Single Player
We’ve adjusted the foot IK to allow the human character to look more realistic and dynamic while walking and standing on slopes. When the feet collide with a surface, they'll know to stop and the connected joints will act accordingly. Here’s a before and after comparison:
The line art and color are finished for North_Star, so now it’s time for personality concepts. Briar_Runner has finished concept art and is ready for modeling. Sunken_Sail and Violet_Fang are rigged, and we’re currently working on standard animations for Briar_Heart and combat animations for Little_Wing. Tide_Walker has been implemented as a playable character. (Pretty soon we’ll have all of the new Kinfolk that we need for our current internal milestone, so there will likely be fewer updates on Kinfolk art in future newsletters.)
On the human character side, Mr. Green_Collar has a final 2D portrait. Our character modelers are working on multiple clothing sets for human townsfolk NPCs, and many other clothing sets and hairstyles are currently in the rigging process. We’re also creating unique animations and hairstyles for elderly human NPCs. Without this, we felt like most of them just looked like silver-haired teens from a distance!
The player character has a newly polished crouching animation. This allows for a much smoother sneaking mechanic than we had with the old placeholder animations.
We’re continuing to make progress on house models for the town, with two new exteriors nearly complete now. We’re also in the process of making adjustments to the model for the boss room.
Another big focus this sprint was cooking animations and logic. When the player cooks food at the camp, the pot over the fire will play a short animation. Cooked foods now calculate their flavor based on the ingredients used.
Cooked foods have their own primary effects, but now also take on the effects of any secondary ingredients used. The cooked food also systematically generates minimalist descriptions of all these effects combined together. This allows cooking recipes to be extremely flexible with secondary ingredients, so that food items can be cooked for different desired flavors or effects. Want some soup that heals more? Cook it with potatoes or tonics. Want a baked potato that heals and also cures the burn status, but your Kinfolk only likes sweet foods? Cook it with Aloe and a sweet ingredient.
We’ve added Status Immunity to work as an inventory item effect. You’re welcome!
After finishing concept art for the biome we mentioned last time, we’ve started on concept art for a cinematic in the beginning of the game. Earlier this week, we also began the process of creating new animations and VFX specifically for other cinematic scenes toward the beginning of the game.
We’ve created VFX for multiple new abilities, and we’re working on special SFX for both retrieving and losing soul flames.
On the development side, we’ve largely focused on fixing bugs and adding polish instead of adding new features. The details are pretty minor (and often tedious), so it makes for a shorter newsletter but a much better game! We’re getting close to the end of a long backlog of bugs from our regression testing, and we’ve been making quick progress.
We’ve added a few more new abilities (we only have 8 abilities left to code for this milestone!), and we’re working on melee attack tests.
We refactored our Items system to greatly reduce code duplication and ease the process of creating new items for gatherables and cooking.
Community
We’re coming to the end of the submission period for our Kickstarter Tailor Tier reward- 10 more days! Andrew will be reaching out to Tailor backers we haven’t heard from to make sure your clothing items are submitted.
Thanks for stopping by! Our next newsletter will be out on June 2.
