Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
Bug Fixes:
- Fix for importing saves that was broken in last update (1.0.48 experimental)
Kenshi
Kenshi 1.0.49 (Experimental Branch)
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
Bug Fixes:
Kenshi 1.0.48 (Experimental Branch)
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
Features:
- Due to recent windows updates causing even more save issues when the game is installed in the C:/Program Files/ folder, Saves can now optionally be stored in the user directory instead of the install path. It can be set in the options.
- Added Stun Recovery Rate and Robot First Aid Speed constants to FCS
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed FCS 'xp rate athletics' constant doing nothing
May Community Update
Localising Kenshi
In the past we’ve spoken about our passion for providing Kenshi in other languages, but we’ve rarely delved into exactly what that entails. As two major languages are still due to be re-released, along with this month’s progress update it’s a good chance for us to touch on the concept of translation vs localisation.
As any animation or foreign cinema fan would attest to, finding the nearest equivalent word to throw on a subtitle track is a very hit and miss experience. Often when a language is spoken, we use sayings and euphemisms to communicate a certain meaning that resonates with one culture but, even if translated, might be completely meaningless in another. On the simpler side, for anyone in their mid-20’s that grew up with the English dub of Pokémon here’s a ‘jellydonut’.
Except that’s actually onigiri or rice balls. As the western audience would have been unlikely to eat rice balls a decision was made to dub them as donuts and call it a day. A much closer cultural equivalence would have been something along the lines of a sandwich, dumpling, or pasty. None of that covers the visual side of what fans see on Ash’s adventure so at best it’s still a very crude way of trying to relate that Brock was nice enough to pack some lunch for their journey. If you understand that and are now thinking what they could have done instead then congratulations, you just took a crash course in localisation.
In Kenshi’s upcoming Japanese localisation, a lot of corrections have been made to dialogue that baffled Japanese players. For example, currently some ironies are translated with opposite meanings which leads to confusion when players need to make dialogue choices. Similarly, Meg has been replacing nonsensical direct translations with their Japanese equivalent phrases, e.g. the current 'eat boots' is now correctly translated as 'kick your ass'. Work is also being done to change proverbs that made no sense in Japanese culture. Players won't see 'out of the frying pan' in the middle of conversation (referring to 'out of frying pan into the fire') and will instead find a Japanese equivalent saying for a worsening situation. All this amounts to a near complete rewrite of our current Japanese text and requires a degree of thoughtful research - it’s a very time-consuming process.
Meanwhile, for the Korean localisation, we’ve recently released a major update. As we mentioned before we revisited it with a different team, but we also decided to collaborate with fan Jeffrey Jeoung to assist with quality assurance. This helped us by breaking through the language barrier which prevented us from otherwise checking on the quality of translations.
Kenshi x Indie Live Expo
A quiet side effect of the ongoing current pandemic is the effect it’s having on live events across game development, whilst not as pressing of a concern as many other topics it’s easy to forget we’re in the middle of the busy season for live expos.
Lo-Fi is excited to share, following the positive outcome of our last physical event in Shanghai, we worked with PLAYISM again to take part in our first digital event – Indie Live Expo 2020.
Hosted by the famous Ryu’sOffice in Japan, live streams were broadcast in English, Japanese and Chinese with aims ‘to promote friendship, fellowship, and enthusiasm through the medium of video games.’ A cause we were more than happy to add weight to.
The event covered a range of different indie titles and initiatives including personal messages from beloved industry figures ZUN (Touhou Project), Toby Fox (Undertale, Deltarune) SWERY (The GoodLife / White Owls Inc.) and KazuyaNino (TYPE-MOON).
Finally as many of the Kenshi Discord community can attest to, I’m also a huge Evangelion fan so it’s incredibly exciting mention that in advance of ‘Thrice upon a time’there’s an ongoing Evangelion inspired game jam which was announced during the event.
Where to watch: YouTube (EN)/ YouTube (JP) / Twitch (EN) / Bilibili (CN)
For more information check out the Indie Live Expo website.
