PROGRESS
The past month was an absolute whirlwind of progress as we prepared to release the Combat Arena Beta, which came out on April 26th! For players with a Challenger tier package or higher, you can read about how to access it here. We’ve had a great time watching people explore the new additions and it feels fantastic finally having some single player content in people’s hands.
Since we worked on so many different things, this newsletter will be a higher level overview than usual. From here, our main focus is going to be increasing stability, fixing bugs, and adding some quality of life features that didn’t make it into the initial release. For upcoming Beta patches, one of our biggest priorities is tracking down a certain crash and preventing corrupted saves.
If you haven’t played the Combat Arena Beta yet and want to go in blind, you may want to skip this next section. These bullets will function more or less as patch notes for the Beta. While it’s not everything that has been changed, most of this work was what was necessary to turn the previous version of the Combat Arena into the Beta.
Added the Kinfolk Brihorn and Kainite as newly playable characters!
Implemented a cutscene where you choose a starting Kinfolk for the Combat Arena Beta. This particular cutscene is unique to the Combat Arena and will not appear in the full game.
Enabled character customization. Added controller support to the character customization UI. Fixed issues where facial details were washed out and other misc bugs.
Revamped our tutorials for capture, using healing items, death, and shrines/revival. Ensured that these tutorials show at appropriate times.
More reliable matchmaking that creates matches with the lowest ping between two players.
Improvements to how matchmaking invites are sent and received. Added controller support for the networking UI.
Tuned NPC spawners in the explorable area and added nighttime spawners.
Added the ability to enter character customization inside the game via the mirror in camp.
Added camera zoom as a slider in the game settings so controller players can adjust camera zoom.
Adjusted clouds in our weather settings and fixed issues in some ability VFX that caused the clouds to render in odd ways when rendered behind the VFX.
Prevented the player from being able to sell certain important key items, so the player can't accidentally remove them from their inventory.
Final fixes and polish for the item quick use hotbar.
Forcing a characters healthbar to be visible when locking on to them.
Re-enabled the "recall" vfx when a Kinfolk returns to the summoner and polished how it looks.
Added improved NPC navigation features to allow Restless Kinfolk to better chase the player during Ether Runs.
Added "Summoner caches" which are interactable chests that only the summoner can open.
Item popups always show for the resulting item when cooking.
Balanced the rate at which characters gain exp from combat.
Balanced the levels at which different Kinfolk learn abilities.
Balanced the levels of NPCs.
Balanced the cooldowns for some of the new abilities
Finalized the environment for Ether Run, a new mode that puts a monster catching twist on classic wave based survival (previously referred to as Red Letter Mode) Here’s some gameplay if you haven’t seen it!
Bug Fixes from before release (Non-Exhaustive)
Ability shards weren't always adding the ability to the Kinfolks known abilities.
Fixed a bug that caused all characters to stop rendering as the build process was stripping important character shaders.
The special attack buff from Leaf Barrage was never going away.
Leveling up and learning a new ability in an empty slot was causing the Shield ability to stop working.
Fixed issues with using homing attacks while playing on a controller.
The player could gain exp by damaging friendly NPCs in camp.
The player could knock around friendly NPCs with any ability that had a pull or knockback.
Cooked food items would break upon saving and reloading the game.
Death cutscenes could freeze under certain conditions.
Fix issues with NPC spawning in horde mode.
Hitting already dead enemy Kinfolk continued to reward experience.
Sweets (an Embear NPC in camp) was capturable.
Punching as the player, or using hotbar items could lock up.
Death cutscenes weren't pausing NPC AI, allowing them to continuously attack the player while they were in the cutscene.
Death cutscenes weren't pausing other soul flame timers, allowing other soul flames to burn out while the player was in a death cutscene.
Soul flames could surprisingly carry over from old saves in certain conditions.
Held items in the player's inventory would activate when punching enemies.
Mushrooms and rock salt were not working as cooking ingredients.
The game would lock up if the player joined an arena match with no Kinfolk equipped.
Fixed issues with character swapping that could result in the player being teleported outside the map.
Puzzles were not saving when they were completed, causing them to show up again when returning to an area.
Fixed issues with some pickup items when they were picked up by a Kinfolk.
In case you don't know, we also post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted over the last month:
Player Character Facial Details: https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3lmgjmt76fs2y
Unraveled Slyphur: https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3lmyendtzoc2x
Copious Phantom Kinfolk: https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3lnjtoreelk2p
Save File Slots: https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3lo2lhcsti22j
Community
In case you haven’t seen yet, we're now running an advanced testing group! This is a group of volunteers who are given early access to potential Beta updates and test it for bugs before we do a public release. To join, all you have to do is make several high quality bug reports on our Discord server, and you will be approached. Note that the ATG group requires the signing of a non-disclosure-agreement.
We want to give a huge shoutout to our ATG and Beta players who have been giving us so much helpful information for finding and squashing bugs! Thank you all so much, your help had a big impact on the experience at launch.
A member of the community commissioned an artist to draw a group profile picture featuring other community members and some of the dev team! It was encouraging to see and a fun way of celebrating the Beta’s release.
As a fun exercise, we'd like you to answer this: after you've played the Beta for a bit, tell us about your favorite Kinfolk partner! What nickname did you give them? What's their personality type? Did you survive any harrowing situations together?
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Red Letter mode: The codename for Ether Run, the new wave survival mode included in the Combat Arena Beta.
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.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on June 6.
