Hey, thanks for the reply Luca, we somehow missed this comment. Indeed, we haven't abandoned the project, but we don't really psoted updates on itch anymore. We post all our latest updates on our discord server these days!
Hi, this tech demo is not representative of the state of the game anymore, so we pulled it from itch. A completely overhauled version is in internal/closed testing stages for now.
Hi! We haven't tested it for x86 bit specifically, but it should work! You can get the old build for free on our Discord - and be sure to let us know if it works (or doesn't)!
Hi there! You can download the old build on our Discord! We've just started internal alpha testing with a new build, which will be available to all members of the Discord in a few weeks!
Yes, it is! If you haven't yet, you can subscribe to our e-mail newsletter which we'll use to send out development updates. There's a signup form on our website: https://www.kinstrife.com/
You can navigate directly to the installation folder and launch the executable from there. (Typically: "C:/Program Files (x86)/Kinstrife/bin/Kinstrife Pre-Alpha.exe")
Apologies for the inconvenience, we have changed servers since the last public release.
We're starting a new development milestone this week where we combine our physics based collision & damage model with our new and vastly improved actor controller - that also includes armed combat!
We also appreciate your patience and sticking around with us! It really means a lot to us.
So i really enjoyed this , been a chiv player for years and already have like 600 hours in mordhau but i still come back to this from time to time and im sad to see it hasnt moved forward. If those games make you feel defeated in anyway please dont , cause i still wanna play it and i love those games also. Cheers and good luck !
p.s. i think i hafta have like 200 hours easily with what little is developed in Kinstrife hahah I NEED WEAPONS! i also forgot to add i have about 500 hours in Blade and sorcery and i still come back to this ! <3
Woah, we're really happy to hear that! :D Rest assured, despite things having been quiet recently, we're still very much busy developing the game with all-new and exciting kickass technology! Including a weapon system that's much better than what we had started building for the preview build.
Well, that was savage. It's not like we don't feel bad about this ourselves :D
However, we're two people doing this in addition to earning living wages at the moment, so things are still progressing slower than we'd like. While we would like to quickly reach a point where we can focus on this project full-time, we do not want to sabotage the technical foundation of this project, which would bite us in the ass down the road. This is especially the case because we're self-taught game developers, so many of the previous prototypes - the pre-alpha build included - were not suitable as a foundation for a full-fledged game and were valuable learning experiences. Armed with this knowledge, we've spent the time since 2018 to build such a foundation, which is paying off handsomely now that we work on gameplay features again.
Alright, enough for this mini-rant - know that we're just as frustrated about not being able to show off cool new features or release new builds and that we're working our asses off to make that happen again soon!
As a gamer, I understand LoSboccacc's frustration. But as a fellow programmer, I really appreciate your response. Thanks for sharing your hard work and creativity with us thus far.
LoSboccacc, you may already know about it but, if you need something to tide you over, check out Mount and Blade: Bannerlord. It's in early access, but it's very fun and may scratch the same itch that Kinstrife will some day!
Thanks for your supporting comment! It's definitely tough having to tell people they need to be patient, even though it's been a pretty long time.
Bannerlord is actually a pretty good example, it's taken them around 8 years and it's actually become a bit of a meme implying that it'll never get released. But, there it is!
While I personally haven't played it yet (no time...), the two of us working on Kinstrife actually met on the Mount & Blade forum and it's certainly been our initial motivation for getting started with this project.
So, yeah, thanks for your comment and I hope you'll stay tuned in :) Things are moving very quickly for us with Unity ECS and the new rendering pipeline.
I just purchased the Alpha, tried starting it, and it keeps telling me "Error" followed by "can't find remote versions list." I am unable to even start the game, may I get some support? It would be greatly appreciated!
I believe it was just the launcher that was acting up, because I went to the root folder and opened the actual application instead of the launcher and it worked!
We currently port the project to the newest version of Unity (the game engine we use), set up a UI framework because UI development can be a huge time sing and of course work on campaign continues.
Hey. I have 2 questions before I buy the game.
(1) I will pay $ 5 and get access to all versions of the game (alpha, beta,
full release) is this true?
(2) Will my copy of the game (purchased at this time on this site) be available to me in Steam after the release?
Alright,first of all,i want you to know how much I WANT to buy this game.
Whenever I see words "physics based combat",i am already sold out.Sadly,there is no way for me to support you,since I can't buy this game via credit card.Still,i will do my best to support you guys in any other way I can.
Unfortunately the payment options on itch don't seem to work out for some people, but we'll definitely be on steam in a couple of months! In the mean time, though, there will be a couple more dev logs, though, so we hope you stay tuned :)
I think you guys are doing God's work with this and I wish you the world.
