Community Newsletter: July 30, 2021
over 2 years ago – Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 11:23:40 AM

COMBAT ARENA ALPHA

• The Combat Arena Alpha 2.0 patch was released this sprint! The main attraction is the long-awaited Practice Room, alongside some other updates. You can read the full patch notes here.
  

• Our Alpha players have given us some really helpful feedback in the short time the Practice Room has been out! Here are some changes we’ve made to the AI for the next patch:
  
  -Added path finding so NPCs can chase the player around obstacles/fight in tight spaces.
  
  -Removed 6 sec startup timer so NPCs are now active as soon as they respawn.
  
  -Increased the speed at which NPCs enter combat after being attacked by the player.
  
  -NPCs now use line of sight with the player to determine their behavior. Upon losing line of sight of the player for a short duration, they will now path to the player until line of sight is recovered, or until aggro times out.
  
  -Fixed bug on Slyphur that was causing all of the NPCs to become unresponsive, forcing the player to restart the practice arena.
  
   
• We’ve also converted the Shield attack to use the left control key for its invocation, instead of taking up an attack slot.
   

SINGLE PLAYER

• We’ve completed 2 more water type kinfolk and started on an earth type! The water type trees are beginning to take form, which is exciting to see.
  
   
• Rigging has started for Hull_Piercer, and we’re continuing to make new animations for Salamurder now that their rig has been updated.
  
   
• We spent more time making additions to our world streaming to speed up its performance and ensure it meets our technical needs.
  
   
• We added an asset that allows us to create cave systems more easily! Our team’s geology nerd is doing preliminary research so we can eventually create interesting cave structures based on Hinterlock’s real world counterpart.
  
   

COMMUNITY

• Mod Stream: 2pm EST Saturday, July 31st on Twitch
  Our Discord mods and Andrew will be playing Muck tomorrow on Twitch! We hope you’ll be able to join us!
  
   
• A few community members noticed something strange about one of the images in the progress board. Upon closer inspection, there was someone hiding inside it!

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time, on August 13!

Combat Arena: Alpha 2.0 is live!
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jul 24, 2021 at 03:17:47 AM

With our 50th Kickstarter update (wow!), we've just released what is without a doubt the biggest update to the Combat Arena Alpha so far, and with it comes the long-anticipated Practice Room.  This is a pretty big milestone for us, so while we don't usually post patch notes on Kickstarter, we wanted to let you guys know! 

We’ve added 7 new NPCs to train against, made some serious improvements to the game’s performance/stability, added a new Mecha Type ability, updated the music, and more! 

You can view the full patch notes on our website, but here's the big stuff:

The Practice Room

The Practice Room is a single-player arena where you can easily try out your Kinfolk’s abilities, improve your skills against the AI, practice combos, experiment with new strategies, and generally get comfortable with the game’s combat outside of online PvP matches. The room contains 7 Kinfolk NPC AI, changeable held items, changeable Kinfolk teammates, Hurt/Heal/Revive features, and Time of Day Controls. 

Gameplay Changes

• Major improvements to the Combat Arena's performance and stability! You should see much better framerates and far fewer instances of you having to restart your client to play again.
• We've changed the way aim cancelling works, so you can change more seamlessly from one ability to another.
• Changes to your stats no longer reset when swapping Kinfolk. 
• The Combat Menu and Valley Battle music tracks have been polished and updated to their most recent versions. The next public update to these tracks will include live recordings!

New Ability: Crush

• Mecha Type. Base Power 30, Physical.
• The user slams down in front of them, crushing their enemy with the weight of their armor. This attack gains 20 Power for each stage the user's Physical Defense has been raised.
•  Usable by Mechid and Shovlet.

We've also made a metric ton of bug fixes, and have a list of known issues that will be our next focus to fix. We're incredibly excited to have this ready for you, and can't wait to see your feedback!

