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Combat Arena Beta is released!Apr 27, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsThe time has come! We're happy to finally announce that the Combat Arena Beta is available to download! We know it's been a long time, and as always, thank you so much for your patience as we've navigated unexpected delays and roadblocks. We're so excited for you to try it out! The Beta is accessible to those who own the Challenger package or higher, from either the Kickstarter campaign or Skymill store. It can also be purchased on Steam for $45 (the Steam price is intended to keep pricing fair for Kickstarter backers). If you've already redeemed an Alpha key in Steam, you should have access to Beta just through updating the game in your library and launching. If you have not redeemed any keys: Log in to the Skymill website using the email tied to your pledge https://www.skymillstudios.com/user-account If your pledge email is not one of the three login partners, log in with a partner and then link the correct email in Preferences under Account Linking Go to your Account Inventory. Find the "Closed-Beta Combat Arena Key" item and click "Redeem" and then "Show". Go to Steam. Hover over "Games" in the top bar, then click "redeem a product code". You can now put in the key shown in your account inventory and add the game to your Steam library. Note that the Steam listing for the game might still appear as "Combat Arena Alpha", but it will change soon when Steam gets a chance to fix it. It's a cosmetic issue only. If your account inventory is empty, ensure you're logging in with/linking the correct email. If you paid with PayPal, the email might be the one tied to your PayPal account. If none of this works, you can email us at [email protected], make a support ticket in the Discord server, or send a message on Kickstarter. You can also contact us if you have issues redeeming the key. While you're in your account inventory, we recommend also making sure your desired final game copy is selected! While the Beta isn't available on Switch, Switch backers are still able to redeem their Beta code on PC while still keeping their future access to Switch. Now, what's changed in the combat arena? For those who aren't familiar, the Beta was initially intended to be pure combat arenas like the Alpha, but we've decided to add a small amount of singleplayer content! We don’t want to spoil it for you, but here are some general major things to note/changes compared to Alpha: You can explore a small amount of the overworld and experience a variety of things, including bonding with and training Kinfolk. There are no longer any preset Kinfolk or items to use in PvP. You have to catch and train your team yourself, and find or buy items for them to hold! You cannot play a PvP match until you finish the intro fight with the Guild Officer at camp. There is one additional PvP arena, making the total six. We had initially planned to release with two more arenas, but we had to delay this due to technical difficulties. The other arena will be added in an upcoming patch! There ...Community Newsletter: April 2025Apr 4, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsProgress We’re in the final stretch of preparing for the Beta release (which comes out on April 26!), so we’ve been working on scrubbing the floors, polishing the candlesticks, and dusting the shelves for your arrival! Bug Fixes: This took up the majority of the month, since we want Beta to be a fairly polished experience. These were mostly related to newly explorable areas, NPCs, cooking, inventory UI, gatherables, capturing Kinfolk, Kinfolk evolution, saving and loading, asset management, and cutscenes. We won’t bore you with a full list, but here are some highlights: When the player character blacks out, there’s no longer an option to respawn at a shrine further away than the bounds of the observable universe! Removed an exploit that would allow for Kinfolk duplication as well as attaching one to your cursor in the box menu. Ensured that the player character always spawns with the default outfit (for now) to avoid situations where it might spawn in naked. Gameplay Improvements: Improved our inventory UI to provide a smoother experience when using items on Kinfolk. Item effects or lack thereof can now be previewed on hover, and then the item may be used with a single click. Improved our item quick use bar to support access to every inventory tab. The player can now cycle vertically through different inventory tabs and horizontally through items of that category. This allows the human character to use any item in their inventory without having to open the inventory UI, and even allows the human character to quickly use items in battle. Improved how "impactful" abilities feel by polishing effects like camera shake. Polished one of the Beta Kinfolk as a playable character which uses a few new abilities. PVP players will be happy to hear that control inputs have improved yet again! The server now assumes that a button is currently held if the button has been pressed more times than it has been released. Previously we networked every frame that a button was held, and this was prone to input errors if a single frame was dropped and the server thought the button was no longer being held down. By only tracking the more reliable press and release events, held inputs can be communicated much more reliably. Said simply, holding down buttons should be more reliable now. Controller Support: Added better controller support for the item quick use bar. The player can now hold L2 to activate the menu and navigate with the D-pad. Added controller support to almost all the remaining UI in the game. This includes the help menu, NPC shops, and the cooking UI. Added controller support to all of our tutorial popups. Any tutorial images that display button inputs now update the button image to show controller buttons if the player is using a Dualshock or Xbox controller, or they show keyboard keys if the player is using keyboard and mouse. Tutorials were the final area of the game where controller input display didn’t update automatically, so it’s nice to finally have...Community Newsletter: March 2025Mar 11, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsProgress This month, we focused on fine-tuning the game in preparation for the upcoming Beta release. This will be a fairly short newsletter, but we recently posted a very detailed overview of our development progress for the 5 year anniversary of our Kickstarter, as well as some major announcements about the future of Kindred Fates. If you haven’t read it yet, we strongly recommend that you do. We spent a lot of time putting this post together, so we really appreciated everyone who took the time to read it and share their support, thoughts, and concerns. In case you missed it, as a part of this announcement we shared a new Kinfolk, Briar_Heart! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/d2ad2b2b-51ce-4319-91ea-d50634c1f393/image00004.png?