Single Player
- Greyboxing is in its final stages for the dungeon we’ve been working on. Next will be the modeling phase, though we won’t be starting immediately since we’re focused on the town buildings for now. Here’s a sneak peek at the greybox version of some of the rooms in this dungeon! (Note: The lighting isn’t final.)
- Modeling for the houses is coming along really nicely! The exterior of the first house model for this town is complete, as is the ivy we showed off on Twitter last week. Now that the materials are further along, the rest of the houses should begin to progress more quickly!
- We’re starting on the concept art for a handful of important human characters in the game’s story. We’ve also updated the human crouching and sneaking animations.
- The base models for child NPCs are nearly complete. We’ve also started modeling several clothing assets and hairstyles for them.
- Concept art for Big_Bandit, as well as the colors for Tender_Foot and Briar_Stomper, have all been finalized. Next, our concept artists will be working on the action and expression pages. (Correction from the last newsletter: Tender_Foot was listed as a Null Type, but is actually an Air Type.) We have finished models for both Little_Bandit and Briar_Heart! Rigging has started for Bashful_Strider and is still in progress for Wailing_Weed (who is especially complicated on the rigging side). There are a few combat animations left for Puddle_Hopper, and Tide_Walker has joined them in the combat animation phase.
- One of our main focuses for concept art has been an important building for the game’s story that can be in multiple states throughout the game. We’ve just finished the exterior concept art and are most of the way through the interior for one of these states. Once that’s finished, we’ll be doing concept art for the interior and exterior in other states. We’ve also finished concept art for a few major set pieces.
- We’ve been working on some new vfx that we’re really excited about! Once completed, we’re looking forward to sharing it in a newsletter.
- We’ve built out the terrain for the area outside of town. It was important to keep multiple level design constraints in mind while sculpting this, and we’re pretty happy with the result!
- We’ve added logic for your teammates to react to new types of events that occur at camp. We’ve also added some new camp dialogue sequences, including the interaction from the end of our Kickstarter Trailer. (Bear in mind the exact dialogue will depend on the individual Kinfolk and dialogue choices you make!)
- We fixed the settings for our Overworld map, which had a few issues after we shifted the origin coordinate to be closer to the center of the map.
- Our new Hierarchical Task Network AI is fully implemented. We’re looking forward to the following benefits:
- Streamlined editor interface.
- Greater separation between the sensory layer, decision making layer, and Unity monobehavior layer of our NPC AI. This makes our AI decision making much easier to unit test and debug. This will help us spend less time debugging and more time polishing NPC behaviors.
- Unit tests that cover a majority of the decision making process.
- Runtime AI editing. This allows devs to modify many parameters of the NPC AI in runtime, which greatly improves iteration time compared to how we previously needed to frequently hop in and out of play mode to make changes to the AI.
- Streamlined workflow for creating NPC combat AI. In particular, Summoner teams with combos that involve swapping characters benefited the most from these changes.
- We’re continuing to write logic for specific story missions in the single player. This has been one of our major focuses for dev work recently, and will probably continue to be for at least a few more sprints.
- Now that we’re finished setting up the basis for the ability pools that we mentioned last time, we’ve started implementing them. It’s a relatively large change that impacts a lot of our other code, so the process has been involved. The improvements to performance will make it well worth the effort!
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll be back with the next newsletter on April 21.