Just communication.
Similar to the real world, Kenshi 2 is going to be pretty big. Previously when talking to Nat she confirmed that whilst we still don’t have a marketing friendly measured size to rally behind, it’ll be bigger than Kenshi 1. This raises two important questions: how do we make it feel alive and how will it work from a technical standpoint? Below Nat touches on the first point and the magic of the ‘narrative bark’.
“Hello! For the last few months, I've been working on the little pieces of information that subtly unfold the various histories and cultures of Kenshi's world. Writing for a sandbox game can be a little different to other RPGs where the developers normally have more control over what the player hears and sees (and even what the NPCs do!). So, for Kenshi, I need to reflect the necessary information differently while also making sure the world feels alive and immersive.
A few months back, I talked about roughly structuring our first factions' layouts on the world map, but now my job is to zone in on the individual cities and their own mini conflicts. I've been planning out what I like to call the 'Carrots' - the local goals or tempting secrets for the player to explore. I then list out all the possible ways I can convey that information, using in-game item descriptions and different dialogues, or visually with assets. We're strictly against traditional quest systems in Kenshi, so it's important for me to tell the player what they can do indirectly through the environment instead, planting seeds in your minds and making you want to do things for yourselves.
One of those 'dribbles' of information involves writing dialogue Barks. Barks are the short bits of dialogue that NPCs blurt out either in reaction to something, or just completely ambient comments - the ambient comments are the ones that I've been writing and they're perfect for breathing life into a world, reinforcing goals and lore, and simply interacting with the player to really make them feel part of the world. BUT... I have to write a lot of those suckas while actually keeping them interesting and nonintrusive. They can be a bit mind numbing to work on but they're one of my favourite methods to paint a picture of a town via gossiping and general musings from citizens.
If you'd like to read more about my process with writing barks, I've written a much more in-depth article on gamasutra or you can follow me on Twitter”
Beautiful World.
As readers already know, Kenshi 2 is in development using Unreal Engine 4 which is a major jump from an aging implementation of OGRE. Following on from the narrative elements of the world, Victor, our technical artist, has kindly offered to answer some questions about the technical aspects.
Starting with a major pain point then, moving across large areas in Kenshi 1 leads to lots of ‘loading’ pauses. How does Unreal handle huge maps and will that help with this?
“UE4 has a system called World Composition - it allows us to divide the world into cells which are then automatically loaded as the camera approaches them. It can do that asynchronously, meaning it doesn't lock up the game; it's loading the data as a background task. We can divide buildings and such over these cells in order to keep them unloaded and have them automatically come in when needed. World Composition is also built to work with Unreal Engine's Landscape system.
Unfortunately, the stock Landscape system isn't explicitly designed for a world as massive as Kenshi 2. While we still intend to use world composition, there’s additional exploration going into third party options for the landscape system to go even further. It’s important for us to get this right as currently Kenshi 2's world is expected to end up even bigger than Kenshi’s ~1000km2.”
That’s pretty huge, I can’t think of that many other games with similar scale. I appreciate it’s not your field, but will World Composition mean no more units running into the sky?
“Ideally, but this also relates to pathing. We haven’t finalised exactly how pathing will be handled in Kenshi 2, but our current expectation is that we'll be working with Recast (UE4's stock navmesh which is well-tested and reliable). So tentatively, no more people walking off into the big blue yonder.
UE4 and Recast allow us to generate the navmesh where we need it with a large amount of flexibility, and it should, theoretically, handle our world really well. Either way, I'm confident we'll have a lot less weird pathing going on than we do in the original game.”
You’ve mentioned streaming bits of world in and unloading it on the fly but let’s talk about building larger spaces. In talks from Unreal Fest it seemed like developers can make presets for objects or types of buildings, set the area boundaries then let the engine create an entire city for them to edit. Do we have anything like that helping us with Kenshi 2?
