We’ve been busy at work for the last month or so migrating all of our content over to UE4. It’s going pretty well so far. All of the art and animations have been moved over and we have resumed our normal schedule for level and character/animation production.

Programming Update
The programming team is busy at work focusing on translating all of our codebase from Unrealscript into C++ systems in a way that we can easily produce and implement gameplay. We are close to being back to a state where we can playtest weekly with most of our basic Samurai Kenshi mechanics working as intended. Within the next month, we hope to move into production of our 3rd development phase which will be complete completion of the Kenshi with all of his training tree mechanics and gameplay.

Character/Animation Update
Recently, our second character, the Samurai Archer, was completed in a rough phase. Our character artist is currently working on textures and polish to get the Archer ready for its playtest debut sometime in the next 1-2 months. The archer is a bit of a deviation from our initial design in terms of “personality” and “character” and we’ll see how it works out. We’re excited to have our second character in the game.

The Kenshi animations are completely done, and there’s some time left in-between to really polish between the two. We’ve especially been emphasizing on basic attacks, and making sure our animation blending doesn’t detract from the weighting/impact of each sword swing. Animation development will be focusing on the Archer shortly, now that the rig is complete. The rig turned out really nice, we’re really excited to show it off soon.We are also developing our next character concept to begin production while the Archer is being animated. We’re really looking forward to the production of this one, you guys will find out why soon. (Any guesses?)

Environment/Level Update
With all the art moved over and our maps reassembled, we can resume set dressing and art production on populating our Gifu Crossroads battle map. Matt has been working on an interior/exterior modular set to construct a nice teahouse in the central area of the map that can also be used to make buildings of any size. This set has taken some time, but has a lot of versatility so we’re happy to show it off. Besides that, our junior artists are helping build small-to-medium sized cover props, cliff faces and other assets to help populate the level and give it life.