I only hope that eventually the physics based gameplay and combat become so optimized that people can play faster and plan ahead more easily. I think that should be the current goal for games like these.
Thanks for the encouraging feedback, it means a lot to us :)
We shipped a lot of performance optimizations in the last update, so things should be running a lot smoother. Combat speed is a tricky thing to balance. We're convinced it needs to be a bit slower than in real life to offset the reaction penalty you have because of the additional input layer (think keyboard & mouse input.) Another thing to consider is that movement has 'weight' in our game, so it's not possible to cancel an attack and immediately blocked. As you said, planning ahead is an important aspect there. However, this poses another difficulty by itself, because with physics, there's very emergent and dynamic gameplay which is even very hard for us as developers to predict and plan ahead for.
All in all, these are things we want to balance based on feedback in the community. We are also in the middle of setting up infrastructure that allows modding, so people can also directly change some of the physics and weapon stats by themselves to see what they like best.
Thanks for replying. I was incredibly surprised by the array of options available and they made me feel much more comfortable immediately. Best I could suggest for it is an in-game keybind menu. Was blown away by the FPS but still a little confused as to why it still felt choppy.
You said you're working on the weapons right now? Shouldn't the footwork get more attention first? Or you doing both?
And you say that but that was some of the fastest and most realistic fist blocking I've seen in any FPS besides maybe COD. We're approaching those speeds. How do you balance fast, close and dirty combat in the heat of the moment? Is it balanced in real life? The only plans made in those moments are usually instinctual.
By the way, could you give a tutorial on the attack system and explain it? The UI looks angle based but there only seem to be four moves... And if I only move the dot a quarter outwards, the punch either looks like I extended my hand a little or it juts out away from the reticle.
If there're only four moves and they need to charge or whatever, why not just use MB Warband's attack system?
And have you considered adding eye/headtracking support if you want angled attacks? The camera locking up really shouldn't stay.
Thanks for the elaborate feedback! It's super helpful and actually the main reason we are making the game available at such an early stage.
That feeling of 'hm, something doesn't add up quite right' yet about the flow of things is something we want to balance out with feedback from the community. As you mentioned some issues with the input system - maybe that could be the 'missing part' that kinda puts you 'out of the flow'? You're also right that there's not a lot in the way of tutorials or introductions - this is something we want to tackle soon. We have not done so, however, because we haven't settled on a control scheme yet. This is a topic we've put a lot of consideration into - one of the things we've decided was that unarmed and armed controls are going to be different. This also ties in with your observation that there only seem to be ~four moves: This is actually due to the fact that there are only really three types of different boxing attacks - straights, upper cuts and hooks. They may target different body targets and be executed with either hand, and their angle may also change slightly. But they are generally limited to pretty narrow angle ranges that also do not really transition very fluidly. This is of course because we for now take grappling, throws, choking, clinching and elbows out of the equation. Contrast this with weapons combat, where swings can transition fluidly in the upper 240° - which you can actually do with our armed combat. That is one part of the question why we do not adopt the same attack scheme like M&B. Another is - we do not like essentially just 'watching' attacks unfold after the 'charge' was 'released' in M&B. It creates a disconnect between what is happening on the screen and what you actually do/control as the player. Another issue is that it causes a delay to attacks. We instead work with a 'guard' system - think about the 'charged' state in M&B, e. g. a raised arm, ready to strike. Actors would mostly be in a 'guard' state that allows for very quick strikes from that position, but also telegraphs the angle. Strikes from vastly different angles take longer in contrast. It's all very early, but there's been great progress. You can see a gif of it in action here: https://twitter.com/KinstrifeGame/status/1034078220918943744
By the way, have you explored the different attack control schemes (e. g. drag & release etc.) yet? Any thoughts on that?
Regarding footwork - Do you mean general combat movement or how footwork aligns with attacks? The former is actually because we currently do not have proper animations for combat locomotion. You'd be surprised, but the majority of combat locomotion uses crossed feet... Which can be especially fatal with physics based combat and tripping ;) It's very high on our list of graphics-related things we want to get replaced, though!
As for speed - that's a good question and may even be up to personal taste in games. As you said, reactions in real-life are very instinctual - trying to put up one's hands to protect the face is a super important instinct. But also reactions like 'uh oh, I should probably duck now and avoid that hook' are very instict-based - which is not an issue in real-life because that very easily and naturally translates to movement of the body. But with games, it has to go the route of remapping that to a game control scheme and clicking buttons. There's certainly going to be a noticeable delay and it's something we need to keep in mind.