“Things like city-spawners are something that we can use, but because of the oddities about Kenshi's world and a bunch of specifics, we also can't rely on a generalised system. If we do want to end up using things like generators, we’ll be developing a tool internally. One other big problem with these sorts of things is that if it’s relied on too much then the world ends up feeling ‘same-y’.
On the other hand, while it’s a lot of work for an artist to go through and manually put all the buildings and pots and pans in the right spot, it means they really are in a spot that does them justice. We do use modular (re-useable) pieces where we can, but we’re being careful with not overdoing them, after all we want Kenshi 2’s world to feel unique and distinct.”
What about when adding details to natural biomes?
“Natural environments are a lot easier to automate with those kinds of tools – at least for the menial stuff like grass placement. Of course, we could manually position every blade of grass, but that would be a nightmare. What we actually do is procedurally place grass in the right spots determined by our level designer.
There are also other procedural tools we can easily integrate into our workflow for natural assets – for example Unreal has native Speedtree integration. Speedtree is a tool that allows us to make foliage “species” and generate as many unique trees in that species as we want. It makes the foliage-creation a lot less tedious than needing to manually model them.”
If everything is going to be nicely dressed up, how do you deal with performance hits for all that extra detail?
“For starters, Kenshi 1 didn't use LODs (dynamic changes in level of detail) which meant operating with a massively constrained tri-budget for near-camera-detail. Kenshi 2 make heavy use of LODs, and we’re massively helped in that area by UE4's semi-automatic LOD generation systems. Essentially, we can have extra detailed meshes up-close, and turn them into simpler low-detail meshes when they’re further away. This all happens without any extra work on the artist's end.”
So that covers some basic software optimisations, what about from a hardware perspective - Kenshi runs an older version of OGRE that’s famously single threaded so what’s the difference with Unreal and Kenshi 2?
“It’s a huge shift here, really. When Kenshi development started, multi-threaded CPUs really weren’t that common yet, nor were the cores nearly as fast as they’re becoming now. For context, at the time Intel’s i3/i5/i7 release scheme didn’t even exist. In development, it’s important to work on systems that help as many people as reasonably possible to be able to play - Back then that meant there was no reason to go beyond a single-thread. It’s an incredibly complicated thing to code so it wasn’t worth the development time.
That’s different now, even the average user runs 4 CPU cores. Unreal Engine, by default, runs its render-thread on a separate core. Kenshi 2 runs almost all of its logic on extra threads, of which there are now more, and they’re faster. The gains made by proper multi-threading are massive at this point. Another thing which makes a big difference is that so many rendering-bottlenecks of the past decade have gone from being handled on the CPU to being on the GPU, which is significantly faster for calculations that need to happen hundreds of thousands of times per frame. GPUs have gotten exponentially faster over the past decade, and that’s power we can properly tap into.”
A lot of this works on paper but what can you do to know if you’re getting it right as it’s being made?
“This sort of thing is for a large part just developing some sort of instinct for what you should and shouldn’t do. If you show me the profiler statistics for a given scene, along with a wireframe, I can generally pretty quickly figure out where any slowdowns are coming from. It’s difficult to explain why in each case, that goes incredibly deep, but you get a feel for the patterns of what works and what consequences certain choices have.
During initial development, you work on rough ideas, generally without hugging tight performance limits for everything. Once something’s working, then it’s time to start looking whether the current cost is reasonable, and where you can easily scrape some frame time off it. The big analytical guns come out when you run into major performance problems. Generally, there’s a certain benchmark you want to hit for acceptable performance at minimum specs. Once you’re unable to hit that benchmark, it’s time to stare at lots-and-lots of numbers – indicators of how costly parts of a scene are – and go through what you can deduce from them. Starting with the worst offenders, you ‘scrape some stuff off’, ever more aggressively. Optimisation’s basically a circle, it repeats as you go. Scenes keep growing and therefore getting more expensive, so you work your ass off to make sure you’re still meeting the benchmark by tearing the existing stuff apart more. The scene grows again and the cycle repeats.
