We’ve received some feedback that our newsletters have been difficult to understand. Thank you to those who let us know, and we’re sorry for the technical jargon. It’s easy to take that sort of vocabulary for granted after using it every day, but we want our updates to be approachable for everyone. We’d like to try including a lexicon of dev words at the end of every newsletter. Let us know if it’s helpful, and if there’s a word you think should be added!
DESIGN
The town we've been working on is very close to its finished version. This sprint, we put the houses in their final positions, adjusted the pathways, and added details like mailboxes, street lamps, bushes, and flower beds.
We created a detailed map of planned encounters for one of our biomes. This includes physical points of interest and interactions with NPCs, both friendly and hostile. Some of these encounters have been written well in advance, so we're looking forward to getting them fully implemented! On top of this, we’ve worked on writing a new encounter that uses our NPC summoners- more on that below!
We created and implemented a new SFX for item pickup. We showed our previous version in another newsletter, and we received feedback that the sound was jarring. We’ve made a new version with a different angle this time, and we hope you agree that it’s an improvement! We also have a different SFX for “special” items.
We’ve finished implementing a very involved cutscene complete with new dialogue, animations, set pieces, and several large VFX. It took a long time and hard work from multiple people, so seeing it in its final form is really satisfying!
We’ve nearly finished 2 part cutscene that introduces several core features, such as Restless Kinfolk, the Fog, and morality.
A human character who plays an important role in the game's story is currently being implemented. We recently finished rigging their model to be able to handle custom cutscene animations, and are looking into options to make a unique piece of clothing look even better during these cutscenes.
We recently added a ton of new sound effects for cutscenes, abilities, and various actions. Now that one of the most major cutscenes so far has all the SFX required for it, it feels a lot more real!
Development
We’ve added tooling that helps improve the workflow for creating and testing dialogues and cutscenes. Cutting down on a few simple but frequent actions is going to save us a ton of time moving forward!
We fixed several bugs so that NPC Summoners are now capable of battling other NPC Summoners. This has some interesting possibilities, such as 2v2 fights with NPCs!
A large focus this sprint was adding more variety to world exploration in the form of Kinfolk spawners. On top of the points of interest and encounters, this is one of the ways we’re most excited to create density in the overworld.
As always, we’ve fixed many, many bugs. Among them this sprint were a stutter in the player character’s running animation, being able to punch a character while in dialogue with them, and the Stunner Flies ability being aggressive from too far away.
LEXICON
Asset: Essentially any in-game model. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of the game and depicts part of the storyline.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
Logic: The programming side of any feature. For example, “cooking logic” would be the base level programming for the cooking mechanic.
NPC: A non-player character.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Point of interest: An area given special care and attention, intended to draw the player’s interest. An abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods filled with strange notes would be a point of interest.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
SFX: Sound effects.
Set piece: A model used in the environment, such as buildings, statues, etc.
Shader: An effect that changes how things visually appear in the game. Shaders can do many things to alter overall appearances.
Spawner: Code that spawns Kinfolk or NPC Summoners into the world. We can give them a multitude of settings to spawn based on time passed, or enemies defeated, etc.
Sprint: A two week period used for organization. Our newsletters are released on the last day of our sprint.
Summoner: The people in Hinterlock who can summon Kinfolk.
Tooling: Dev tools that help improve efficiency.
VFX: Visual effects. Kinfolk attacks, dust clouds, water splashes are all VFX.
xNode: The software we use for handling our dialogue implementation.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on November 3.
