New Kinfolk: Tadalon
This past Monday, we were thrilled to get to share one of our new Kinfolk with you as a part of GymLeaderEd’s Monster Taming Direct! Our trailer featured Tadalon (a Water Type Kinfolk), some new abilities, a new song, and a touch of lore we hope you’ll find interesting. It took a lot of hard work to put together, and we really loved getting to share a more extensive look at some of our recent progress! Be sure to check out the full Monster Taming Direct for trailers and updates on 33 other games in the Monster Taming community!
Art / Design
We’re down to the final handful of animations for North_Star, and those remaining animations are in their final phases! This is the final Kinfolk we need for our current milestone.
The high-poly model for an important human NPC was completed this sprint! We’ve also completed more hairstyles and clothing items, and improved the rigging for many of our already-implemented hairstyles. One of the new hats is unique, and will require some extra work to make it fit with the hairstyles. We also made improvements to how human characters sway while walking around, especially on slopes. Previously, they leaned over too far in order to stay more or less perpendicular to a slope, which led to some unnatural results.
Concept art for a new major set piece is in the works. This is a larger point of interest that we plan to use in multiple locations in the overworld. Many of the final building models have also been placed in the town! We’re currently experimenting with different colors to create more variety between the houses. The result so far is very charming! In addition to the houses, we’re implementing many of the wall models we’ve shown previously.
Most of our cinematic scenes for this milestone have fully completed animations now! Soon we’ll be implementing these in engine. While we currently have some preliminary versions as placeholders, they use outdated models and animations. The other cinematic animations will be finished in the coming weeks, if not sooner. Additionally, we’ve been creating smaller cut scenes using standard animations. All in all, they’re really tying the sequences together!
We’ve continued creating VFX for new abilities! We also made a fix to the old VFX that indicates a summoning bell’s location after successfully capturing a new Kinfolk. The old version had a dark outline that didn’t look right, and the new version is much cleaner.
Our post processing effects have also been getting some love recently with the reintroduction of volumetric lighting, an effect that many will recognize by the stylish god rays it creates in atmospheric fog. Our original volumetric lighting solution was incompatible with the project after our switch from Unity’s Built-in Rendering Pipeline to the Universal Rendering Pipeline several years ago, but this new method seems to be working very well!
We also recently overcame a hurdle that was previously preventing SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) from working properly. The effect adds shading and depth in areas that need it and wouldn’t otherwise have it. However, in our case this also had the unfortunate side effect of shading our grass in a way that looked a bit like TV static. This is thankfully resolved now, but we’ll also need to mask out objects like character’s faces from the effect to prevent it from clashing with their toon shading before we can call it good.
Development / Combat
We’ve made a lot of improvements to character motion this sprint. For starters, we added additional fields to many characters’ locomotion blend trees, which improves how they handle sprinting or walking at slow speeds. We also polished the animation transitions/blends for jumping and dodging so all characters correctly play these animations and properly re-enter the grounded state. We were previously seeing some characters unintentionally entering the falling state when dodging on flat ground, or jump animations being distorted by blending into falling animations too soon.
We’ve modified how the NPC "Truce" state is triggered. This state is an alternative to dying in combat, where NPCs display a white flag and flee from the player for a few seconds before fading out. The Truce state now only triggers after an NPC takes fatal damage, and leaves them at 1 hp, with invulnerability for a very brief amount of time. Essentially, it gives the player the choice of allowing the NPC to flee to live another day, or to kill them in cold blood. Either way, the player will receive experience for defeating the NPC. This Truce state only triggers for specific NPCs, while others are committed to fighting to the death. By triggering the Truce state only after the NPC has received fatal damage, we hope players still feel the satisfaction of victory in combat, with the added option of showing mercy to your combatants in certain situations.
Adjustments were made to how we handle "teams" with NPCs. Teams are simply a way to categorize groups of NPCs who are affiliated with each other. We now have a way to categorize teams by name and index, and the beginnings of tools for easily modifying the relationships between teams. NPCs may interact with friends or foes in different ways depending on how their team views another, and these relationships can dynamically change in game. This opens up options for the player to talk their way into alliances with certain groups, starting combat via dialogue, etc.
We added functionality to force NPCs into interacting with smart objects, as a way for our cut scene and dialog systems to interface with NPC movement and animations via smart objects. We’ve also developed a bunch of nodes for cut scene logic purposes. Work is also being done to ensure that the timing of dialogue text, camera movements, and other cinematic events remain consistent regardless of the game’s frame rate.
Shrines now exhibit a special behavior when you first discover a new one! Undiscovered shrines won’t have the blue flame until you interact with them for the first time. The first interaction will also display a special dialogue and heal you and your team fully. Previously, the player would have to interact with the shrine twice in order to heal in this case, so the new method is more streamlined.
Our grass color tool needed a touch up to be more reliable when water was nearby. The color mapping tool we use to make the grass blend into the textures beneath used to reference the water layer as well as land textures. The result was some cartoonishly blue grass along the edges of lakes and rivers. This fix means we will no longer be importing any of the game’s grass from Kentucky, so it’s all that good green Hinterlock grain.
Thanks for checking in! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on September 22.
