Skara’s next build, version 0.4.6, is going to bring the largest bunch of features and improvements since we launched Skara on Early Access and will represent the beginning of our alpha state.
In addition to passive and special skills, the most important updates will come in the backend. Build 0.4.6 will bring player accounts, levels, experience and rankings as well as other community tools such as live chat for the lobby and (hopefully) in-game VoIP.
These features have been demanded from the beginning by a lot of our pre-alpha testers and will help a lot of our players to find other people to play with and interact in-game. But it is an ambitious feature for our small team: a lot of care and dedication must be taken to avoid bugs and crashes, as well as to prevent player's accounts being hacked. But we are working hard to get there.
The next build will also bring some cool improvements to the in-game action: We will complete the core combat mechanics for Celea and Shinse, including new features like dash attacks, parry and executions.
These features still need to be proven, so don’t necessarily expect a complete list at this stage.We cannot confirm a release date for this new build, though we would love to launch it the beginning of May. In any event we'll announce the final date for the release soon.
The #NameSkaraBots competition
Thanks to the awesome response we got from the invitation to name Skara’s Boss (now known as Groth, the Soul Reaper) we decided to do the same thing with all of Skara’s AI.
The bots’ present names come from within the studio, taking the nicknames of various developers. Mr. Wellington Bot is our beloved Art Director David Guell, Ori Bot is one of our Game Designers (and the only girl in our team), The Sport Boss Bot is supposedly Pablo, Skara’s founder and creative director. And so on...
However, we realized there is no reason to limit the bots to these characters. Why not add a few from the community? To make the process fun, why not make it a competition?
So here’s our plan.We will provide a list of characters for the community to fill in names of their choosing.We will collect the submissions and choose them based on the following awards.
The winning submissions of these awards will get their name selected and added to the Skara bot universe. But in addition to that we will also give something extra (it’s a secret).
Categories:
GORIEST:
FUNNIEST:
LONGEST:
MOST SUITABLE FOR SKARA:
STOLEN FROM LEAGUE OF LEGENDS:
BEST ROCK N ROLL REFERENCE:
BEST ACTION FILM REFERENCE:
...we realize these categories are kind of arbitrary, so feel free to suggest any new ones, and we may add them in.We will be accepting submissions across all our social media platforms and Steam for the next week. On April 13th we will announce the winners on our blog.
To be able to efficiently award prizes, please make sure your submission comes with some form of name and contact information.
Good Luck!
