Progress

Prophect

In preparing our trailer for Gym Leader Ed’s Monster Taming Direct for this year, we spent some time polishing Prophect as a playable character. This included things like improving the VFX for some of their abilities and making slight tweaks to their animations. We also created a new graveyard Point of Interest to use as the set for the trailer, and made some tweaks to our nighttime lighting to improve visibility.
In case you haven’t seen yet, here is our trailer from the most recent Monster Taming Direct:

Tadalon polish:

Marking abilities like Tidemark now carry over when an enemy swaps characters. This improves usefulness of the Tidemark ability and encourages more engaging counterplay with dodging and shielding as apposed to swapping characters if you get marked.
Marking abilities now have better support for marking multiple enemies at once.
Fixed a bug where Tidemark’s dash could cancel the ability just before applying the damage of the final dash finisher.
Improved how Tadalon animates when using Aqua Launch, and Tadalon uses headlook while aiming it.
Fixed the Ripple-Splash ability combo occasionally getting stuck on Splash indefinitely. Also fixed an issue where the Splash ability could be accidentally given to other characters in your party if you used ripple and immediately swapped characters.

Items:

We consolidated our code used for held items, consumables, cooking, and powerups in Ether Run. This allows us to reuse different effects between any of those items, which helps speed up development and allows us to support a diverse variety of effects with cooking and held items for example. Our framework for item effects is now very solid and could even help us develop Kinfolk passive abilities more quickly in the future.

Cinematics:

We added support for skipping through dialogues and camera transitions in cutscenes. This greatly speeds up development when QA testing story related gameplay.

Community

We had a fantastic time at GDEX again this year! As always, it was wonderful getting to show the game to new people, chat with longtime fans, and give out some Awburn plushies. We’re thrilled to say that Kindred Fates won Best in Show - Unreleased Game this year! (The trophy is currently being shipped to us, but as soon as we get it you’ll be the first to see.)

In case you don't know, we post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted in the past month:

The full lexicon can be found here.

Build: A playable version of the game.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Headlook: Code that tells an NPC to look in a specific direction.
NPC: A non-player character.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Summoner: The people in Hinterlock who can summon Kinfolk.
UI: User Interface. The layout of information on the screen, including menus, health bars, etc.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on October 3!