Again, thanks for the elaborate feedback and we're super happy to have discussions like that! But for the sake of posterity & overview, we'd love to bundle discussions like these over on our forums. So it'd be great if we could carry on there :)
EDIT: Woops, just saw you've already signed up and posted there :)
You are almost a god to me at this moment with your willingness to submit this even longer reply. Why don't we just add each other on discord and chat like buddies?
We've been considering a discord channel, but we've noticed that our communications are spread out a lot already. We'd like to be able to respond quickly & as in depth as necessary, so we decided that narrowing things down on our forums will likely work best for us for now. If at some point a lot of people ask for an official discord channel, we'll certainly reconsider, though :)
Hey kinstrife! I have read a few of your updates and devlogs and just purchased the Alpha preview. It is very exciting to see you all build something out of passion despite lacking funds.
I will play around with alpha, and keep my eye out for a few more devlogs. Hopefully I can support on a monthly basis soon after that!
Sorry for having missed your comment :( We're very glad that our dev logs and updates transport the passion and time investment we're putting into this project! We hope you've enjoyed the alpha and will be joining us along for the ride :)
Wow that's very generous to give the full game for 5 dollars! I'll have to try it out when I get to my good computer. Would you say you guys are inspired by Mount and Blade in anyway?
Speaking of physics based combat you might also want to check out the Examina game as well. Good luck on your game!
Quite frankly, we do not necessarily see it as selling the game at this point, it's more about getting people on board early. We'd like to reward those who stick around with us for the majority of development, after all :)
We certainly are inspired by Mount&Blade! Funnily enough, we met on the game's forums and also modded that game. We have also clocked in dozens of hours in Exanima and are following its development with great interest as well.
You're quite quick in declaring a project dead ;) First of all, we're still going strong and soon have lots of cool new things to show. Expect a dev log in a couple of days. Second thing, we don't do this full-time, so sometimes things just get in the way of development. That is bound to happen until we can support ourselves from developing the game. Third: We've been working on the game (before going public) for years. We're not just going to throw the towel just because we haven't posted an update in a couple of weeks.
On a more serious note: We're still in the middle of figuring out how to go about this whole public communication thing. We're still very much behind this project (as our response rate may indicate) - we're just having a hard time communicating that progress. Since we've been developing in 'seclusion' for so long, we still need to find a good groove to keep you guys in the loop without diverting too much time from actual development. We first thought streams would be a good idea as well as video dev logs. We then found authoring those too time intensive, considering that we have to, you know, develop a game :P We then scrapped the video production mid-process and decided it's better to keep it for major updates.
We realise we've done a pretty poor job at that since the release, so we've started opening up more to our patreon backers recently, posting less 'filtered'/scripted dev upgrades. We'll round them up and turn them into an official update soon. And cut us some slack, we're still new to this whole PR thing :D
Hey. Today I bought your game and I'm delighted. Very much like Exanima, but much steeper. I would like to see in the game weapons and optimization. But for a team of two people it's very cool. I wish good luck in working out!
Hey, thanks for the supportive feedback! We're super happy about the comparisons to Exanima - it's been one of our references for how dynamic we want our combat to be. Armed combats is currently being finetuned and we're planning to publish more information during the weekend, so stay tuned!
PS: We also appreciate people getting in touch on our forums because we'd love to get the community involved in the development through discussions and Q&A sessions. So if you're up for it, it'd be great to see you there :)
Due to popular demand we're going to add an early version of armed combat (with some low-level weapons), as well as a more performant brawl scene on high priority. Hopefully this won't last more than a few weeks, but don't pin us down on it!
As a small update, we're making good progress on that end. For the next release, however, we will focus on improving hand to hand combat (and adding in various options to tweak your experience.) Based on that feedback, we'll polish armed combat further as we want the first impression for that feature to be really good :)
You pay for the current version and get future versions all the way to the full release as we sincerely appreciate people supporting us at this early stage.
Great to have you on board then! We're currently a team of two, and we've become quite efficient working with this team size. We will soon start doing dev streams for a look behind the scenes for our patreon followers, too.
Due to popular demand we're going to add an early version of armed combat (with some low-level weapons), as well as a more performant brawl scene on high priority. Hopefully this won't last more than a few weeks, but don't pin us down on it!
This game looks like it is going to be awesome once it is completed. I only had two major issues I wanted to address (other than minor bugs). The first is that the controls are very frustrating for me to play on my laptop. It runs fine, but it is nearly impossible to turn the camera using the trackpad while walking or running. I am using an HP omen, just to give further detail. Do you plan on allowing controller (Xbox one, specifically) use for this game rather than just the keyboard? The second thing, and this could definitley just be an oversight on my end or something I am doing wrong, but there are no other NPC's in the courtyard with me and I can't seem to go into any other areas where there might be, so I didn't really get to test out any of the hand to hand combat. Other than that I am very excited for the continuing progress on this game, it looks like it is going to be phenomenal.
