Hello to all our backers and newsletter readers! We’ve got a ton of updates to share with you this time, so let’s dive right in.



Closed Alpha is getting even closer!

We’ve been working around-the-clock on our PFTG Closed Alpha release. Right now, this means doing a substantial amount of tuning on controls, climbing, and combat. We recently integrated Unity’s new Cinemachine/Timeline system, which is a huge improvement for cutscenes and trailers. It’s a great tool and will cut down the development time we were going to have to dedicate to cutscenes. Cutscenes that used to take us one week to set up now take 20 minutes! It’s pretty amazing.



The Champion is an enemy we’re working on for the Closed Alpha.

All images © 2017 - No Matter Studios, LLC

Wait, you’re still working on the Closed Alpha?

Yes, still! Game development schedules are not an exact science, and estimating how much time it will take to get PFTG to “feel right” can be a bit of a moving target. Our hope was to have the Closed Alpha done earlier, however we felt it was necessary to include a number of features now that we had slotted for later releases, including a new onboarding area for players. Initially, our plan was to throw players into the deep end and see how it went. However, in recent playtests we quickly found that a dedicated area to let players get comfortable with the world and the mechanics was worth prioritizing.

The good news is that we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for the Closed Alpha and the path to full release. However, with that being said, it’s become obvious to us that we need to push out the PFTG Closed Alpha and full release into 2018. We know that you have been patiently waiting, and we’re excited for you to see all of the great stuff that we’ve been able to add by pushing out our dates a bit. We hope that all of the additional features, content, and polish will take away the sting of having to wait a little longer. (Read on to learn about some of these improvements in detail.)

Because of this change to the schedule, we’ll be updating our official site, the kickstarter page, and various other places to show the new 2018 target instead of 2017. If you see press, social media posts, or friends that are still referring to the 2017 date in the future, please help us spread the word and get them up to speed.

All images © 2017 - No Matter Studios, LLC

When will we see the full release!?

We’re not ready to throw out a specific 2018 date for the full release yet, especially without seeing the feedback from the upcoming Closed Alpha. We’ve received lots of emails and messages from our backers asking us to take our time and not rush PFTG, which we really appreciate as it lets us work towards the high bar we’ve set for ourselves. Because our Closed Alpha will be a rolling release that first goes out to our backers and then later to a wider audience, we’re estimating that the full release would follow at least 6-9 months after Closed Alpha begins.

All images © 2017 - No Matter Studios, LLC

What else is going on?

Since our last newsletter, the camera system in PFTG has undergone some major improvements, the biggest of those improvements is the smoothness of the camera when following the player. This may sound like something simple in theory, but when the player is hanging from fast-moving giants, gliding with a sail cloth or maneuvering through tight climbing puzzles, things get much trickier.

Our central problem with camera smoothness stemmed from the way we were dealing with the player’s physics. Typically in games, you have a “loop” of code that runs at least once per frame for as long as the game is running. In games built in Unity, you usually have three times during each loop when you can move objects in the game: FixedUpdate, Update, and LateUpdate. FixedUpdate is often used for physics as it’s constantly run at fixed time intervals regardless of frame rate, which avoids physics acting inconsistently due to frame rate changes. LateUpdate happens once every frame, and since the frame rate can change, you never know how often LateUpdate will happen.

As a result of writing our own custom character controller, we were moving the character in both FixedUpdate and LateUpdate. As we found out with this approach over time, getting the camera to follow smoothly became a huge headache and a pain to work with. This issue lingered for a while since it was something that didn’t completely break anything, but it was annoying to see the camera “pop” into position or have a slight jitter. Over the past few months we kept it in the back of our minds as something that needed fixing.

Eventually, we recently decided to just bite the bullet and spend time to fix it. So we moved all of the player movement into one Update, which greatly simplified the camera and allowed for a constant smooth movement without issues. The results of this fix, while not drastic, do help us to get closer to a camera that should be something you don’t even notice, and keeps the focus on the gameplay.

Overall, we’ve spent a good chunk of time getting our controls and combat to feel much tighter and more responsive. Climbing controls were improved to react better to player movements. Tim has been working hard tuning this as well as simplifying the base controls with our bow/arrow and grappling hook. In the pre-alpha build, to use the bow you pressed right click to pull up the bow then left click to shoot. We’ve streamlined this now so it’s left click to pull up and shoot with both the bow and grappling hook. We also improved climbing so that you can climb around 90 degree angles, and also tweaked stamina usage and cold resistance. The core pieces of the game continue to get refined while we iterate through both big changes and improvements as well as things like how the player explores and finds bosses.

All images © 2017 - No Matter Studios, LLC

Climb Jump

A new feature we added was the ability to jump backwards off a wall. It seems like a small thing to add but it’s been on the backlog for a long time. Finally, it’s here! Having this ability allows us to improve and expand on platforming elements, especially in caves (more on this below).

Here’s a rundown of some other things we’ve been hard at work on:

Caves:

A backer on the Kickstarter page had a question about this, and in previous streams we’ve discussed how caves would possibly be used to expand our environments. In general, we’re looking into developing multiple paths within caves. Some would be short, some would be longer, and some would have platforming elements. We’ve begun work on these and we like the early results so far and hope to share more soon.

All images © 2017 - No Matter Studios, LLC

Music:

Bosses:

We wrapped up the third boss and are now deep in refining the fourth boss. We have a little work left on the Closed Alpha but are really close. We also have a couple of other bosses sketched out and will have to decide which one will be the fifth boss.

All in all, development is in a really good place and we can’t wait to show you more! Have a great 2017 and we’ll see you in 2018!

-No Matter Studios

Exclusive Desktop Background

Until our next update, here’s an exclusive desktop background for our backers and newsletter readers / All images © 2017 - No Matter Studios, LLC

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