Community Newsletter: March 2025

Progress

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!

• 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 similar changes that are smaller on their own, but overall have a big impact on the game’s polish.

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.

• Networking: The process of sending data between machines