Combat Arena Beta

Released a new version this month with Prophect as a playable character along with various bug fixes! We’re very excited to finally get a new Kinfolk in your hands. Their unique ability list should give plenty of options for those that enjoy Lumala and/or Skulken’s gameplay. They have one of the most interesting and unique playstyles that players have had access to so far. Prophect's combination of Light, Dark, and Mecha abilities mean that there's several different meaningful skill expressions available to different types of players at different skill levels.

Progress

We’re still continuing work on the Unity 6 upgrade with the main focus on our addressables asset pipeline. This mainly affects things like dialogue trees and NPC functionality. Addressables is basically just the framework Unity provides that allow devs to decide what assets are currently loaded into the computer's memory. For example, in a large open world with a lot of different environments, locations, characters, it's important for only the relevant assets where the player is currently exploring in the world are loaded into memory. That way there's never too much loaded into the RAM, which can overwhelm low-end hardware. Another example is ability handling. With these improvements, we can have something like a boss fight include a lot more projectiles in their attacks than before.
Worldstreaming (ie. loading and unloading chunks of the world) has gotten much more efficient as a result of these upgrades. We’re able to make the environment itself much more lightweight and the heavier assets like NPCs can be loaded in separately as the player roams the world.

All of this to say that performance should be much better when you’re traveling the open world and it allows us to design the environment with fewer technical limitations.

This month we’ve been working on rigging and animations for two different Kinfolk models in tandem, Nyazen and Humble_Shepherd! These are both special as their designs came from the community instead of us. Nyazen was the winner of the cat contest that we did way back in 2020. Humble_Shepherd was submitted in response to an art prompt. Both designs perfectly capture what we’re going for in Kindred Fates, and we’re still very grateful to both community members for letting us highlight their designs. We have an idea in mind for Humble_Shepherd’s official name, but we’re not fully settled on it yet, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer!
While Nyazen isn’t quite ready to show yet, we have a look at a freshly made animation for Humble_Shepherd ready to show to you all. Also as a reminder to those who haven’t seen it in awhile, right below we also have the original concept art vs our revision of it. For the animation, keep in mind this is the first pass and it still needs polishing!

Our main goal at the moment is finishing our upgrade to Unity 6. There’s still a ways to go, but we’ve come a long way so far. The process of switching will be worth it in the long run! Once that’s done, our focus will turn back to fixing up the current game for the Early Access release.

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

The full lexicon can be found here.

Addressables: Basically just the framework Unity provides that allow devs to decide what assets are currently loaded into the computer's memory.
Behavior Tree: The instructions that tell an NPC how they should act in different situations.
NPC: A non-player character.
Optimization: Making the code run more efficiently, so it takes less processing power to achieve the same effect.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
World Streaming: The process of breaking up large terrain into smaller tiles that can be unloaded if they aren’t visible from the player’s current perspective. Reduces processing power needed to run the game.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on April 24th. Until then, take care!