About player-driven development in Skara

[cromlech_]

Hello!

I guess many of you may be newcomers here thanks to our Open Alpha.
First of all, welcome to our community! It is great to have you here.

Skara is a player-driven game. That means the devs REALLY rely on your input to modify the development around the community’s goals and expectations. Skara was born back in 2013 as a small and crazy indie idea and evolved - thanks to the feedback from the community behind our successful Kickstarter campaign and Steam Greenlight submission - into what you can see in our Open Alpha.

We know it is still at an early stage. Great ideas takes time, and we are enjoying the journey, building prototypes, interacting with players and implementing your ideas. Skara is already a much better game because of it.

But we are also aware that it can be a let down. Don’t worry, the dev team is ALWAYS ready to talk/chat/show where we are at. That’s why we take precious time to leap weekly twitch development sessions and chat sessions.

And we also are committed to answering all your messages. You can propose game modes, talk about balancing, even influence the game’s lore with your stories. You are an essential part of this game, able to have a massive impact on its future.

So, our small indie team would like to give you a very warm welcome… And the conversation is yours to continue from here :P

[gilgam3sh666]

Keep being devoted to communicating and listening to us players. it's the Awsum sauce.

[Timetraveler]

Nice post Pablo :)

[cromlech_]

Thanks Heerser. You are one of the veterans here, you can tell how the game changed thanks to player's feedback from the old versions :)

[Timetraveler]

It definitely has changed quite a bit, I've also mentioned in my review that the developers are eager to hear feedback from the players which is a very positive thing :) There's still quite a bit of things that need to be addressed but as long as there's progression and communication between the developers and the community I'm sure that things will improve.

How's it going with UE 4.5 so far?

[cromlech_]

Originally posted by Heerser:

How's it going with UE 4.5 so far?

It is amazing! Not only some of the bugs and errors are fixed now, but the new version of the engine comes with some new cool graphic features. New real-time shadow effects, sub-surface scattering for skin materials and a lot of more things we are having a lot of fun with!

Can't wait to show you the new build and all the features we are going to release.

[themightybalwin]

Originally posted by cromlech_:

Originally posted by Heerser:

How's it going with UE 4.5 so far?

It is amazing! Not only some of the bugs and errors are fixed now, but the new version of the engine comes with some new cool graphic features. New real-time shadow effects, sub-surface scattering for skin materials and a lot of more things we are having a lot of fun with!

Can't wait to show you the new build and all the features we are going to release.

Looking forward to try the new features. I joined after 0.4.2 release and the game is getting better every single month. It is cool to see the progression and be active in the conversation with the devs.

[Timetraveler]

That sounds good to me! The new build will be released the 26th right? Hopefully we can also see some GUI / option improvements :) It feels pretty weird doing everything with your keyboard instead of your mouse haha.

[cromlech_]

Actually we are implementing the mouse-aiming system that you and Ares asked for, as well as the options menu and some cool ideas people suggested in the Twitch and chat events.We'll make an announcement about those new features later this week.

[Timetraveler]

Oh wow that sounds amazing, I'm really excited about that :) I'm looking forward to test these things in the new patch. Very nice!

[The Koi of Okinawa]

I dunno what you guys have planned for in the future, since this is my first time coming here, but I think you guys should throw a nice option for single player too. I got on today and couldn't find anyone to play with, but I did create a match and messed around with the controls. Was pretty nice, from what I played.

[cromlech_]

Yeah, there is a post somewhere in which we talk about our future plans for single player mode. It is quite difficult indeed to find matches in certain time zones, but that will get solved with the February build, I believe.

Anyway, feel free to poke us whenever you want to host a fight, the devs are always ready to jump into a battle.

[Timetraveler]

Creating a proper AI for singleplayer is one of the most difficult things to do in my opinion and the wrong focus for a game that is promoted as a primary mutliplayer game. Usually fighting AI gets repetitive because you start to recognize the patterns very easily. Once the multiplayer game gets more polished, fun and therefore more addicting I don't think that finding other people is going to be a problem. I'm unsure however when this day will come so all we can do is just wait it out ;)

[cromlech_]

Thanks Heerser. I also think that day will come soon, even sooner that we all expect :)

It is quite difficult to create a good IA indeed, we are experimenting with some behaviour trees for The Beast of the Lava Coliseum. It is not supposed to be a very clever fighter - it's a Kharn champion after all - but making patterns difficult to recognize is quite challenging.

[Timetraveler]

Originally posted by cromlech_:

Thanks Heerser. I also think that day will come soon, even sooner that we all expect :)

It is quite difficult to create a good IA indeed, we are experimenting with some behaviour trees for The Beast of the Lava Coliseum. It is not supposed to be a very clever fighter - it's a Kharn champion after all - but making patterns difficult to recognize is quite challenging.

No problem and let's hope so :)! I'm looking forward to test it out.

[cromlech_]

We are going to test The Beast today for the very first time. Still with the basic mesh but the sculpt is getting better every day, next week we will share how the final model will look. The animations are in a 20% state, as soon we confirm the game flow is correct we´ll start to work on the final animation set.

Exciting moment in the develoment as we are close to finish all the core mechanics of the game. Once we reach that stage, it will be all about releasing more and more characters, maps and Game Modes.