Finally, Epic just announced Unreal 5, as it’s supposedly seamless to migrate there’s talk of us moving along with it. Are there any features that you saw and immediately thought ‘that would be perfect for Kenshi’?
“As a technical artist, I’m incredibly excited to see what Unreal Engine 5 will bring us. If it delivers everything Epic has been marketing so far such as the lighting and geometry changes, it could be a massive game-changer.
That said, we don’t know how the final implementation will turn out so we can’t count on it yet. The promotional material stresses that porting should be easy, and I’m confident it will be, but based on current information swapping from UE4 to UE5 won’t automatically mean much. The major gains with the new tech aren’t user-oriented, they’re things that will make a massive difference for the art creation workflow and we’re already in the middle of that. We also can’t work according to the new idealised workflow either. Obviously, as it wouldn’t be worthwhile to sit here twiddling our thumbs until UE5 comes out and make everything then, the current plan is to just continue developing as before and see what we can do when it arrives.
Speculating on a hypothetical Kenshi 3 though… I imagine our workflow would be fundamentally different using UE5 as compared to our current art-pipelines, and I imagine it’d be significantly more time-efficient. That’s all very speculative though, so don’t get too excited.”
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This month’s blog was a lengthy undertaking so I’m looking forward to hearing thoughts and questions from the community in the comments. As ever you can join us on Twitter and Facebook where we have a soon-to-be-confirmed creator competition in the works. If you’d like a none-Steam way to keep up with the studio, blogs are available on our website and via our mailing list.
Cheers,
Kenshi v1.0.47b
Update 1.0.47b is out now! This deploys a significant update to the Korean translation. We'll be continuing to monitor the quality over the next few weeks so please include feedback below.
1.0.47b
- Korean Language update
March Community Update
Developing from a safe location
As represented through parody on our Instagram, we’re encouraging everyone to stay at home if they can and as no exceptions to the rule, everyone at Lo-Fi has been working remotely. It’s taken us a little while to adjust but we’re now fully in the swing of things; our latest series of Kenshi 1 bug fixes have just been deployed to the stable branch and Kenshi 2 progress marches on.
Welcome reinforcements
To continue ramping up development for Kenshi 2 we’re excited to introduce some new faces to the team (starting remotely of course). Already hard at work, Victor Goossens, is our new Technical Artist and Sarah Keates, our new Office Administrator – both of which bring more structure to our workflow in the studio. Additionally over the next few weeks we’re welcoming Mohammad Rezazadeh as our Lead 3D Artist and Craig Tinney, as a Junior Programmer, each adding additional talent to push Kenshi 2 forward. Finally, with the popularity of the waterways picture shared in a previous update, fans will be happy to welcome back well known freelance artist Calum Alexander Watt.
Technically art or Artfully technical?
Joining us this month, Victor gives a better explanation of what a technical artist does along with a sneak peak of work that would make Bob Ross proud:
“Hi guys! I'm Victor, or Mr4Goosey (after my last name, Goossens)! I’m happy to say I’m Lo-Fi’s new Technical Artist (I’ll call it TA for short, so that doesn’t stand for Teaching Assistant here). Most of you are probably not really sure what that means, though. In a nutshell, my job as a Technical Artist is to be a bridge between the art department and the programming department. I do artsy things that are too technical for the artists, and I do technical things that are too artsy for the programmers.
I’ve been doing indie-development on all kinds of projects for years now. I got into game development as a programmer, but quickly developed a passion for creating beautiful things – bringing me to the specialized niche that is Technical Art.
Most of the work I do relates somehow to what your graphics card is doing while you’re playing games; I handle lighting, all kinds of color-balancing, and most importantly, I deal with shaders, the ‘code’ that tells your graphics card what every pixel on your screen should look like. Having specialized in Unreal Engine 4, a lot of the shader-work I do is actually material-based (using UE4’s node system). That doesn’t necessarily make the job much simpler (you still need to understand how rendering engines and graphics cards work), but definitely a bit easier to understand at a basic level. I also work with artists to work out any kinks in their work flow, as well as dealing with performance-budgets and optimization.