We hadn't anticipated on people trying to play using the trackpad, so everything is tested with a mouse and keyboard. We did include controller support (I will update the ingame cheat sheet), however that is only tested with an Xbox 360 controller so far. You should be able to plug in the controller at any time and control the character with that.
The courtyard is to display your creations so as soon as you create multiple characters, they will all show up in the courtyard. You can also spawn random characters by pressing 'insert' while in the location.
Thanks for the feedback, and good to see you're on board where we want to take this going forward!
Hi, thanks for the encouraging comment! We do agree that we need to make improvements to performance, especially the courtyard scene has not been thoroughly optimized. This is one of the reasons we're showing this as an alpha preview; we believe it is the first version we can give out to people to show our vision and our work so far, but we're at the same time aware that there's still a lot to be done, including performance optimizations.
Out of curiosity, how do the other parts of the game run for you and what are your system specs?
I have gtx 770, i5 4670k and 16gb ram at 64bit OS. Main menu and Armory works at 45/60+ fps (almost smoothly) as squad show case and caste run at 30 or below.
Still the potential is great. For me this lands somewhere between exanima and overgrowth (where exanima is my all time favourite and overgrowth is good but still meh) Not bad at all for an alpha preview!
I see, ideally, we'd want the game to run @ 1080p on high settings at least at a stable 30 FPS with such a setup. Since Unity (the game engine we use) currently also does a lot of work on optimization, I'm hopeful we can get closer to that goal in the coming months.
But we're very excited to hear you've enjoyed this preview and hope you'll stay tuned for the next updates! If you'd like, you could also drop in on our forums for more feedback & discussion on ideas for features, improvements, etc. Cheers!
Hi! Physics in the game are based on the PhysX framework, so essentially simplified/streamlined numeric rigidbody physics. In addition to that we also fine-tune e. g. collision reactions by applying additional forces based on the state of a character, for example to simulate muscle strength and/or constractions.
Running a lot of physics computations is definitely resource intensive, but to some extent necessary for the interactions that make up physical combat. So, no, it's not really feasible to attempt physics based combat without a framework like PhysX, especially not for a super small team like us.
What we will be doing, however, is trying to utilize the CPU more fully (as in, make better use of multi-core CPUs) and see where we can offload some potentially computationally expensive stuff into more streamlined/simplified versions handled through custom code.
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Comments
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hi,how download this game?
The big question, though:
Can you shoot yourself from a catapult?
have you abandoned the project?
no they didnt abandoned the project
Hey, thanks for the reply Luca, we somehow missed this comment. Indeed, we haven't abandoned the project, but we don't really psoted updates on itch anymore. We post all our latest updates on our discord server these days!
Will this be on Steam eventually?
Yes! We're working on a gameplay demo that will precede an Early Access Steam release :)
why not put the game on itch.io?
Hi, this tech demo is not representative of the state of the game anymore, so we pulled it from itch. A completely overhauled version is in internal/closed testing stages for now.
Hello, thanks for the response!
how to get the game
Note that this reflects a pretty old version at this point - you can still get it on our Discord server, though.
works for 32xwin bits?
Hi! We haven't tested it for x86 bit specifically, but it should work! You can get the old build for free on our Discord - and be sure to let us know if it works (or doesn't)!
ok!
this is awsome please share info with me so i cna help get the word out. curretly helping the dev at black thorne keep chronicles
how do i download dev
Hi there! You can download the old build on our Discord! We've just started internal alpha testing with a new build, which will be available to all members of the Discord in a few weeks!
Is this still being under development?
Yes, it is! If you haven't yet, you can subscribe to our e-mail newsletter which we'll use to send out development updates. There's a signup form on our website: https://www.kinstrife.com/
where do I download this?
Hi, sorry about the late reply - please see our latest blog post about our next steps here: https://www.kinstrife.com/post/still-alive
How to get the game?
Hi, sorry about the late reply - please see our latest blog post here about our next steps: https://www.kinstrife.com/post/still-alive
I hope you guys doing fine, happy holidays! <3
Oh no, now I feel bad for having missed that! :D We're good, hope you're fine as well and that you had great holidays!
Does this have a discord server ?
Hi hhhg,
You can navigate directly to the installation folder and launch the executable from there. (Typically: "C:/Program Files (x86)/Kinstrife/bin/Kinstrife Pre-Alpha.exe")
Apologies for the inconvenience, we have changed servers since the last public release.
