Community Newsletter: January 15, 2021
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jan 16, 2021 at 01:30:09 AM

PROGRESS

• We’ve been working on some wide-reaching changes to the alpha. While some of them won’t be especially visible, we expect them to improve the gameplay quality in major ways! These improvements include:
  
  - A few new abilities… :)
  
  - Changes to our Netcode that made a significant impact in lowering ping times!
  
  - Revamping the method that detects exactly when an attack projectile should be launched. We no longer use animation events, which are unreliable because of frame dropping. In the past, if an animation event wasn't received, we had to do all sorts of coding gymnastics to launch projectiles, and even then sometimes it wouldn't launch, so your character would just be stuck, not able to fire any more attacks. Instead, we now use two separate animator states, and detect when a post-launch animation state has started, so the attack projectiles fire reliably.
  
  - Proper hurtboxes for all characters. Previously some of our abilities would miss even though you could swear they should have hit. In a lot of cases this was caused by issues like network synchronization, but it certainly didn't help that characters were all operating on a simple cylindrical collider when receiving damage. This change allows you to do things like fire (small enough) projectiles under Skulken. Overall, it should make attacks a little bit more reliable.

• A portion of our QA team unfortunately came down with COVID recently, but we’re very thankful to say everyone is on the mend. Because of this, the team hasn’t been able to test as efficiently in the past two weeks, and we’ll be returning to our normal work cadence as everyone fully recovers.
  
  
• The writing team is getting back into the swing of things! The main focus these past two weeks has been to write a trial version of a quest and play through it “on paper” with the developers. This helped to get a better understanding of all of the components we’ll need to add for the single player campaign. Over the next few months, we’ll start developing:
  
  - Dialogue trees and a Conversation Engine
  
  - Mission logic
  
  - AI for combat and NPCs
  
  - New Kinfolk and abilities
  
  
• One developer has started implementing Kinfolk beyond the Combat Arena Alpha, (which we've got pretty well worked out thanks to the Alpha Kinfolk), as well as implementing the human player and NPCs.
  
  
• We’ve made some great progress on our terrain development strategies! A lot of time was dedicated to developing a method that will deliver high resolution terrains based on real world heightmaps for the map of the entire game.
  
  

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you again on January 29!

Community Newsletter: January 1, 2021
over 3 years ago – Sat, Jan 02, 2021 at 12:58:19 AM

Happy New Year! 2020 was a really rough year for everyone, but we are fortunate enough to have a lot of wonderful things to look back on. We have you, whoever is reading this, to thank for that. The unbelievable progress that we made this year wouldn’t have been possible without all the support everyone has given us. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. It’s our sincere hope that we made a positive impact on your year the way you did for ours. Thank you for joining us for the wild ride that was 2020, and we hope to continue making leaps and bounds in progress in 2021! Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:

PROGRESS

• As we continue improving and adding to the combat arena alpha, a few team members are turning their attention to spinning up production on the game’s single player campaign, particularly writing and planning. As we build the foundation for the single player, some of the developers will migrate to working mostly on that side of things while others will continue focusing on the Combat Arena Alpha.
  
  
• For the first time in who knows how long, everybody took a well-earned break for the holidays! The team has been working extremely hard leading up to and following the Alpha release, so it was nice to wind down and take a moment to focus on literally anything other than Kindred Fates for a few days. (Because of that, this newsletter is more sparse than usual.) Moving forward, we’re going to make a greater effort not to overwork ourselves like we have the past few months.
  
  

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you again on January 15!

Community Newsletter: December 19, 2020
over 3 years ago – Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 01:27:01 AM

PROGRESS

• We released the kraken and the alpha is fully out and playable to everyone! This came with a lot of changes to the account system to support this.
  
  -One of the most obvious changes is that we moved the leaderboard up to the top in the links section (between wiki and patch notes).
  
  -We also added a bunch of items to the leaderboard such as favorite kinfolk, winrate, and number of matches played. Be on the look out for more improvements here soon!
  

• Behind the scenes, we also did a lot of work to make the account system faster and more reliable as we scaled up for the influx of new users.
  

• In game, we made some bug fixes to try to reduce crashes and getting locked up, and also added a very rough first pass of quality settings. If you're having trouble running the game on the default settings, consider lowering your graphics quality and / or picking a lower resolution to run at.
  

COMMUNITY

• We hope to start up our pre-alpha streaming schedule again soon! We’ll share details as plans become more concrete!
  
  

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you in the New Year, on January 1!

The Combat Arena Alpha is now available to all players!
over 3 years ago – Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 06:13:27 AM

Welcome to the Combat Arena Alpha!

We've officially reached our final wave for the Combat Arena Alpha rollout! As of now, anybody who has backed at the Champion tier or higher is able to get their Steam key from our website. Here's how to access it: 

• Sign into your Skymill Studios account.
• Go to your Inventory.
• Under the "Closed-Alpha Combat Arena Key" section, you will see a button that says "Redeem" if a key is available to you. If you click it, your Steam Key code will appear!
• Paste your key into Steam under Games > "Activate a Product on Steam"

Have fun! We'll see you out there. 

Wave 2 of the Combat Arena Alpha is out now!
over 3 years ago – Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 02:44:26 PM

Are you ready for Wave 2? We've added 250 new combatants to the Combat Arena Alpha! Be sure to check your account inventory on our website to see if you have a key! Here's how:

• Sign into your Skymill Studios account.
• Go to your Inventory.
• Under the "Closed-Alpha Combat Arena Key" section, you will see a button that says "Redeem" if a key is available to you. If you click it, your Steam Key code will appear!
• Paste your key into Steam under Games > "Activate a Product on Steam"

We'll see you out there!