[News] What we've been up to!
Hello everyone!
I just wanted to pass by because this restructuring of the combat + the beginning of the new NPC system, is taking much longer than we expected. I wanted to release a demo this week since the new quest is done, but due to other parts that need improvement, we can't do so yet. So I'd like to clear a few things up:
We are writing quests and adding story to the game in the meantime, while the programmers take care of the back-end improvements.
The current situation is that the NPCs are not 100% working as they should. The code before what we started to implement was making it so whenever we spawned an NPC, it took some milliseconds. Which is fine if we don't have many on screen, but unacceptable when we want to build a city. So we're reworking that side of how we dress up our characters to a more optimal way, so both spawning new characters on screen becomes instant, and the weight they will have on performance just to exist in town will be minimal.
The new combat requires us to re-implement features such as biting after parry, blood spilling on the floor when Kalyskah lands a hit, and general VFX and polish. Although the input is flowing much more smoothly than before, and we have the combat flow that allows Kalyskah attacks to go faster and cause more damage, the more hits she lands without taking damage, it still lacks all the features that the old combat had.
We are also analysing some portfolios to see whether we can bring someone new onto the team to speed up the introduction of new cutscenes in the game.
So the goal here is to work on several areas in parallel, and once we have a stable version, we'll release it with more content than the average monthly/bimonthly releases we've been doing this year. Just bear with us a bit longer, and we plan to show some of the new content during the next week. Including the UI for the combat flow (work in progress), some bits and pieces of the new cutscenes, and also an area that we'll enable you to explore. We don't have an ETA for when it will all be done yet, since we would rather be cautious and avoid introducing bugs than rushing things and releasing them unfinished.