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/1c1de29f-2acd-4d34-bcb7-3058affb4dd9/bhpersonality.png?format=2500w We're working on introducing a sense of player progression to the combat arena. In the Beta, the player will start with only 1 Kinfolk instead of having access to the full roster of Kinfolk in the storage box. To build their team, players must bond with Kinfolk they encounter in the game world. Kinfolk will be able to level up and learn new abilities in the Combat Arena. We released a new patch for the Combat Arena Alpha last week! Some of the bigger changes are covered in this newsletter, but the Patch Notes contain more details. We’ve updated and standardized our Ability and Item descriptions to use language that we won’t need to updated every time we do a balancing pass, leaving less room for error. We tested and began implementing new art assets in the Overworld, which will be used in the Beta. This includes the explore-able single player area and Red Letter mode. We made additions to the starting tutorial to help players get up to speed. This includes instructions for things like connecting with other players for the Combat Arena. Currently, we are working on making the new explore-able area for the Beta accessible from the camp area in the current version of the Alpha. Networking updates: We made changes to how the game’s server runs, so it can now adjust its speed based on the performance of the host’s computer. This allows the game to run more smoothly with a faster response time. We modified our animation systems to help reduce the feel of network delay by up to 100 milliseconds. We modified how abilities fire to keep the local and remote versions of a player's character more in sync. It’s now much easier to reflexively dodge or block an enemy player's attacks in multiplayer because they are much more in sync. One of the smaller details we worked on was the trajectory of Twister when used by a flying character, helping it to more reliably land where the character is aiming. In this video, we use debugging tools to illustrate the path of the ability both when it’s being aimed and when it’s being fired. We’ve been making many si...Community Newsletter: February 7, 2025Feb 7, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsProgress This sprint we focused on some big networking improvements and bug fixes for the Beta, as well as quality of life improvements. We’re currently on track to release the Beta near the end of Q1 this year! General Improvements A flying character only lands when they touch the ground if you have recently pressed the "Descend" key. This allows a flying character to dash downward at enemies and still remain flying, but you can optionally press the descend key at any time to land. Pressing the sprint key while flying acts as a "Stop Flying" input, and immediately transitions the character into a falling state when airborne. We're working on a few improvements to the current tutorial. This includes things like adding a tutorial page for how to search for online matches and making the path toward the camp area more intuitive for new players. We're standardizing the text for item and ability descriptions so that they’re more accurate and include fewer numbers that change with patches. In the very near future we'll be starting on the final polishing pass for Red Letter mode! Networking We’ve finalized our work on reducing how much data we network for every frame of gameplay. We now send about 4 times less data every frame than we did before the optimizations. This should help alleviate any potential issues with bandwidth. We added client prediction to ability firing. Previously, a player's inputs had to go to the server and back before their character would start animating an ability. This caused noticeable input delay for remote players with high ping. Now, we allow a character to immediately start their attack animation as soon as the ability input is pressed, by allowing the local clients to "predict" that the ability will fire, as the ability inputs are still on their way to the server. This improves the feel of online play, and even shaved off some delay to ability firing that had existed in the single player. There is now zero delay between when a player presses an ability key and when their character starts animating in single player. We’ve prioritized the code surrounding abilities so that it’s more likely to be the first thing that gets networked if there isn’t enough bandwidth to send all of the data at once at a given moment. We’ve also reduced the size of our ability data to further reduce how much data is networked whenever abilities are fired. Work has started on further networking improvements that should help the game feel better for remote players with high ping. (Players who are very far away from the host player.) We're aiming to further reduce the feel of network delays and to keep the host and remote players more in sync. As a part of our bug fixes this sprint, we made multiple stability fixes to the storage box UI, and fixed an issue where the remote player often ends up dodging and shielding at the same time. By popular demand, we’re moving our newsletters to a monthly basis instead of biweekly. This way we can give more news...Community Newsletter: January 24, 2025Jan 24, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsProgress This sprint we focused on technical improvements to the Alpha like continued stability, bug fixes, and networking improvements to make the game more playable on poor connections. A few team members were out of town or sick for an extended period since our last newsletter, so this one will be a bit shorter than usual. The team is chomping at the bit to get back to our normal schedule, so we expect to have some more interesting progress to show next time! We modified how we reference and load our assets like characters and abilities. This allowed us to fix a 1 second hitch that would occur when summoning a Kinfolk for the first time after booting up the game, which has been a pet peeve of ours for a few months now. This also allowed us to have fewer assets loaded at one time, freeing up more memory. We added the concept of a "network handshake" when a remote player joins a host. Essentially, we now have a process of back and forth communication between the two computers where we confirm on both sides that the remote client has correctly joined the host and is ready to continue before the game progresses. This helps stabilize the game, as we can always be 100% certain that the connection has been fully established before other gameplay logic tries to run. On the networking side, we reduced the size of our player input data when it is networked to be over 3 times smaller! Our network actually sends the most recent input data plus the previous 3 input data for every frame, meaning that for every frame we send the 4 most recent input data (this redundancy helps solve various networking issues). So, because 4 of them are sent for every frame, reducing the size of each input data drastically reduces how much data we are networking for every frame, which should clear up a lot of bandwidth. We improved some of our existing multiplayer systems so that both players now see each other’s characters move more smoothly. Previously, some players would see choppy movement from the other player’s character because we were sending them less detailed information. It should now be much smoother as we use the other player’s actual inputs to move their character instead of just that character’s position data. We fixed a multitude of bugs, including one where a Kinfolk could end up having no cooldowns in the next arena round if it was the last one to die in the previous round. We’ll include a full list in our next patch notes! Lexicon The full lexicon can be found here. Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc. Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers. Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server. Input: Any button press, mouse click, etc. that a player does to tell the game what to do. Logic:...Community Newsletter: January 10, 2025Jan 10, 2025 - Community AnnouncementsProgress Happy New Year! The Skymill team had a great holiday, and we’re looking forward to making this a big year for Kindred Fates! Since we last updated the Alpha, we've been hard at work on UI improvements, stability, and bug fixes: With the addition of controller support for the Kinfolk management and Kinfolk ability pages, we’re nearing full controller support for all of our UI! We’ve simplified our button rebinding UI to allow 1 column for keyboard/mouse rebinding, and 1 column for controller rebinding. The third column has been repurposed into a "Reset" button per key-binding instead of a being a third binding slot. Button prompts on the ability bar and on the team viewer update as you change key-bindings for specific actions. We’ve streamlined the Give/Take Item options so that the whole process takes place in the storage box UI instead of forcing the player to equip characters, close the storage box UI, and open the team/inventory UI to give them items. We modified the "Known Abilities" UI window used for equipping abilities to now use a single click to select an ability, and a single click on a slot to equip that ability, instead of using click/drag. You can also reorganize equipped abilities by clicking an equipped ability and then clicking a different equipped slot to swap their positions. This window also has some new visual polish to make the process of equipping abilities feel more intuitive. On the performance side, we’ve fixed a memory leak in our scene loading, which should potentially help reduce crashing on PCs with RAM of 16GB or less. We upgraded to the latest version of Unity with Long Term Support, which gave the game about a 5-10% performance boost, better stability, and surprisingly cut down our build times to be almost 5x faster! This has already begun to speed up development. We’ve added loading windows that show when two players are connecting. Players should be able to connect to each other faster now! We added stability improvements and optimizations for how players join a multiplayer game. Instead of streaming roughly 10+ KB of data from the remote player to the host, we now only need to send about 900 bytes, a significant improvement. Most of these improvements will make it into the next Alpha update (very soon!), while a few of them will be included in an update after that in the coming weeks. Community Our heartfelt thanks go out to all the Alpha players who’ve been posting to our bug reports channel on Discord! It’s such a huge help for preparing the game’s combat to go out to a wider audience as quickly as possible. We’ll include the full (long) list of bug fixes in our next Patch Notes. Lexicon The full lexicon can be found here. Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes. Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers. Editor: (aka Unity ...Community Newsletter: December 14, 2024Dec 14, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress One of the most important things we’ve been focusing on for the next Alpha update is ensuring players are logged in to their Skymill account as soon as they launch the game. Earlier today we verified that this is working as intended for both old and new players alike. From here we will be conducting final testing with a small number of players outside the dev team to ensure everything is running smoothly. If all goes well, the next public Combat Arena update will be releasing shortly afterward. On the stability side, we fixed a problem that was causing the game to use up memory unnecessarily every time it ran certain background tasks. This issue was making some of our QA testers' computers constantly crash when they switched to another program or played the game for more than 15 minutes. In anticipation of the Alpha update, we’ve been working hard on optimization to ensure that this update will run well on PCs of various different specs. As a part of this effort, we’ve reduced the RAM usage from 16 GB down to under 8 GB. We also added quality settings: Very High, High, Medium, Low, and Very Low. These settings affect the graphics quality and FPS. While the game defaults to "Medium" with a good mixture of performance and visual quality, players are free to raise or lower their quality setting to better suit their PC. We are seeing the lower quality settings giving more than a 2x boost in FPS over the high quality settings. We also added a "RenderScale" slider in the display settings. This setting essentially provides a slider with a tradeoff between smoother gameplay and clearer visuals, increasing or reducing the resolution that the game is rendered at. Adjusting quality levels automatically adjusts render scale, but the render scale value can be further adjusted if desired to customize your display settings. Quality settings and render scale also play a role in memory consumption of the game. We recommend to keep the quality setting and render scale very low if you have 8GB of RAM. 16 GB RAM PCs should have an easier time, but if the game crashes, it may be because the PC ran out of memory due to other applications being open at the same time. Closing other applications or reducing the quality setting in-game may help alleviate this. We’ve made various improvements to our UI. It now supports ultra wide and 16x10 resolution monitors, dynamically scaling to fit the given screen resolution. We improved our ability info page UI so that the process of reading ability descriptions is much smoother. We added controller support for much of our UI. There is still some work left to be done on this front, but we are very nearly approaching full controller support for all of our UI. We added some prompts in our UI to help make it easier to navigate and use. We fixed a bug where option dropdowns in our UI would appear lopsided. We have successfully implemented offline local multiplayer (AKA, LAN battles/LAN co-op). This allowed us to demo PvP betwee...Community Newsletter: November 29, 2024Nov 29, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress We’ve resolved several major issues/shortcomings with the “Arena Boxes” feature, and have since renamed it to “Team Loadouts” to better communicate how this feature is used. Now Loadouts function much more like what our Combat Arena players are used to. For those who aren’t familiar, Team Loadouts allow you to create presets of Kinfolk teams with set abilities and held items. They now also have the advantage of allowing a single Kinfolk to appear in multiple different loadouts at the same time. For example, you can have a single Awburn exist in an "Offensive" loadout, and have that same Awburn exist in a "Sustain" loadout, which wasn’t possible with the old Arena Boxes. Each of those loadouts could also have Awburn using different abilities and held items. Loadouts should give players more flexibility in team building and promote experimentation with different team compositions and abilities. Players can also name their loadouts whatever they want. Our main focus continues to be the remaining features and bug fixes necessary for the next Alpha update. We're very close to releasing, with essentially just bug fixes to our new account system remaining before we can release. Our current rough estimate is that the update will be ready next week. We made several improvements to interaction prompts. These appear whenever the player approaches an object they can interact with. Previously this featured had fairly limited controller support, but it now supports a much wider array of controller types as well as mouse and keyboard. We’ve re-implemented regional matchmaking! If there have been more than 3 matches recently, players now automatically send a list of the servers near them with the lowest ping when queuing up for matchmaking. The matchmaking algorithm then uses this to match people regionally. We re-enabled saving/loading in the Combat Arena Alpha (we had previously disabled it while working out multiplayer matchmaking). Saving/loading works with the new team loadouts, and we fixed a recent regression where some characters were not working with save and load. Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue where the remote player's attacks did not respect the maximum firing distance of abilities on the server. This meant the remote player could fire Scorch and Explosion at 100+ meters. Fixed default usernames that are used for testing UI occasionally appearing during multiplayer matches. Fixed host's name overwriting both players’ usernames in multiplayer matches. Fixed dash abilities sometimes locking up the character when used directly after another dash ability. Fixed a bug that caused the frame rate to drop to roughly half of what it would ordinarily be after rebooting on some computer setups. Community https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/39bcd5b9-e3d9-40c5-addf-d76165ebe4ae/GC-CMH-WEB.png?format=2500w Kindred Fates is coming to GalaxyCon Columbus December 6-8 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center! Like previous event...Community Newsletter: November 15, 2024Nov 15, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress The combat arenas’ weather profiles have been updated (likely one of the final visual improvements before we release a new build for the Combat Arena Alpha). This lets us create unique weather conditions for specific areas, often related to changes in lighting. While the regular lighting in the first picture is good for general use, the arena-specific lighting helps to make the arena to stand out stylistically. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/ae1e2682-c3a7-4f8f-8d91-22df77b44087/ToweringForest1.png?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/978d2268-50c3-47b0-af04-6ab148325443/ToweringForest2.png?format=2500w We’ve implemented public matchmaking in-game. As of now, testers can easily queue into public matchmaking by clicking the "Public" button within the matchmaking UI. The game is now much better at resetting its state after ending a multiplayer session. It used to be that joining a multiplayer session and ending it would leave lingering changes to the state that would cause errors when trying to initiate a multiplayer connection for a second time. It’s now possible to initiate a multiplayer connection for a private or public match, return to single player at the end of the match, and then restart a new multiplayer connection repeatedly without issue. We’ve added additional validation steps around joining a host's game after accepting a private invite. This ensures that accepting an invite only moves forward with sending the remote player into the host’s game if a connection is possible and the host is not already busy in a different multiplayer match. This validation process is automatic. If it fails, the player who accepted the invite will be notified that they failed to connect to the other player because they’re no longer online or they’re in an invalid state to host them. Players will now be able to cancel matchmaking or disconnect at any time within the matchmaking process without crashing the server, which was a prevalent issue until recently. They can also disconnect at any time within an arena match without crashing the server. When players disconnect during a match, the other player is notified of the disconnect and is given a way to exit the match. A nice quality of life improvement: we’ve reduced how much time it takes to connect two players by roughly 5 seconds! Woo! We modified how we organize our assets so we can easily swap between Combat Arena Alpha builds and test builds for the full game. This way we only include released content within the game's files for builds that we release to the public. Next Steps Our next big update to the Combat Arena Alpha is extremely close to being ready to release. We’ve finished all of the features (things like getting matchmaking ready) and are just down to fixing bugs. While it’s looking like Combat Arena Beta 1.0 won’t be ready until sometime early next year, we’ll be continuing to update the Alpha versi...Community Newsletter: November 1, 2024Nov 2, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress The past two weeks have been a whirlwind! After pulling some long hours to get everything ready for our booth and GDEX demo, we had a wonderful time sharing the game with everyone we met during our three days at GDEX. While we were there, out of a pool of roughly 70 games, Kindred Fates won the award for best in show art and design, as well as being runner up for the best in show unreleased game! This was a huge honor for our team, and it truly validated the countless hours we’ve spent agonizing over character designs, animations, set pieces, ability effects, music, lighting and all the little details that help bring Kindred Fates to life. Coming out of GDEX we got right back to work, taking all of the feedback we gathered and applying as much of it as we could to the demo in time to show it all off again at Torg! We’re pretty happy with what we managed to squeeze into the demo in the five days between shows, and we can’t wait to share it with everyone at Torg this weekend. For those who aren’t able to see us in person, here’s a quick look at one of the videos we’ve been playing on loop at our booth. So, what did we get done these past two weeks? Here’s a breakdown: Implemented the results screen for arena matches. Added the new player vs AI mode that allows players to play full arena matches against a team of AI opponents. Created 4 AI difficulty levels, each with their own teams, for PvAI mode. Added the lock on feature to the game’s tutorial. Added a target for the player to lock on to in the tutorial area. Added a shout to prompt the player to try locking on to to the target in the tutorial area. Resolved an issue with fog near the edge of the game’s map. Enabled the swap Kinfolk UI buttons to display gamepad icons. Fixed an issue that prevented the game from loading if you didn’t have an internet connection. With the exception of PvP, the game can be played entirely offline. Temporarily allowed Kinfolk to interact with types of objects that they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to interact with. This is something we did to streamline things for the demo, but we’re also treating it as a sort of trial run to see how Kinfolk handle a little extra freedom. Added a new location to the world. Enabled the game’s interactables to better support gamepad. Added boundaries to the demo’s tutorial area to prevent the player from falling off the cliffs and dying. Added a shout near the 2nd tutorial where a party member asks you to summon them. Extended the black screen before loading in for the first time so that the player doesn’t see their character’s clothing load in. Reduced the depth of field intensity a bit to that objects in medium range don’t appear too blurry. Added a system that allows separate music tracks to be assigned to each arena. Added a new basic controls tutorial for jumping, dodging, shielding, swapping, attacking, and lock on. Prevented NPCs from leaving the combat area mid arena battle. Added controller support to the ready up an...Community Newsletter: October 18, 2024Oct 18, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress