Single Player
A new series of standard human animations has been completed, including a new idle (+ 2 idle events), walking, running, sprinting, crouching, sneaking, death, dodge-roll and a weak punch. From here we’ll be testing these animations in-game to make sure they have the right feel. Here’s a quick showcase of the new idle, idle events, walking, and running:
In addition to the standard animations, we’ve started to work on unique animations for a human NPC who will be featured heavily during an important moment early in the game’s story.
The Water Type Kinfolk that was rigged last sprint has multiple animations in progress now. We’re really happy with the personality that’s coming through! We’ve started modeling for another Air Type as well. We’re almost finished with the concept art for a new Null Type Kinfolk, as well as continuing the concept art process for the Dark Type we mentioned last time.
For the Nintendo Switch port, we've reached a point where we have made as many major improvements as we’re able to for the time being. We’re planning to come back to it in a few months, and in the meantime continue pushing the single player forward. When we do start working on it again, we’ll be looking to engage with a team within Unity who has more insider knowledge.
The modeling for a new dress is nearing completion! We’ve also implemented socks for our character creation, and fixed some bugs where the lipstick accidentally painted your whole face when certain lip shapes were selected.
We fixed some bugs with the evolution room recalling incorrectly. It was really jarring to be evolving your Kinfolk when suddenly they’re pulled out and recalled to the human character. Definitely a moment that we don’t want to ruin!
There’s a ton of new building concept art for the town we’ve been working on. We have a finished piece for every building planned! Next on the concept side, we’ve started working on the exterior for a new dungeon.
We’re making good progress on plant models! There’s one tree species in a good spot, as well as multiple smaller plants. We verified that we can use a material for the leaves on trees that gives them the level of dimension we’ve been hoping for. It’s great to see this tree species reaching the balanced point of being stylized enough, but still accurate to the real-life trees we use for references.
There are new VFX completed for several abilities in the single player, with accompanying SFX in the works.
As we continue filling out the world, we’ve written more NPC dialogue trees, including some that give side quests. We’ve added dialogue for 6 more NPCs that will be living in a small village near the game’s starting town. There are a few that we especially had a lot of fun writing this time! We hope you’ll find them as endearing as we do.
The improvements keep on coming for our Utility AI, which is used for our NPCs’ combat AI. We made some big progress on a new custom editor that will greatly speed up the process of creating unique AI for each NPC.
We’ve completed a new 'one gameobject per host' optimization. Previously, the host client could still experience small desync between where a character appeared to be and where they could be hit by abilities. This was due to the underlying client server architecture. By moving to this new one-per-host setup, now the host's client and server are perfectly in sync at all times with zero delay in the single player.
We fixed some issues that were causing save files to not reload properly in the single player. Also, we made more progress on getting object placement to work correctly when the player is on a moving platform.
Thanks for stopping by, everyone! We’ll see you next time, on March 10.
