It’s finally here!
This is without a doubt the biggest update to the Combat Arena Alpha so far, and with it, comes the long-anticipated Practice Room. We’ve also added 7 new NPCs to train against, made some serious improvements to the game’s performance/stability, added a new Mecha Type ability, updated the music, and more! There’s a ton to cover this time so let’s get right into it.
New Game Mode
The Practice Room:
See that Mechid? You can fight it.
The Practice Room is a single-player arena that can be accessed from the main menu by clicking “Play” and then “Practice.” Here, you can easily try out your Kinfolk’s abilities, improve your skills against the AI, practice combos, experiment with new strategies, and generally get comfortable with the game’s combat outside of online PvP matches.
The room itself also contains many useful features, such as…
Kinfolk NPC AI:
The sparring partners that are always there for you. Scattered around the edges of the room, you’ll find NPCs for each of the currently playable Kinfolk. They’re pretty laid back most of the time, but if you attack one of them they’re more than happy to give you a fight. If you defeat one in combat they’ll respawn right back where they started so you can continue practicing for as long as you like.
Each species of Kinfolk behaves uniquely from others in combat, complete with strategies geared for their particular move pool. You might find that some of the AI are more challenging than others!
With this being the debut of our NPCs and their AI, there are bound to be a few bugs and quirks, but rest assured, we plan to continue polishing these up and making improvements wherever they are needed.
We’re really looking forward to hearing your feedback!
Item Pick-ups:
Head to the upper level of the Practice Room and you’ll find many useful pick-ups to interact with. On the left, you’ll see colored circles with item icons for each of the currently available held items in the Combat Arena. Simply walk into the circle and your Kinfolk will be given the held item.
kinfolk Pick-ups:
On the right-hand side you’ll find a similar arrangement of colored circles with Kinfolk portraits above them. Simply walk into the circle and your currently active Kinfolk will change to match the Kinfolk above the circle you walked into.
Keep in mind that at the moment you’re only able to have 1 of each Kinfolk in your party, so stepping into a circle containing a Kinfolk that’s already in your party won’t do anything.
hurt, heal, and revive:
Between the item and Kinfolk pick-ups, you’ll find 3 more circles. The pink one deals damage, the green one heals, and the yellow one revives any defeated members of your party. These will continue activating as long as you stand in them.
Time of Day controls:
On the opposite end of the room, you’ll see a transparent glass wall with icons for different times of day. To change the time, just shoot at one of the icons with any skillshot, and the time will change to match the icon that was hit.
GAMEPLAY CHANGES
Performance Improvements:
Massive optimizations have been made across the board. We took a look at basically all of our code, trimmed the fat where we could, refactored in other places, and in general vastly improved frame rates.
FPS is higher across the board, with some of us having as much as a 200% increase. In one particular stress test relating to character controllers, we saw frame rates go from 3 to 70!
We’ve also identified a few other places where improvements can be made in future patches to continue boosting frame rates even further.
Stability Improvements:
The game is more resilient across multiple matches. Now when you go back to the main menu (from the practice mode or from a normal alpha arena match), you start from a completely clean slate.
This means there should be far fewer instances of you having to restart your client to play again.
Revamped Arena Logic:
The code behind our arena logic is now cleaner and more extensible. This should have relatively little impact on the player-side for now, but it makes coding up new or future game modes (such as 2v2s) much easier.
Aim Canceling:
This seemingly simple improvement has really improved the flow of combat for nearly every character! You can now cancel into other abilities while aiming by simply pressing their key.
For example, when playing as Embear, if you are aiming Scorch and then press the key for Fire Spin, Scorch will immediately cancel aiming and Embear will use Fire Spin. Any ability that has an aiming mode can be canceled into any other ability this way.
This is especially helpful when using aimed abilities that have multiple charges, since it means you’re now able to quickly place just 1 or 2 charges and instantly cancel into another ability without re-tapping the key for the ability that’s currently being aimed.
Stat Changes:
In a recent patch, a change was made that affected how stat buffs and debuffs are reset during combat. This change wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the patch notes previously but it’s something we’re continuing to try out with this patch.
In short, changes to your stats no longer reset when swapping Kinfolk. Some users might have already noticed while playing, but we thought it was probably best we let you know about it here too.
It might finally be time to consider equipping a party member with one of those fancy debuff abilities…
Updated Music:
The Combat Menu and Valley Battle music tracks have been polished and updated to their most recent versions.
The next public update to these tracks will include live recordings!
New Ability: Crush
Description:
Mecha Type. Base Power 30, Physical.
The user slams down in front of them, crushing their enemy with the weight of their armor. This attack gains 20 Power for each stage the user's Physical Defense has been raised.
Usable by Mechid and Shovlet.
BUG FIXES
Fixed many many bugs caused by the addition of the Practice Room before it was introduced in this patch.
Fixed many more bugs related to NPCs and their AI before they were introduced in this patch.
Fixed broken flower shaders in Forest and Riverside arena.
Known Issues
Currently, there is no visualization to display how much a Kinfolk’s stats have been raised or lowered during combat. We plan to add visualizations to address this in a future patch.
Occasionally NPCs will stop responding to attacks in the Practice Room. A temporary fix for this is to simply leave the Practice Room and then return.
Currently, NPCs are unresponsive for the first 6 seconds upon entering the Practice Room.
When your party is revived after they all die in the Practice Room, the Kinfolk in your first slot is not revived.
Some of the visual effects for Crush are not properly displayed in the Practice Room.
Shovlet’s NPC has no name. He will no doubt be named Shovelbutt next patch.
The visual effect that signifies whether a buffing ability has successfully applied the buff to the character always plays, regardless of whether or not the Kinfolk attempting to buff themself was interrupted and prevented from receiving the buff.
The damage descriptions for several abilities that do not have Tick Damage, show a total Tick Damage amount.
Occasionally, players with low ping do not return to the current starting position between rounds.
Large AoE attacks currently only damage one minion at a time.
On rare occasions, one team member begins the second round with abilities locked.
Occasionally, attempting to cancel searching for a game results in the matchmaker locking up.
Often times teams can not be edited while searching for a game.