We finished implementing our new "Ready up" screen. This is a new feature that was not present in the Alpha Combat Arena, and it allows you to select which of your customized team loadouts you want to use in your next PvP battle. You can also choose to battle with your current party if preferred. You’ll have about 45 seconds to select your team before being forced to lock in your choice. Once both players have locked in, the match begins. There are still a few improvements we’d like to make to this feature in the future, but for right now we’re happy to have it up and running. We’ve nearly finished implementing the Results screen, which will display once a PvP match ends. This screen is pretty similar to the one that showed at the end of matches in the Alpha but with a few small visual improvements. Private matchmaking now has a complete loop that can be navigated entirely with the in-game UI (no special dev commands needed!). Players can send invites to other players for a one on one match, then when the other player accepts the invite, both players are teleported to the arena and the match begins. When the match ends, the players are returned to the areas they were in before starting the match, and further invites can be sent for additional matches. We fixed a memory leak that was causing a few megabytes of memory to be used every second. Left alone, this could add up over time and cause computers to crash or seriously degrade performance. We reduced the amount of memory allocations per frame by nearly 95%. Memory allocations during runtime are bad because as the memory adds up, the computer will later have to spend extra time clearing that memory space as it frees up, which causes hitches in the game's performance. By greatly reducing how much memory is allocated per frame, these hitches are now essentially non-existent and the game should hold a much more stable FPS. The load time after clicking play in the main menu has been reduced by over 10 seconds- a pretty noticeable difference! We modified our world streaming system to support loading between "Load Configs": pre-selected configurations of specific tiles of the world’s terrain that are loaded in at a given time, instead of relying on regular world streaming that loads all tiles around the player within a given radius. This is especially handy for areas like the multiplayer hub and arenas, as we can now control exactly what gets loaded or unloaded between areas. The map for Red Letter mode is getting a major overhaul. All of the placeholder art is currently being replaced with final art, and some big terrain changes are being made to accompany that The outlines of certain intractable objects now light up to make it clear that the player can interact with them. Apart from being a nice little bit of polish, this helps make it really clear which objects can be interacted with, especially in a chaotic environment. Bug Fixes: Fixed the player loading into the world without any defaul...Community Newsletter: October 4, 2024Oct 4, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress We’ve implemented a good chunk of our new in-game UI for multiplayer and networking activities. This UI can be accessed at nearly any time during gameplay and currently has 3 tabs: Match Making Lets you choose a specific game mode, queue up, and send invites. A public matchmaking button which allows you to instantly queue up for a match of the selected game mode. A private matchmaking button that opens up UI to easily invite the most recently logged in players, any online friends, or allows you to manually type in the name/tag of a player to invite. Inbox Allows you to accept/decline invites to matches, and in the future will also be used to invite for co-op play. Allows you to manage friend requests from other players. Friends List Allows you to see a list of all your friends, manage them, and see when they were last online. The UI visuals in the video above are definitely still a work in progress, but being able to go from playing by yourself to starting an arena battle, all through the in-game UI, is a big step toward our next public release. After extensive bug testing, Windmill is very near parity with the current live account system and will probably be deployed this next sprint. NPCs are working properly in multiplayer. This included fixes to NPC target selection and ability aiming so that NPCs are capable of fighting host and remote players. We re-implemented round state UI used to visualize details about the current state of a PvP match, like player names, how many rounds each player has won, time remaining in the current round, etc. We also implemented arena boxes. These are storage boxes that hold 4 Kinfolk each. When joining a PvP match, a player can designate if they will use their currently equipped team, or a specific arena box team. We recently finished work on the visuals for a non-arena location that will be accessible in the Beta. You can see a small peak of this area in this twitter post from earlier this week! Community We’re going to GDEX this year! Come see us in person at our booth from October 25th through the 27th at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Talk with the devs about Kindred Fates, enter a raffle for a free plushie, and even play an early version of the upcoming Combat Arena Beta with us! This version will also include some brand new content that has yet to be revealed. If you can’t make it that weekend, don’t worry, we’ll also be attending TORG, also at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, from November 1st through the 3rd. Hope to see you there! Lexicon The full lexicon can be found here. Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server. Input: Any button press, mouse click, etc. that a player does to tell the game what to do. Local Client: The player who is experiencing the gameplay with their own inputs (ex. controlling a character with keyboard presses). When you are ...Community Newsletter: September 20, 2024Sep 20, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress We created a new ability called Anti Air. We’re especially excited about this one because 1) it gives grounded melee fighters a new tool for dealing with aerial combatants and bringing the fight back to the ground, and 2) it gives you a cool new way to follow up on knock up attacks and end combos in an explosive way. Here’s an early peek at how it works: We’re almost finished setting up two new arenas, both of which feature set pieces we’re really proud of. The final art and bounds are complete; all that’s left is to tweak some lighting settings and touch up the distant terrain. We’re especially looking forward to sharing the environmental storytelling for one of them. These won’t be the last arenas we create for the beta release, either! Multiplayer Stability Fixes: We improved our ability and stagger code to be more reliable. (Fingers crossed) all of the bugs that can cause a character to lock up when firing an ability have been fixed. We made several improvements to how we synchronize server and client character positions. There is now less rubber banding and characters are much better at keeping their positions in sync. We modified our hit notification reticle to rely on the server to know if a player has been hit. Previously, the remote player’s computer might think that an enemy was hit but the server didn’t see it, so that player might get a false positive from the hit indicator. The new version always takes the information from the server to ensure both players are getting the same information. We fixed an issue where sending too many aim and fire inputs in rapid progression could put the game in a bad state. Characters now reset to the correct positions when a new round starts. Before this change, both players would occasionally spawn at the same location. Bug fixes: Fixed errors that were causing the host player's PC to crash when playing in one of the new arenas. Fling was not firing on the remote player’s side. Characters would fly off in random directions when swapping between them. Quicksand didn't prevent the remote player from dodging or jumping like it’s supposed to. The Germinate passive used to stop working after being staggered. Fixed NPCs not aiming some attacks correctly due to recent optimizations on input handling. This week we fully deployed the website portion of the new account system (Windmill) for internal evaluation and testing. Work also began in earnest on the in-game portion which will replace matchmaking and post-round stats with much more reliable systems. Be on the lookout for more about that in our next newsletter! Lexicon The full lexicon can be found here. Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server. Input: Any button press, mouse click, etc. that a player does to tell the game what to do. Local Client: The player who is experiencing the gameplay with their own inputs (ex...Community Newsletter: August 23, 2024Aug 23, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress The first week of this sprint, we fixed up just about every currently documented bug related to combat and abilities specifically in multiplayer. Here are a few of them: The lock-on camera wasn’t working. Homing attacks were targeting the user instead of the enemy. There were some issues with animation synchronization, causing some Kinfolk to do an ability animation twice. If the host player used an ability that caused the reticle to change, the other player’s reticle would change as well. Buffs and debuffs were not being displayed or calculating damage correctly. Minion attacks like Stunner Flies weren't moving on the remote player’s side. Gaia minions and damageable objects like Rock Wall were only showing their health bars on the host side. There was an issue with Lumala’s passive, Soothing Aura, that made it so you had to press a swap key twice in order to swap to a character other than Lumala. The remainder of the sprint has been largely focused on improving how our multiplayer systems handle data in order to reduce lag and keep gameplay smooth during multiplayer matches. While it can be complex and tedious work, it will make a massive difference. Here’s how a match looks as of now: We halved the amount of input data sent from players by changing how NPCs send their inputs. NPCs were a special case that sometimes needed to send twice as many inputs when a Summoner NPC was giving commands to its summoned Kinfolk, meaning they were both moving at the same time with different inputs. By reducing this data, we’ve made the network more efficient since inputs are sent back and forth to the server every frame. We have additional plans to reduce the size of this input data even further. We combed through much of the data that is networked every frame when a character is running around and animating, and we greatly reduced how much data is sent per frame. For example: In PvP when both players have 4 Kinfolk, there are 8 Kinfolk in total with data that could be networked. But, we actually only need to network the data of the 1 Kinfolk that each player is currently using. We are also looking into other forms of optimization such as adding priorities to how data is being sent, to ensure that higher priority data is always being sent first, and also limiting certain less important data to be sent less often. Aside from these optimizations, we made a few other changes to improve the feel of multiplayer. We've been looking into necessary adjustments to how often the server updates the game on the smallest possible timescale to avoid scenarios where the server and remote clients get too far out of sync. We've also been looking into adjustments that should allow local inputs (how quickly your machine responds to your own inputs) to feel much more responsive, and networked characters to move more smoothly by making more use of client prediction. We began work on a new non-arena location that will be accessible in the Beta. Progress on this area is ro...Community Newsletter: August 9, 2024Aug 9, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress Recently our primary focus has been on making optimization improvements to the game’s multiplayer connection quality, including for lower end computers. One way we track our progress with these improvements is by monitoring the game’s framerate when two players are connected and playing together. If the frame rate is too low, it can have an even bigger impact on connection quality than ping. Over the course of the last two weeks we’ve seen frame rates increase from an average of 24 frames per second to 83 frames per second on some of our test machines. The demo below was recorded on higher end machines with a good internet connection. The start of this sprint was largely devoted to finishing up the slate of combat and quality of life improvements we’ve been working on for the past few weeks. After firing the last charge of a basic ranged attack, the ability will now go on cooldown for a short time before refreshing all of the charges. We have greatly improved the quality of our camera shake. Now the shakes are much more compact and do not accidentally move the camera off-center, or cause an abrupt snap back near the end of the shake. We added smooth camera transitions for summoning and recalling Kinfolk. This makes the transition between playing as a human and playing as a Kinfolk much smoother. You can take a sneak peak on Twitter! When you stagger an NPC as they’re starting an attack, they will now attempt to fire that ability again after the stagger animation ends. If the NPC is continuously stagger locked, they may attempt to dodge away or try a different ability. Previously, NPCs had a tendency to stand still like a punching bag if they were staggered frequently enough. The ability bar UI is getting a makeover! In general, there’s a lot more visual feedback, making it easier to tell at a glance what’s going on with your Kinfolk’s abilities. Ability slots briefly animate and flash white when their key is pressed. Ability slots that just came off cooldown also play a small VFX. You can see these changes in our Twitter post from this week. Ability slots that are disabled or on cooldown play an error animation and flash red when their input is pressed while still on cooldown. Combo abilities like swipes display a white version of the cooldown bar to visualize time remaining between combo hits before the combo is automatically ended and put on its full cooldown. If an ability is currently being aimed, or if the ability can be reactivated to cause a secondary effect, its ability slot will now pulse white. Bug fixes: Our water had a pretty noticeable but low priority visual glitch for some time that is now fixed. We were under the impression it was related to the upgrades to our lighting system, and that it would take some digging to figure out, but thankfully it ended up being a simple fix! We fixed issues with characters occasionally locking up after using a dash attack, as well as a bug where tutorial popups could lock up the player. We...Community Newsletter: July 26, 2024Jul 26, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress We’ve improved the visual