We don't have a Discord server (yet), but we are preparing a Reddit page where we will soon start again with showing updates.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kinstrife/
Discord server will follow with a first proper internal alpha release, which we have been working on for the last two years.
Thank you
New build this year? :)
We're on it! We're looking at roughly the end of the year, but it might also be early next year.
Sooo is this still being developed?
Sure is! :)
Yay! Still waiting! Stay healthy :)
Thanks for the encouraging words! Hope you're also staying safe!
How is work going? Still eagerly waiting for armed combat :) Good luck for your developing!
We're starting a new development milestone this week where we combine our physics based collision & damage model with our new and vastly improved actor controller - that also includes armed combat!
We also appreciate your patience and sticking around with us! It really means a lot to us.
So i really enjoyed this , been a chiv player for years and already have like 600 hours in mordhau but i still come back to this from time to time and im sad to see it hasnt moved forward. If those games make you feel defeated in anyway please dont , cause i still wanna play it and i love those games also. Cheers and good luck !
p.s. i think i hafta have like 200 hours easily with what little is developed in Kinstrife hahah I NEED WEAPONS! i also forgot to add i have about 500 hours in Blade and sorcery and i still come back to this ! <3
Woah, we're really happy to hear that! :D Rest assured, despite things having been quiet recently, we're still very much busy developing the game with all-new and exciting kickass technology! Including a weapon system that's much better than what we had started building for the preview build.
"recently"
> pre-Alpha Build 2a Out Now! Aug 23, 2018
Well, that was savage. It's not like we don't feel bad about this ourselves :D
However, we're two people doing this in addition to earning living wages at the moment, so things are still progressing slower than we'd like. While we would like to quickly reach a point where we can focus on this project full-time, we do not want to sabotage the technical foundation of this project, which would bite us in the ass down the road. This is especially the case because we're self-taught game developers, so many of the previous prototypes - the pre-alpha build included - were not suitable as a foundation for a full-fledged game and were valuable learning experiences. Armed with this knowledge, we've spent the time since 2018 to build such a foundation, which is paying off handsomely now that we work on gameplay features again.
Alright, enough for this mini-rant - know that we're just as frustrated about not being able to show off cool new features or release new builds and that we're working our asses off to make that happen again soon!
As a gamer, I understand LoSboccacc's frustration. But as a fellow programmer, I really appreciate your response. Thanks for sharing your hard work and creativity with us thus far.
LoSboccacc, you may already know about it but, if you need something to tide you over, check out Mount and Blade: Bannerlord. It's in early access, but it's very fun and may scratch the same itch that Kinstrife will some day!
Thanks for your supporting comment! It's definitely tough having to tell people they need to be patient, even though it's been a pretty long time.
Bannerlord is actually a pretty good example, it's taken them around 8 years and it's actually become a bit of a meme implying that it'll never get released. But, there it is!
While I personally haven't played it yet (no time...), the two of us working on Kinstrife actually met on the Mount & Blade forum and it's certainly been our initial motivation for getting started with this project.
So, yeah, thanks for your comment and I hope you'll stay tuned in :) Things are moving very quickly for us with Unity ECS and the new rendering pipeline.
I just purchased the Alpha, tried starting it, and it keeps telling me "Error" followed by "can't find remote versions list." I am unable to even start the game, may I get some support? It would be greatly appreciated!
******NEVERMIND, it works now!
Great to hear! What fixed the issue for you?
I believe it was just the launcher that was acting up, because I went to the root folder and opened the actual application instead of the launcher and it worked!
Still alive?
Yup! We currently are busy with some contract work to pay the rent and after that is resumed, it's back to Kinstrife for us :)
hey im having some trouble using my equipped weapons, i have them holstered but i cant figure out how to take them out and use them
you cant use weapons yet it might come in the next update tho
Woops, looks like we missed that. Yep, that's right, the current release is unarmed combat only :)
Still alive?
You bet.
We currently port the project to the newest version of Unity (the game engine we use), set up a UI framework because UI development can be a huge time sing and of course work on campaign continues.
We are waiting for alpha 3 with armors
And we're working on it ;)
Hi. I'm hopping also for discord train as own discord for kinstrife would be useful. How is weaponized combat forming up?
About the striking methods, the old one is still better for me. Chained attacks are also really good (in the easy mode or what it is called)
I also still prefer that camera stops moving while attacking because it feels very floaty when camera moves while charging attack.
But really great update all in all.
ps. Are physics working under 60fps? I get 140fps ingame or so and still movement seem like it's working somewhere between 30-40?
Hi! I took the liberty of replying on our forums :)
(1) Yep.
