Times are busy on the The Legend of Khiimori team at Aesir! Today we want to give you a closer look behind the scenes and tell you about some exciting things that have been happening in the past few weeks.
Alpha Playtest Reports
As the Kickstarter backers among you know, our Alpha Playtest has been underway since about mid-May. Access to the Alpha Playtest was an exclusive backer reward during our Kickstarter campaign earlier this year, and the campaign’s success means that from one day to the next, we went from having about 20-30 people (that is, our developers and our QA people) playing the game, to over 8000.
The math is simple: 8000 people can find a whole lot more issues a lot faster than our handful of dedicated QA people who test the game professionally every day, by sheer force of numbers. The result? We received thousands of crash reports and bug tickets these past few weeks, and our tech people have invested a lot of their time into digging into the reasons for crashes and issues and fixing them.
Testing with such a large number of people has its pros and cons: on the one hand, the large volume of crash reports lets us easily see which crashes affect the most people. In order to analyze these reports efficiently, we created a separate tool that sorts crash reports into an excel sheet, counts duplicates and thereby tells us which issues are the most urgent to address. At the same time though, the huge volume of reports generates additional overhead on our end. And while we end up receiving duplicate reports of many issues, we still want players to report what they see, so we don’t risk certain problems slipping under the radar because everyone assumes it’s a known issue already.
Over on the community side of things, we’ve also tried to educate our many playtesters on what makes out good bug reporting, since the difference between (for example) “my horse looked really weird at some point” and “my horse’s animations broke after repeatedly mounting and dismounting while standing in the river” can be immense to any of our devs who want to reproduce the bugs in question to find out what is actually going wrong.
Addressing these most severe bugs and crashes has been our first priority, because we will only be able to gather valuable qualitative feedback (such as which features players are enjoying, which improvements are needed, etc.) once people aren’t kept from actually playing by fundamental technical problems. And we’re very glad to have the chance to address so many crucial problems early on, rather than only learning about them at Early Access release. 💪
We’re also thrilled to finally push an update for playtesters today that properly supports mission saving and loading!
A Hundred Small Steps Forward
While the bug fixing and crash hunting efforts have kept several of our techies very busy, the rest of the team has been able to move forward with a lot of other matters: “small” improvements in the grand scheme of things, but all valuable contributions to making our game a big and beautiful whole down the line:
Our level designers have encountered an interesting problem: many of our travel distances in the game were too short at the moment, not really leaving the player enough room to encounter interesting challenges along the way. This has led to a lot of careful planning on how to expand the game map. Our goal is that any courier mission is never as straightforward as “ride from A to B in a straight line”, but that players will always face some options and decisions along the road thanks to mechanics such as difficult terrain, resources along the way, dangerous wildlife, various points of interests and other obstacles.
Optimization is an ongoing progress that won’t be “done” until the game itself is “done”, but our tech team has made a lot of important progress recently that allow the game to run a lot more fluently on the lower spec end of our target hardware. One such change is that the activity of NPCs and Wildlife updates based on player proximity, so far off NPCs don’t consume as much processing power as the ones you’re looking at up close.
Our Horse Breeding Interface is heavily being worked on and we’re excited to share a new teaser: the plan is that by using specific food items, you can influence the outcome of your foal’s looks – all within the genetically plausible, based on our coat color genetics system. Where a real life pairing between two palomino horses can randomly result in a chestnut, palomino or cremello horse for example, we’ll give our players a bit of influence over that result, if they choose to invest the resources.
Note that the Interface is still in WIP. These screenshots may not represent what anything looks like in the final game.
Our animators been creating and fine-tuning various animations for characters and horses: most recently, they’ve prepared animations for horses threatening to kick, the horse nuzzling the player character for treats, and a foal clacking its teeth in deference to older horses. We’ve also started working on character stances and horse reactions that will become relevant in our horse taming mechanics later on, but remember that those will likely not make it into the initial Early Access release just yet.
Note that the animation is still in WIP. These assets may not represent what anything looks like in the final game.
Our tech artists have been improving our waterfall rendering, layering particle effects on top of a spline mesh for the right amount of splash and foam that can be used and adjusted for various different setups from small rivulets to bigger landmarks like the famous Ulaan Tsutgalan in Orkhon Valley.
Note that the animation is still in WIP. These assets may not represent what anything looks like in the final game.
That’s just a small selection of various small and big improvements and important steps the team has been making the past few weeks, but we hope it gives you a bit of insight into how much work and effort and thought goes into crafting every aspect of a game like The Legend of Khiimori!
If you’re more interested in the big picture roadmap, make sure to have a look at our Trello board, where you can see how we’re progressing on various features and even leave your vote on what you’d like to see added to the game in the future! We can’t wait to show you more as we’re nearing the Early Access release.
Previous Developer Diaries can be found here:
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