and audio feedback for when you successfully dodge an attack. Dodges now display special visual and audio cues, as well as briefly slowing time when the player successfully avoids damage. This makes dodging attacks much more satisfying and rewarding! The brief period of slow motion gives you a moment to react and potentially begin your counter attack, plus it just looks cool. Let us know your thoughts on if this time slowing effect should be included in multiplayer, or if you think the feature should be single player only! This has been another sprint full of combat improvements. On top of dodging, we’ve added new VFX in a few other places to improve clarity and visual quality. All Self-Spawn and Cone Attack abilities now have impact VFX upon hitting an enemy. When you successfully shield an attack, a special impact effect will indicate that the attack was blocked. Melee impact VFX also rotate to better match the direction of the attack. Super armor is finished and has been added to each ability that requires it. This feature grants the user immunity to stagger as well as any effect that would forcibly move them during the ability. The exact length of this immunity time varies depending on the ability. Some bulkier Kinfolk even have super armor while using certain abilities where others do not. We've added some classic red “taking damage“ edges to the screen’s UI. Naturally, this effect appears whenever the player takes damage, lighting up and making it clear which direction the damage came from. We've added an option for some abilities to activate only when the user collides with the ground. This is particularly useful for attacks where the user slams into the ground. At long last, all character dodges and abilities now support a short period of animation canceling at the end of the animation. That might not sound like much to some, but this fixes an issue that has hampered the feel and flow of combat since the early Alpha. No more waiting half a second after your dodge fully ended to be able to fire an ability. No more waiting a weirdly long time after launching your first attack to return to your idle animation so you can fire your second. This has been a massive improvement to the feel of combat and we can’t wait for you to try it out. Of course, attacking and dodging will still require meaningful commitment, and tankier Kinfolk will still have animations that last longer than average, but now you won’t feel stuck in between like before. Combo attacks like Swipes will also allow for animation canceling with movement inputs. This allows players to move in between individual hits of certain combo attacks, and even space them out a bit if they choose. This means if you hold forward, and click Swipes once, the character will swipe once and then cancel out of the end of the attack’s recovery animation to start running forward again. This helps combo attacks feel much less unintuitively restrictive and more fluid....Community Newsletter: July 12, 2024Jul 12, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress Our aiming reticle has some new flair we’re pretty excited about! Now when you hit an enemy, a hit indicator appears. This indicator gets larger and redder the more damage your attack deals, and builds with successive hits. This sprint, we made significant strides in improving the feel of combat. Of the features we discussed in the last newsletter, more than half have been implemented, including improvements to screen shake, hit pause, and creating chunkier VFX for many abilities. We've made it so any ability can add extra character motion on a per-ability and per-character basis. This is similar to root motion (something we use for character movement during abilities) but isn't tied to animations, giving us numerous new options for polishing the feel of abilities and certain characters. Here is an example of how that can look in gameplay. Ranged basic attacks now have a set number of charges in addition to their normal short cooldowns. We are still testing the number of charges and the recharge time, but so far we’ve seen that by turning ranged basic attacks into a more limited resource, players will have to change up their combat tactics while they wait for them to recharge. This design decision was made after noticing that many playtesters defaulted to simply kiting and using ranged basic attacks, and we hope to instead guide players toward using their other ability slots, using shield and dodge, or swapping characters. We fixed multiple issues with combat: All projectiles were unintentionally piercing through multiple enemies. Now, only specifically designated projectiles will have this ability. The basic attack aim reticle could sometimes go missing and wouldn't return unless the game was restarted. Characters were sometimes able to launch abilities even while in a stagger animation. Abilities can no longer be spawned while a character is staggered. Characters wouldn't always reset their stagger animation to the beginning if they were staggered again. Now, the stagger animation always resets to the start whenever it is triggered. Dash attacks did not always move toward the lock-on target when lock-on was active. Now, they always go directly toward the target when the player is using lock-on. This sprint we finished a major stability milestone with multiplayer, mostly related to informing the player’s machine about how good the connection is rather than just trying to connect, failing, and trying anyway (resulting in a bad state). On the account system side, in this upcoming sprint we expect to fully switch over to Windmill: Our new account system backend with increased functionality and fixes for bugs from the old system. Thanks in advance for bearing with us for any downtime or issues while we move over; we expect it to be fairly unnoticeable. Next Steps Looking ahead, a lot of our remaining goals for the simplest version of the Beta revolve around restoring functionality from the Alpha— Things like the logic for navigating matchma...Community Newsletter: June 28, 2024Jun 28, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress With action combat being a core pillar of Kindred Fates, and especially for the upcoming Combat Arena Beta, we want combat to feel better than ever. We gave a lot of careful attention this sprint to planning out the specific feature improvements and polish needed to make the feel of combat really shine. A few of these improvements include: Adding some amount of forward motion to any melee attacks that currently have none, and maintaining a bit of momentum when using melee attacks while running. This prevents you from feeling stuck in place while using melee attacks, and helps combat feel more fluid. Adding a feature that’s often called “hit stop” or “hit pause” to a lot more of our melee abilities. Hit stop is a feature that very very briefly pauses a character’s attack animation right at the moment they damage a target. This makes hits feel more chunky and satisfying. Adding a very small amount of camera shake to more abilities when you hit a target. This further helps make hits feel more weighty and satisfying, but keeping the effect subtle is key! It’s easy to overdo screen shake and when that happens it’s more disorientating than it is satisfying. Adding the concept of “super armor“ to certain abilities. While using an ability that has super armor, your Kinfolk cannot be staggered, stunned, feared, pulled, knocked back, or knocked up during that ability’s attack animation. Bigger and brighter impact VFX on attacks that need it. Some of our impact VFX are a little underwhelming, which