(2) In short: yep. Once we release on Steam, people who got the game on itch will receive steam keys.
Alright,first of all,i want you to know how much I WANT to buy this game.
Whenever I see words "physics based combat",i am already sold out.Sadly,there is no way for me to support you,since I can't buy this game via credit card.Still,i will do my best to support you guys in any other way I can.
Keep it up ;)
Thanks! That's very encouraging to hear :)
Unfortunately the payment options on itch don't seem to work out for some people, but we'll definitely be on steam in a couple of months! In the mean time, though, there will be a couple more dev logs, though, so we hope you stay tuned :)
Also sadly,even on steam,i won't be able to buy the game,since i do not have a credit card.
I think you guys are doing God's work with this and I wish you the world.
I only hope that eventually the physics based gameplay and combat become so optimized that people can play faster and plan ahead more easily. I think that should be the current goal for games like these.
Hey there!
Thanks for the encouraging feedback, it means a lot to us :)
We shipped a lot of performance optimizations in the last update, so things should be running a lot smoother. Combat speed is a tricky thing to balance. We're convinced it needs to be a bit slower than in real life to offset the reaction penalty you have because of the additional input layer (think keyboard & mouse input.) Another thing to consider is that movement has 'weight' in our game, so it's not possible to cancel an attack and immediately blocked. As you said, planning ahead is an important aspect there. However, this poses another difficulty by itself, because with physics, there's very emergent and dynamic gameplay which is even very hard for us as developers to predict and plan ahead for.
All in all, these are things we want to balance based on feedback in the community. We are also in the middle of setting up infrastructure that allows modding, so people can also directly change some of the physics and weapon stats by themselves to see what they like best.
Thanks for replying. I was incredibly surprised by the array of options available and they made me feel much more comfortable immediately. Best I could suggest for it is an in-game keybind menu. Was blown away by the FPS but still a little confused as to why it still felt choppy.
You said you're working on the weapons right now? Shouldn't the footwork get more attention first? Or you doing both?
And you say that but that was some of the fastest and most realistic fist blocking I've seen in any FPS besides maybe COD. We're approaching those speeds. How do you balance fast, close and dirty combat in the heat of the moment? Is it balanced in real life? The only plans made in those moments are usually instinctual.
By the way, could you give a tutorial on the attack system and explain it? The UI looks angle based but there only seem to be four moves... And if I only move the dot a quarter outwards, the punch either looks like I extended my hand a little or it juts out away from the reticle.
If there're only four moves and they need to charge or whatever, why not just use MB Warband's attack system?
And have you considered adding eye/headtracking support if you want angled attacks? The camera locking up really shouldn't stay.
Thanks for the elaborate feedback! It's super helpful and actually the main reason we are making the game available at such an early stage.
That feeling of 'hm, something doesn't add up quite right' yet about the flow of things is something we want to balance out with feedback from the community. As you mentioned some issues with the input system - maybe that could be the 'missing part' that kinda puts you 'out of the flow'? You're also right that there's not a lot in the way of tutorials or introductions - this is something we want to tackle soon. We have not done so, however, because we haven't settled on a control scheme yet. This is a topic we've put a lot of consideration into - one of the things we've decided was that unarmed and armed controls are going to be different. This also ties in with your observation that there only seem to be ~four moves: This is actually due to the fact that there are only really three types of different boxing attacks - straights, upper cuts and hooks. They may target different body targets and be executed with either hand, and their angle may also change slightly. But they are generally limited to pretty narrow angle ranges that also do not really transition very fluidly. This is of course because we for now take grappling, throws, choking, clinching and elbows out of the equation.
Contrast this with weapons combat, where swings can transition fluidly in the upper 240° - which you can actually do with our armed combat. That is one part of the question why we do not adopt the same attack scheme like M&B. Another is - we do not like essentially just 'watching' attacks unfold after the 'charge' was 'released' in M&B. It creates a disconnect between what is happening on the screen and what you actually do/control as the player. Another issue is that it causes a delay to attacks. We instead work with a 'guard' system - think about the 'charged' state in M&B, e. g. a raised arm, ready to strike. Actors would mostly be in a 'guard' state that allows for very quick strikes from that position, but also telegraphs the angle. Strikes from vastly different angles take longer in contrast. It's all very early, but there's been great progress. You can see a gif of it in action here: https://twitter.com/KinstrifeGame/status/1034078220918943744
By the way, have you explored the different attack control schemes (e. g. drag & release etc.) yet? Any thoughts on that?