You might now be wondering what that means for Kenshi in the larger scheme of things. As you guys probably know we’ve decided to move to Unreal Engine 4 for Kenshi 2. Having years of experience in UE4, I’ll be working to smooth out the transition from Ogre, helping the team get used to Unreal’s way of working. Unreal Engine 4 has an incredibly powerful and versatile rendering engine – if you know how to work with it, because that power comes at the cost of complexity. The plan is for Kenshi 2 to be graphically above and beyond anything we could ever do in Ogre, and I’m here to make sure that we can actually pull that off. An easy example for that is what I’m actually working on right now:
[previewyoutube="rFzzThMA3nc;full"]
Kenshi 2’s new Time-of-Day system, and primarily, its clouds! Kenshi’s fully dynamic lighting and environment is a massive challenge to represent properly, and it means things like clouds just cannot be left static. Kenshi’s new clouds grow, move and morph over time – all without melting your graphics card! Next up is just about every other material in Kenshi...”
The final piece
Last but not least, we’re still searching for a lead programmer to join us, keeping us on track to complete Kenshi 2 before all of this apocalypse malarkey. In the meantime, keep your eyes on our Twitter and Facebook pages for some new events and once again, if you prefer updates directly into your inbox, sign up for our mailing list here.
Kenshi v1.0.46
Features:
- Added some DirectX dlls to assist users experiencing installation issues.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a random dialogue crash.
- Fixed a crash when dropping things in character portrait panels.
- Moved save complete message to after the back thread is finished copying files.
- Fixed 2 crashes that could happen from missing mod data.
- Fixed animal trading window not closing if confirm button is cancelled.
Due to a small error pushing the update this is tagged in the changelog as 1.0.47
February Community Update
New Trailer
At the end of January we contacted Kokoplays to work with us on a new video that would coincide with our latest patch. The main aim was to give potential players an honest look at the game and an overview of what publications and users think of it. If you missed it, check it out below:
[previewyoutube="9Qr9gNdHEW0;full"]
We’re incredibly pleased to see all the positive comments about the result, making it a notable entry for our new YouTube channel which also offers Japanese, Chinese and Korean versions of the same video. In future we’d like to do more collaborative projects with members of the community, level up awesome ideas that might otherwise stay on the drawing board, and celebrate alongside the fans that make Kenshi great.
Korean Translation update
At the end of last month we pushed a patch with a number of bug fixes alongside the official support for Korean language text, thanks to detailed user feedback and the assistance of a freelance third party to verify, we’ve been made aware that the quality of this translation hasn’t met a standard we’re happy with.
Our current plan is to revisit this translation with a much stronger emphasis on context and error checking to update it as soon as possible, current projections put this at around 10 weeks. Unfortunately this has also lead us to reconsider Korean social media efforts. In the meantime, Korean Twitter and Facebook coverage is set to continue for at least another month, keeping users updated on the status of the translation.
Korean Wiki – looking for editors
On a more positive note, due to the popularity of Wikis in eastern gaming communities we worked with a member of our existing English Fandom Wiki team to start up a Korean version, mirroring a number of key pages to assist new users.
With the initial setup out of the way we’re now looking for Korean community members to take over. The Korean Wiki can be found here
GUI Development
In the interests of shedding more light on the Kenshi 2 progress from the technical team, this month we’re sharing some thoughts on the ongoing work underpinning GUI development directly from programmer Boodals:
“Hey, I'm Boodals, the newest programmer at LoFi. Ever since I was first hired in November, I've been working on remaking the GUIs from Kenshi 1 in Unreal Engine for Kenshi 2. Its too early in development to know everything that the GUIs need to be able to do, so we're just copying the designs (graphics & layout) from K1, and focusing entirely on getting the functionality working so we can test things. That means they currently look like uglier versions of the K1 GUIs, so there's no point in showing any pictures yet, somebody will make them look pretty at some point in the future.