in turn makes hits feel less impactful than they really should. A whole host of tweaks to AI combat behavior to keep NPCs challenging, while making their attacks more react-able. A lot of these combat feel improvements fall under the old adage of “if you’ve done it right, they won’t notice you’ve done anything at all.” Basically, when it’s there it feels good and you don’t think about it. When it’s not, you notice that it feels bad but it can be hard to put your finger on why. We’re looking forward to implementing these improvements and more in the near future! But it hasn’t been all planning! A good number of improvements have already been made and are having a big impact on the game’s feel. Here are some of the more interesting changes: Combo abilities like Swipes now allow you to aim each individual hit, instead of locking you into the rotation of the first swipe. More melee abilities allow the player to aim for the entire duration of the animation leading up to the ability firing, instead of locking the character into the initial camera aim when the ability key was first pressed. The melee lock-on camera follows moving targets more smoothly, and aims slightly downwards when the target is very close, making it easier to gauge melee distance and preventing dizziness when rotating around nearby targets. Shielding and jumping inputs are more responsive. We have been exploring the idea of adding more "wow" factor to our abilities, and having more interest...Community Newsletter: June 14, 2024Jun 14, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress When you completely run out of time to retrieve your Kinfolk’s soul flame, a brief cutscene now plays where they speak their final words. Long-time fans will find it reminiscent of the old Final Hope Message trailer. This gives your fallen party members the proper sendoff they deserve. We’ve written 60+ unique possibilities for the dialogue in this cutscene, so far. There are several factors that impact what a Kinfolk chooses to say in these moments, with one of the most notable being your Bond level with them. During your playthrough, we expect that you’ll lose multiple Kinfolk. However, you’ll likely never see the vast majority of dialogue possibilities. A large part of the reason why we’re writing so many variations is to help ensure that when you do lose someone, it feels meaningful. Losing a Kinfolk you’ve grown close to is a very emotional experience, and we’re definitely leaning into that here. Below you can see a comparison of the graphics for the original Final Hope Message video and the cutscene you can expect in the game: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/a05adffc-24cc-45bc-ae8c-86ee5fee63f5/fhm+square.gif?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/fceec87b-457f-485c-ad56-3ff2e7444cdd/SoulFlameGif.gif?format=2500w Jumping has been given some needed TLC. We fixed issues where it wasn’t costing stamina properly, and could send the character in odd directions if they weren’t on solid ground. Previously we had also introduced a .15 second delay to the upwards velocity of jumping, but now it’s closer to being instant again. We added the concept of "Coyote Time" to our character controller. Coyote Time is a term in game development for a small window of time in which the player is still able to jump after they have already walked off the edge of a platform. This improves the feel of platforming when the player is often jumping off the very edge of platforms, and ensures that their character always jumps when the player intends to jump. We removed an inconsistent delay at the start of shielding, so now it activates sooner and feels more responsive. We also fixed a bug where the cost of holding shield was not framerate-independent, meaning that if Player A ran the game at 30 fps and Player B ran the game at 60 fps, and both started holding shield at the same time, Player B’s shield would run out twice as quickly. During playtesting we noticed that it was very easy to accidentally use all of your stamina when sprinting, which resulted in characters often becoming fatigued. To help improve the feel of sprinting, we added a visual indicator where the stamina bar turns orange as you sprint while under 30% stamina. We also made some adjustments to the stamina costs of sprinting to give the player a bit more time to cancel sprinting before the character becomes fatigued. Reminder: The "fatigued" state happens when a character reaches zero stamina, and characters c...Community Newsletter: May 31, 2024May 31, 2024 - Community AnnouncementsProgress Babe wake up, new movement tech just dropped. One thing that’s always been clear is that melee-focused characters frequently struggle to close the gap against ranged opponents. We’ve made a number of changes to help address this so far, but the latest is lunging. Now, activating any melee attack within a short window after jumping will cause your character to jump forward while using the attack. This addition helps to extend the effective range of melee characters and has generally improved the feel of combat overall. A few important things to note: This isn’t some frame perfect input that only the best players will be able to execute. The move can be easily executed by anyone, and more importantly, it’s consistent. You can also influence how high and how far your character travels by adjusting how quickly you press the attack button after jumping. Over time, the game’s “Time to Kill” (or TTK) has gradually gotten shorter and shorter. Changes like new active and passive abilities, varying Kinfolk levels, EVs and IVs, and regular balance adjustments have all contributed to Kinfolk generally hitting harder, and taking fewer hits on average before they go down. This is especially noticeable at lower levels where a difference of 2 or 3 damage points has far greater impact. In the Combat Arena Alpha, we restricted all Kinfolk to level 50 and used that as a benchmark for finding the right pace for combat. We settled on a pace where, given an even matchup, players would trade blows in a healthy back and forth- anticipating their opponent’s next attack, dodging, shielding, and swapping between party members to continue the fight. It’s very important to us that we keep that same feeling going into the Combat Arena Beta. So with all that in mind, we took some time to carefully readjust the game’s damage calculation, bringing the TTK back in line with where it was previously. At level 50, the pace feels right back where it should be. At level 6 the pace is slightly slower, but in a way that we’ve seen is helpful for brand new players trying to get a feel for combat. It’s a stark difference from before the change, where 1v1s at that level would regularly end in 2 or 3 seconds after only a few basic attacks, or in 1 Firespin against an Air type. The accuracy of projectile paths has been greatly improved. Projectile aim was sometimes being skewed a bit off course if the path intersected with a character in certain cases. This was less noticeable in open areas, but became more apparent in confined spaces. We also recently uncovered an issue that had been lying dormant since the early days of the Combat Arena Alpha. Instead of firing the projectile where the player is currently aiming, it was causing them to be fired in the direction they were aiming at a whole 8 frames in the past. These attacks feel much more responsive after the fix. In addition, we raised the default camera position for several Kinfolk, particularly the shorter ones with lots of ran...
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