Love,

The Skymill Studios Team

Community Newsletter: July 16, 2021
almost 3 years ago – Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 04:43:11 AM

COMBAT ARENA ALPHA

• We’re getting ever closer to the practice arena being ready to release! Development is complete on the combat AI for all 7 playable Kinfolk, and the NPCs have been placed in the arena. All that remains now is to finish the logic for how the practice room functions, final QA testing, and any needed bug fixes!
  
   
• We’ve changed the way that aiming attacks are cancelled. Previously, the only way to cancel an attack was to press the same attack key again. Now, you can press another attack's key, and the currently aiming attack will automatically be cancelled, and the next attack will fire. This will be available in the next Combat Arena release!
  
   

SINGLE PLAYER

• The design team has been focusing on more Kinfolk creation lately. The water type Kinfolk concepts we mentioned in the last newsletter have seen a lot of development! One of them is finished, while the other is currently in the color-scheme phase. We’ve also completed work on a light type concept, and are most of the way through another water type. We’ve also spent more time on high-level planning for the evolution trees.
  
   
• We’ve made a lot of improvements to the world streaming implementation. Terrains are looking much better from far distances, and we’re getting a better feel for the new workflow to use while improving the terrains.
   
• NPC versions of Slyphur, Shovlet, and Embear now have combat AI! We’ve also reformatted the behavior trees to make them more scalable by referencing external trees for any shared behaviors. NPCs in combat now enter the suspicious state if they lose sight of the player.
  
   
• As always, we’re working on building out the active and passive abilities for both the Combat Arena Alpha and the single player part of the game.
  
   
• We’re rebalancing the footsteps and ambient sound SFX in the single player game, as well as creating movement/footstep sounds for larger Kinfolk.
  
   
• Salamurder is getting an updated rig, and has new animations underway. We have some very fun ideas for them that we’re excited to get to!
   

COMMUNITY

• We hope you enjoyed Andrew’s giveaway stream as much as we did! Congratulations to the lucky recipients of the 5 Champion Packages! The VOD from the stream is available to watch on our secondary YouTube channel in case you want to relive these exquisite tales!

Thanks for joining us! We’ll see you next time on July 30! (Another newsletter blue moon, 3 newsletters this month!!)

Community Newsletter: July 2, 2021
almost 3 years ago – Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 12:33:25 AM

COMBAT ARENA ALPHA

• We were thrilled to finally get our latest update out to the community! The major change was the addition of the ability Shield. You can read more about the latest patch here. We also made sure to get a hotfix out for some bugs that made their way into the bigger update.
  
  
• We’ve been working on some updates to the Combat Arena’s music and expect to include those in the next build.
  
  
• The biggest changes that are needed before the Practice Arena can go live all center around getting the NPC combat AI up to snuff. Work is steadily progressing on this and we’re currently thinking it should be ready within the next few weeks!
  
  

SINGLE PLAYER

• We’ve had a lot of progress on the art/writing side:
  
  -We began concept art sketches on two very promising water type Kinfolk designs.
  
  -Work on another combat song is well underway and progressing smoothly. Rob and Tori are particularly excited for this one.
  
  -A full outline detailing each act of the game's story from start to finish (including all possible endings) is now complete. This also includes many key decision points and how those decisions affect the story's path/ending. Work is also well underway on outlines for each individual story mission. As many of you know, creating a compelling story for Kindred Fates is something we really care about. We can't wait for you to play what we have in store.
  
  
• The dev team successfully implemented a proof of concept for world streaming terrain in the open world. This is a major technical milestone for the open world portion of the game that allows chunks of terrain to load in dynamically, rather than all at once. This has already been a HUGE frame rate saver but we still have several kinks to iron out before we can call it done.
  
  
• NPCs and their AI received even more love this sprint! Our end goal is to make every Kinfolk’s AI match their personality and feel lifelike.
  
  -We’ve implemented patrolling pathways across the map, and added noise to these paths to let the Kinfolk wander around instead of maintaining rigid lines.
  
  -NPCs are now able to gang up on a single player! We’re also looking at the possibility of having NPCs fighting each other in the overworld.
  
