Progress
Humble_Shepherd is our next focus for animations! We’re currently working on their standard animations, which you can see an early work in progress video of below.
Watch on YouTube
Gatherable items like berries, herbs and other things you pick up out in the world are now stored as data rather than as gameobjects in the scene. Previously each one sat in the world fully loaded whether you were standing next to it or a mile away. Now the world holds a marker saying "a wildberry bush goes here," and the bush is assembled as you get close and then recycled once you've moved on. We can scatter far more of them around without the memory cost, and it fits neatly with the system that loads the world in pieces around you. This optimization should help the open world exploration to have better performance!
Puzzle objects like destructible crates, explosive barrels, rune rocks and lock spheres you come across while exploring got the same treatment. The useful change is that the element that sets each one off is now a setting we choose per object rather than something fixed into the object type. The same rune rock can ask for Fire in one place and Water in another. That means a lot more variation across the world without new work behind the scenes each time.
Missions now run end to end through the new dialogue system we talked about in April. Taking a mission from an NPC, asking them how you're doing partway through, and turning it in all flow through the same graphs, and twenty-eight mission conversations have been converted so far, including story and side missions. We also added cinematic beats that aren't tied to one specific location (camera moves, HUD fades, etc.) so a cutscene can play wherever the story needs it to.
Held items now run on the same combat-effects pipeline as abilities and recipes, which we covered back in May. Practically, that means an item can do anything an ability can: apply an effect for the whole time it's held, or make a Kinfolk immune to a specific status like poison or burn.
We’re continuing to make good progress on getting the terrain working with the Unity upgrade! We recently found a fix for a pesky shader issue, so now all the ground textures are finally behaving properly.
Community
In case you don't know, we post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted in the last month:
Terrain Texture issue
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mrt42yx26s2q
What happened to this chime tower?
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mrbqxhamss2k
Aura Discussion
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mqq4vrxvrk2z
Camping with Awburn
https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mq6tvir6s22t
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 August 28th. Until then, take care!