The GUIs in Kenshi 1 were made using a programming library called MyGUI, which allows modders to reskin GUIs, and move individual GUI elements (buttons, text, sliders, etc) around by changing specific files. However, the GUI's functionality was hard-coded in the game's source code, which cannot be changed by modders. This means you cannot make a mod which adds a new button, only change what every button looks like, or move existing buttons around.
For Kenshi 2, we are using Unreal Engine which comes with it's own GUI system called Unreal Motion Graphics, or UMG for short. UMG is tied closely to Unreal's Blueprint scripting system, which is used to give the GUIs functionality.
We don't entirely know how modding will work for K2, but when we looked at other Unreal games that allow modding (such as ARK: Survival Evolved), both UMG and Blueprint is completely available. So in theory, modders will be able to change the game's GUIs, and script them to be able to do just about anything. This is in addition to the Forgotten Construction Set, so mods that add or change weapons, armour, items, buildings, and most other things in K1 will still be possible.”
Harrison first took up coding to make mods for various games before pursuing it as a career choice, which gives us another great point of insight as we make a conscious effort to support the community’s efforts again in Kenshi 2.
Materials Research
Elsewhere in the programming team, there’s been an ongoing investigation of Unreal’s material system which governs a huge number of visual elements and object interactions. Ranging from basic properties such as colour and transparency to complex physics based lighting and weather functions. We’re not just aiming to step up the visual quality in Kenshi 2, it also gives us a great opportunity to make the world itself feel more dynamic (which is part of what’s pushed us to search for a full time technical artist).
Finally, there’s a whole lot more going on behind the scenes with other members of the programming and art teams for Kenshi 2; all of which would be working closely with the successful applicants for each of the roles we’re hiring for. On the topic of abstract studio stuff, we also fixed some of the stranger behaviour with the sign-ups for our mailing list meaning we’ll look for more excuses to use it in the near future, also making it a great alternative way of getting these news posts for fans of Kenshi that prefer to stay outside of Steam’s ecosystem.
Kenshi v1.0.45b
Translations:
- Added Korean Language support.
Korean fans can check out the official press release on Newswire. Once again Lo-Fi would like to extend a huge thanks to Jeffrey Jeoung, BusanDaek, Byunghyun An, Son Byeong-gwan and all the others who worked hard on the fan translation that paved the way for the official release.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed dialogue interrupts not working on announcements when another NPC interjected. Could affect certain player base raids.
- Fixed crash dismantling cages with an unconscious occupant.
- Kidnapped pack beasts from wandering traders will no longer have their inventory automatically re-stocked.
- Fixed possible crash when dismantling a turret that is being used (which should be impossible)
FCS/Modding
- Fixed crash if modded character mesh has UVs outside 0-1 range (other than head)
- Fixed an issue with CHARACTER "stealth stats" property
- Fixed crash if character model failed to load due to missing skeleton file
We've pushed an additional small update tagged 1.0.45c to fix a file mix-up with the Korean translation, it should be much more accurate now.
January Community Update
New language – Korean:
We’re now in the final stages of introducing support for one more language to Kenshi – Korean, which we expect to include in a patch toward the end of February. Adding Korean to Kenshi follows a hugely inspirational community effort to localise the game client, paired with the help of our external translators to see it through to the finish.
Huge thanks to Jeffrey Jeoung for helping us to officialise his translation mod, as well as BusanDaek, Byunghyun An, Son Byeong-gwan and all others who worked hard alongside him on the fan translation.
Korean players can follow along with the press releases onNewsWire and Ruliweb. Additionally, join us as we trial run our Korean social media channels for Twitter and Facebook.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel:
On the topic of new content channels, we’re also finally graduating from using Chris’ personal YouTube. You can now subscribe to the official Lo-Fi Games YouTube channel for video content directly from the studio and to ensure this tweet ages poorly.