  -The past few weeks, we’ve added a new state, “suspicious,” that occurs before they enter active combat. This will help to make NPCs feel much more lifelike.
  
  -We now have the ability to spawn NPCs programmatically, which makes it much easier for QA to test their behaviors.
  

COMMUNITY

Tomorrow marks the 2 year anniversary of the Kindred Fates community! It’s been a joy and an honor having so many amazing fans along for the ride. This game wouldn’t be what it is without all of you, in a very major way. We’re so proud to be able to include community-created characters, music, and items in our game! Every time we give you the opportunity to showcase your creativity and passion, you blow our expectations out of the water. Making an ambitious game like this can be stressful at times, but seeing your support and positivity gives us the encouragement we need to keep moving forward. Getting to play in the Combat Arena Alpha with you this year has been a treat, and we can’t wait to show you more! We have a lot of exciting work underway that we hope to be able to share with you in the coming months (fingers crossed)!

Andrew Reading + Alpha Giveaway Stream - Saturday July 3 at 3pm EST on Twitch
Are you ready for a throwback? Andrew has some rather interesting Kindred Fates stories to read to you this time. We’ll also be giving out 5 champion packages in honor of our community’s anniversary! We hope you’ll be able to join us, it’s gonna be a good time!

Thanks for joining us! We’ll see you next time on July 16!

Community Newsletter: June 18, 202
almost 3 years ago – Sun, Jun 20, 2021 at 10:30:22 PM

Combat Arena Alpha

• We’ve continued placing a lot of focus and care on the game’s single player for the past few weeks. However, many of the improvements we’ve made will soon be added to the Combat Arena for everyone to enjoy! We’re planning to have an update next week for you.
  
   

Single Player

• We’ve had a lot of progress on the art/writing side recently:
  
       -The writing team finished many key structural components for the game’s narrative this sprint, focusing in particular on completing the story outline for the first third of the game.
  
       -One of our artists has finished concept work on a new unannounced water type kinfolk and is starting on the next!
  
       -We finished 2 new music tracks and started work on another.
  
   
• The sound design has also received a lot of attention the past few weeks, with many new SFX being added to the game!
  
       -In the single player version, we’ve added voices for every kinfolk. These voices play when they do things like jump, dash, use certain abilities, or take damage. We plan to add these to the combat arena soon!
  
       -We added SFX for every attack in the new audio engine. In the single player, attack sounds are much more space-filling and more naturally interact with other nearby sounds. Like voices, we hope this will come to the arena soon.
  
       -We’ve also added SFX for footsteps on different materials, as well as all of the UI buttons.
  
   
• NPCs and their AI got a lot of love this sprint, both in the form of upgrades to their behavior, and numerous bug fixes! We’re at the point now where you can run up to them and initiate combat in the open world. Some of them can be quite vicious!
   
• We’ve greatly improved the responsiveness and visual feedback for the capture mechanic. While there are still several important improvements we want to make, it feels much better now and allows you to make inputs much faster. We’ve also started concept art work on the thing that makes capturing possible in the first place! While we can’t show you what those concepts look like yet, we can show you how work is progressing on improvements to the gameplay mechanic itself: 

• Our QA command console now has several quality of life commands such as applying or curing status effects, healing or damaging a kinfolk, and even swapping moves out. This makes it easier for QA to test under specific settings.
  
   
• We’ve revamped a lot of our UI, including adding detailed stats for the Team List such as 'Dex No.', 'Species', 'Type', 'First bonded at', 'Met at', and 'Nature'.
  
   
• We also added UI tutorials when you do specific actions. They take the forms of instructional popups that pause time and give you some information on the particular action the player is taking.
  
   
• The whole team has been working really really hard this sprint on a major goal for the studio. Although we can't say much more about it now, we managed to reach it on time, and we're pretty excited about that.
   

Community

• Terrain Sculpting Stream - Saturday, June 19 at 3pm EST on Twitch
  At last, the time has come! Join us for a chill stream as Tori works on terrain sculpting for a piece of the open world for the single player portion of Kindred Fates.
   

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you next time on July 2!