep the quality and fun as high as possible, but we do actually need the testing data. Likewise there will be bugs, unbalanced weapons and a range of troubles.
This is exactly what we need your help fixing! The feedback we’ve already got back is amazing. Two separate patches have already been sent addressing multiple issues from our first week. We hope our next tier of Backers will have as much fun as we did this week, and will likewise provide us with some clutch information.
Again thanks so much to the amazing community. Huge shout out to the awesome backers and our moderator team.
Till next time
Ashur