Regarding footwork - Do you mean general combat movement or how footwork aligns with attacks? The former is actually because we currently do not have proper animations for combat locomotion. You'd be surprised, but the majority of combat locomotion uses crossed feet... Which can be especially fatal with physics based combat and tripping ;) It's very high on our list of graphics-related things we want to get replaced, though!
As for speed - that's a good question and may even be up to personal taste in games. As you said, reactions in real-life are very instinctual - trying to put up one's hands to protect the face is a super important instinct. But also reactions like 'uh oh, I should probably duck now and avoid that hook' are very instict-based - which is not an issue in real-life because that very easily and naturally translates to movement of the body. But with games, it has to go the route of remapping that to a game control scheme and clicking buttons. There's certainly going to be a noticeable delay and it's something we need to keep in mind.
Again, thanks for the elaborate feedback and we're super happy to have discussions like that! But for the sake of posterity & overview, we'd love to bundle discussions like these over on our forums. So it'd be great if we could carry on there :)
EDIT: Woops, just saw you've already signed up and posted there :)
You are almost a god to me at this moment with your willingness to submit this even longer reply. Why don't we just add each other on discord and chat like buddies?
We've been considering a discord channel, but we've noticed that our communications are spread out a lot already. We'd like to be able to respond quickly & as in depth as necessary, so we decided that narrowing things down on our forums will likely work best for us for now. If at some point a lot of people ask for an official discord channel, we'll certainly reconsider, though :)
Hey kinstrife! I have read a few of your updates and devlogs and just purchased the Alpha preview. It is very exciting to see you all build something out of passion despite lacking funds.
I will play around with alpha, and keep my eye out for a few more devlogs. Hopefully I can support on a monthly basis soon after that!
Hey there!
Sorry for having missed your comment :( We're very glad that our dev logs and updates transport the passion and time investment we're putting into this project! We hope you've enjoyed the alpha and will be joining us along for the ride :)
Wow that's very generous to give the full game for 5 dollars! I'll have to try it out when I get to my good computer. Would you say you guys are inspired by Mount and Blade in anyway?
Speaking of physics based combat you might also want to check out the Examina game as well. Good luck on your game!
Hey there!
Quite frankly, we do not necessarily see it as selling the game at this point, it's more about getting people on board early. We'd like to reward those who stick around with us for the majority of development, after all :)
We certainly are inspired by Mount&Blade! Funnily enough, we met on the game's forums and also modded that game. We have also clocked in dozens of hours in Exanima and are following its development with great interest as well.
When is the next update planned?
We have our first devlog scheduled for the next few days that will shed light on the hows and whats of the release!
More that month without updates. RIP very promising game :(
You're quite quick in declaring a project dead ;) First of all, we're still going strong and soon have lots of cool new things to show. Expect a dev log in a couple of days. Second thing, we don't do this full-time, so sometimes things just get in the way of development. That is bound to happen until we can support ourselves from developing the game. Third: We've been working on the game (before going public) for years. We're not just going to throw the towel just because we haven't posted an update in a couple of weeks.
Now RIP ?
lol nope.
On a more serious note:
We're still in the middle of figuring out how to go about this whole public communication thing. We're still very much behind this project (as our response rate may indicate) - we're just having a hard time communicating that progress. Since we've been developing in 'seclusion' for so long, we still need to find a good groove to keep you guys in the loop without diverting too much time from actual development. We first thought streams would be a good idea as well as video dev logs. We then found authoring those too time intensive, considering that we have to, you know, develop a game :P We then scrapped the video production mid-process and decided it's better to keep it for major updates.
We realise we've done a pretty poor job at that since the release, so we've started opening up more to our patreon backers recently, posting less 'filtered'/scripted dev upgrades. We'll round them up and turn them into an official update soon. And cut us some slack, we're still new to this whole PR thing :D
Lmao what about now?
Hey. Today I bought your game and I'm delighted. Very much like Exanima, but much steeper. I would like to see in the game weapons and optimization. But for a team of two people it's very cool. I wish good luck in working out!
Hey, thanks for the supportive feedback! We're super happy about the comparisons to Exanima - it's been one of our references for how dynamic we want our combat to be. Armed combats is currently being finetuned and we're planning to publish more information during the weekend, so stay tuned!
PS: We also appreciate people getting in touch on our forums because we'd love to get the community involved in the development through discussions and Q&A sessions. So if you're up for it, it'd be great to see you there :)
When you will add weapons?
I got this answer few days ago
Due to popular demand we're going to add an early version of armed combat (with some low-level weapons), as well as a more performant brawl scene on high priority. Hopefully this won't last more than a few weeks, but don't pin us down on it!
Thanks pequiq! That's spot on.
