Happy Friday, friends!
It's been a slow couple weeks over here as we all recover from a wicked cold that hit the whole family pretty hard. But we're mostly back on our feet and have been hard at work on the next update.
Our top priority right now is the skill trees and we're getting really close! Only one tree left to knock out and a few skills here and there from the other trees.
Here's a sneak peek at one of the abilities I finished up today for the Rogue's tree.
While I've been working my way through the skill trees I remembered that with the weapon stats and skill trees that weapon balance was going to be all over the place. Not to mention that bows and spears have been in a bad spot for quite a while now. And two handed weapons have felt a little left behind after we set up the combo system for the other weapons.
So I spent a few days last week working on a full rebalance of all weapons. This time based entirely on the weapon's level, so we don't have to spend time balancing every weapon we add to the game. This works really well and tweaking the strength of individual weapon types is very simple now.
Two handed weapons got a boost in not only damage, but their physical size, making them even more viable against groups of enemies. They also received two additional attack animations.
While working on those attack animations I decided that since the greatswords and warhammers were SO huge now that it wasn't very realistic for the player to hold them in the default idle state. So I dove into adding some basic combat idle states to make combat look a whole lot cooler.
Since the last digest I also took a break from the priority stuff and managed to sneak in one of the Kickstarter weapon design rewards, and with it I added a new spell, a new outfit and a new secret quest. I don't want to spoil too much about this one, though so you'll have to wait for the update to find it!
Since we're coming close to wrapping up skill trees finally we've been talking about the best way for you guys to fully experience the new class-based skill system and I think we've decided that we want to release them with the game's first official dungeon.
We're not sure on the details yet, or which dungeon we want to release first, but I'm sure you'll catch me on Twitch sometime this month working on it.
That said, since this is going to be one of the biggest updates we've ever done, right along size the Farmlands and Windless Woods updates, it might not be ready until later this summer.
Janna and I take a few weeks off every July to work at a girl's game dev summer camp, so be prepared for that next month as well. Though we'll still stay in touch via Discord throughout the camp.
If you want more sneak peeks or to just chat with Michael and I, join our Discord! We're in there daily!
Thanks for all of your support!
- Michael
Kindred Games