Progress
On the animation side, we’ve spent some time focusing on the tail animator. Here’s an early WIP of Nyazen using the animator! You can see the tail flows smoothly behind them, even on tight spins, though we’re still tuning how much the tail “stretches” behind them in some instances.
The engine upgrade is in its final stretch! We're now running internal playtests of full Combat Arena Beta runs on the upgraded engine, and any issues we notice get fixed before the next run. Once those runs come back clean, the upgrade will be wrapped up and we can get back to making new content for the Early Access version of the game like we’ve been wanting to do.
As part of the upgrade, we streamlined how abilities are set up. Many abilities used to need their own custom code, so every new move meant writing and debugging something from scratch. Now abilities share a small set of common shapes (a projectile, a melee combo, a dash, a mine, etc.), and each one can be given their unique characteristics via the settings on those common shapes. Implementing a new move is now mostly setup time rather than new code, which means more variety for the same effort.
We’ve brought a lot of odds and ends to the upgraded engine this month. This includes 34 abilities, camera lock-on, NPC summoners, character death logic, a whole host of NPC behavior tools, and lots more.
Back in May, we talked about how our new combat-effects system would let our list of passive abilities grow quickly. Every passive from the Beta now runs on it, and we already have a few new ones working too! Passive abilities have also received the same treatment as active abilities. They have become more standardized and templateable. Just like for active abilities, this makes creating future passives easier.
We developed a very easy system to record combat and replicate bugs! Before, when we found a bug in a playtest, we had to try and recreate it by hand. Depending on the bug, this could take a ton of time to do and be hard to diagnose. Now we can record a fight frame by frame (where everyone stands, which way they face, every ability, every hit, plus snapshots of the screen) for later review. An automated checker then reads the recording against a list of gameplay rules we've written down (ex. feet should never slide across the ground, Kinfolk NPCs should never stand around doing nothing in the middle of a fight, etc.). Anything that breaks a rule gets flagged at the exact moment it happened, and whenever we add a new rule, we can make sure that all of the previous fights we recorded follow it. Problems that used to take hours to pin down now get detected automatically!
Community
In case you don't know, we post weekly on Bluesky! Here's what we've posted in the last month:
Fall Camping https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mwae3skggc2s
Unity Upgrade Progress https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mvoscpgyts2e
Improved FPS Performance https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mv52up5fi22l
Thoughts on Bargeist? https://bsky.app/profile/skymillstudios.bsky.social/post/3mulq6lqsuk2o
LeXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Automated tests: Tests that are programmed to run automatically whenever a new build is made. Reduces the need to manually test features repetitively (ex. making sure every ability works as intended for every character).
Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes.
NPC: A non-player character.
Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on October 30th. Until then, take care!