Merchandise – Not quite for sale:
As nearly everyone is aware, there have been a number of precautions taken to limit the spread of the coronavirus across the globe, particularly in China. As our merchandise partners use manufacturing facilities in China this has understandably lead to a delay in creating Kenshi products. We’ll have an update on the status of merchandise in a future post once things are back to normal.
The continuity teller:
Following the announcement of Kenshi 2 the speculative flood gates opened on feature lists and lore questions, specifically how various topics in Kenshi might be explained in the events of Kenshi 2. As before, our answers will remain limited allowing each user to explore the world and come to their own conclusions (unless we have to end any more astrophysics arguments…). What we can share is some of the thoughts behind it all, directly from Natalie:
“I’m currently working on the foundations of Kenshi’s story and content, which means a lot of switching between open world design and writing world lore (... I may or may not have ended up with my own endless encyclopedia of Kenshi lore at this point). First up I’ve had to map out the ruins which need preserving from kenshi 1, comparing three different timelines to make sure the layout and history are consistent.
This takes a huge amount of time, essentially working on two different world timelines as I go back and delve more into Kenshi’s ancient history. It all helps in keeping the explorable ruins nice and interesting, plus it helps to work out the evolution of its current factions, making for some really original cultures. So my working map right now has a bunch of overlays from the different timelines, plus the current faction’s territories, their safe(ish) zones, danger zones, wtf?!? zones, wildlife and enemy territories.
I’m constantly working back and forth between fleshing out the main faction lore, making a list of squads in that territory, mapping out the town locations, working out the individual town conflicts and stories, plus figuring out all of their gameplay roles, goals, motives, and traits. After a rough placement around the world, I’ve begun concentrating on a 1/6th of the map portion (one of the safer zones) and fleshed it out with any split off groups that may have conflicted with its main faction, any dens, bases and other more interesting POIs. Spider diagrams have become my best friend at this point :’)
It’s been a slow process. The map is… considerably bigger than Kenshi 1’s; it’s a challenge to fill it with interesting content as well as balance it for a desolate, wild atmosphere. I’m conscious of not filling the world with shallow or empty content, instead focusing more on the individual towns and their micro-cultures. Admittedly I have to keep reigning myself in from overcomplicating the whole thing - this is a sandbox game with subtle, environmental story-telling, not a heavily story-driven RPG.
It feels like I’ve had to scrap a lot of ideas so far but I’m starting to pick up some momentum as everything finally clicks nicely into place. World building and writing is a lot like sculpting a statue or painting, you have to constantly add, tweak, delete, repeat… it takes some patience but it’s all part of the process!”
For some additional musings on the inner workings of Kenshi such as NPC dialogue and world building, check out Natalie’s blog entries on Gamasutra.
The quiet sounds of progress:
Last month in addition to continuing our search for a tech lead, our programming team have been working on a number of systems to help in creation of the game. This includes everything from basic camera controls and map markers all the way to physics events such as building collision. As we’re still very early in development a lot of their time is laying the groundwork for certain elements of Kenshi 2 that are still under wraps, undoubtedly users will have a lot of fun speculating over this in the comments and we look forward to revealing more about this in a few months time.
Finally for any fans agonising over what to do for their special somebody this valentines day, why not tell them how to sign up for the Kenshi mailing list before treating them to a gourmet meal of the finest foodcubes and a glass of grog (assuming you’re old enough). If that doesn’t win them over then at least it should slow them down for when the skin spiders eventually turn up...
Kenshi v1.0.45 (Experimental Branch)
Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums
- Fixed dialogue interrupts not working on announcments another NPC interjected. Could affect certain player base raids.
- Fixed crash dismantling cages with an unconscious occupant
- If you kidnapped the pack beast of a wandering trader, the beasts inventory would still get re-stocked.
- Fixed possible crash when dismantling a turret that is being used (which should be impossible)
- FCS/MODDING
- Fixed crash if modded charcter mesh has uvs outside 0-1 range (other than head)
- Fixed an issue with CHARACTER "stealth stats" property
- Fixed crash if character model failed to load due to missing skeleton file