As a small update, we're making good progress on that end. For the next release, however, we will focus on improving hand to hand combat (and adding in various options to tweak your experience.) Based on that feedback, we'll polish armed combat further as we want the first impression for that feature to be really good :)
So how much time left to wait for update?
There will be new information available by the end of this weekend and progress is coming along nicely :)
First of all the game and concept is amazing, but I havea question, if I buy the 5$ version will I get the full release aswell?
You pay for the current version and get future versions all the way to the full release as we sincerely appreciate people supporting us at this early stage.
I will surely support this project, if I may ask, how many people are working on this project?
Great to have you on board then! We're currently a team of two, and we've become quite efficient working with this team size. We will soon start doing dev streams for a look behind the scenes for our patreon followers, too.
if the people that buy the game on itch.io do they get in on steam if it gets put on steam
Yes, we will be handing out Steam keys to people who bought it here, as soon as we go live on Steam!
Will it ever be free?
The game won't be free anytime soon, but we will release a free demo version in the future!
thats nice!
How far away is armed combat? Can't wait to smash some heads with swords and axes!
Due to popular demand we're going to add an early version of armed combat (with some low-level weapons), as well as a more performant brawl scene on high priority. Hopefully this won't last more than a few weeks, but don't pin us down on it!
Sounds really cool! Thank you for answering!
This game looks like it is going to be awesome once it is completed. I only had two major issues I wanted to address (other than minor bugs). The first is that the controls are very frustrating for me to play on my laptop. It runs fine, but it is nearly impossible to turn the camera using the trackpad while walking or running. I am using an HP omen, just to give further detail. Do you plan on allowing controller (Xbox one, specifically) use for this game rather than just the keyboard? The second thing, and this could definitley just be an oversight on my end or something I am doing wrong, but there are no other NPC's in the courtyard with me and I can't seem to go into any other areas where there might be, so I didn't really get to test out any of the hand to hand combat. Other than that I am very excited for the continuing progress on this game, it looks like it is going to be phenomenal.
Hi & thanks for giving the preview a go!
We hadn't anticipated on people trying to play using the trackpad, so everything is tested with a mouse and keyboard. We did include controller support (I will update the ingame cheat sheet), however that is only tested with an Xbox 360 controller so far. You should be able to plug in the controller at any time and control the character with that.
The courtyard is to display your creations so as soon as you create multiple characters, they will all show up in the courtyard. You can also spawn random characters by pressing 'insert' while in the location.
Thanks for the feedback, and good to see you're on board where we want to take this going forward!
- Khaya
This is good and I can totally see the potential with this! I only hope that performance would be fixed asap. Ofc that might not be first concern yet
Hi, thanks for the encouraging comment! We do agree that we need to make improvements to performance, especially the courtyard scene has not been thoroughly optimized. This is one of the reasons we're showing this as an alpha preview; we believe it is the first version we can give out to people to show our vision and our work so far, but we're at the same time aware that there's still a lot to be done, including performance optimizations.
Out of curiosity, how do the other parts of the game run for you and what are your system specs?
I have gtx 770, i5 4670k and 16gb ram at 64bit OS. Main menu and Armory works at 45/60+ fps (almost smoothly) as squad show case and caste run at 30 or below.
Still the potential is great. For me this lands somewhere between exanima and overgrowth (where exanima is my all time favourite and overgrowth is good but still meh) Not bad at all for an alpha preview!
Best regards to you!
I see, ideally, we'd want the game to run @ 1080p on high settings at least at a stable 30 FPS with such a setup. Since Unity (the game engine we use) currently also does a lot of work on optimization, I'm hopeful we can get closer to that goal in the coming months.
But we're very excited to hear you've enjoyed this preview and hope you'll stay tuned for the next updates! If you'd like, you could also drop in on our forums for more feedback & discussion on ideas for features, improvements, etc. Cheers!
Yoooo this looks sick, how did you do the physics for this!? Am a physics student currently in college
Hi! Physics in the game are based on the PhysX framework, so essentially simplified/streamlined numeric rigidbody physics. In addition to that we also fine-tune e. g. collision reactions by applying additional forces based on the state of a character, for example to simulate muscle strength and/or constractions.
Does the game take a performance hit by using the PhysX framework? Can you still have realistic body physics without it?
Running a lot of physics computations is definitely resource intensive, but to some extent necessary for the interactions that make up physical combat. So, no, it's not really feasible to attempt physics based combat without a framework like PhysX, especially not for a super small team like us.
What we will be doing, however, is trying to utilize the CPU more fully (as in, make better use of multi-core CPUs) and see where we can offload some potentially computationally expensive stuff into more streamlined/simplified versions handled through custom code.