Your donations keep RPGWatch running!

Kenshi 2 - All News

Show news in a year(yyyy), month(yyyy/mm) or day:
Show news of type:
Thursday - May 06, 2021
Tuesday - December 03, 2019
Friday - September 27, 2019

Thursday - May 06, 2021

Kenshi 2 - New Screenshots/Concept Art

by Silver, 12:40

The latest community update for Kenshi has some new screenshots/concept art for Kenshi 2.

The Official Kenshi Discord is here

We have launched an official Kenshi Discord server.We’re not looking to replace the community Discord in the slightest, and we have the utmost respect for its moderators and participants, thank you for being part of something very special! Instead, we’d like to create something complimentary: a place for mini updates from us and somewhere where you can quickly and easily have a direct line to Lo-Fi Games (though we do have a sequel to a certain game to make so forgive us if we’re not always too quick to respond).

We’re very keen to hear from you about what you’d like to see the Official Kenshi Discord look like, so do please jump in and let us know.

[...]

A smidgin of Kenshi 2 content

Environmentalism

From Environment Artist Oliver Hatton: "At the moment we're putting together two adjoining biomes so we can get to see all the amazing buildings and characters in situ, doing their thing. This biome blending will also help us identify any problems that are bound to arise, things like town sizes, over-budget texture limits and so on.

The voxel terrain can be fun to work on, with overhangs and caves being possible and re-editing areas much more hands-on than with elevation maps."

And now towns and settlements are beginning to emerge on the map, we should begin to get a much clearer view of the world. It'll be like our own little working death valley where we can test out a lot of the pain and suffering to come."

Gates

Look, it's a gate! Here's a few words from Concept Artist Christopher Schlesag on how the design of the gate came to be:

"The design of the gate was mostly influenced by the architecture of the main faction, which was already established. It is visually very sturdy and has simple geometry. For these defensive walls I wanted to incorporate more metal in comparison to the civilian buildings, which gives an even more militaristic feel.

These are the highest and thickest walls you will encounter in the game. We wanted the walls to be customizable to an extent, so they will consist of optional place-able modules like bastions, towers, and anti-climb extensions that will give advantages in several areas. For example, placing a tower on your wall will not only provide cover from ranged attacks and protect from environmental effects, but also increase the number of turrets you can place on this part of the wall. How much extensions the walls and bastions of a town have will also be a great indicator for how dangerous the surrounding lands are. We are also working on resolving placement-issues the walls in Kenshi 1 had."

loading...

Some, er, mishaps along the way

We also thought you might like to see this happy little accident tentatively titled "I'm just going to spin my arms in the air as I run and if you get hit, it's your own fault!" (thanks Craig):

From Technical Artist Victor Goossens: "What was meant to be happening was literally that the guy was just supposed to be running somewhere, but some animations broke in a bind pose. To explain a bind pose: it’s the thing that an animation is relative to. So if, for instance, an animation was animated with an A-pose as bind-pose, but then the bind-pose in engine is a T-pose (arms are higher), the arms will tilt up when playing that animation in-engine.

I think at that point in time half of our various reference poses (we use a cool blending system under the hood) were borked, so animations ended up being... Magical.

We also had people growing and shrinking vertically as they breathed because of this…"

[...]

Tuesday - December 03, 2019

Kenshi 2 - November Community Update

by Silver, 10:55

A new update on Kenshi 2 details progress so far.

November Community Update

During October we confirmed our focus on Kenshi 2 before covering ways to get your fix of curated and studio-led Kenshi content, existing events and upcoming competitions, merchandise and our ongoing support for Kenshi 1 which has received a number of experimental updates pushed recently. If you missed last month's update you can read it here.

Community Events:


The Kenshi Community Discord team’s Halloween modding competition officially draws to a close with the end of November meaning they’ll be featuring a winner and handing out prizes (read: free games) shortly. If you’d like to take part in future community driven events, be sure to join the community Discord soon as there’s something special coming up for the festive season…

Building Kenshi 2:


As we aim to finish creating Kenshi 2 prior to the heat death of the universe, Lo-Fi Games has been expanding our staff team and working with freelance artists to get Kenshi 2 started. Outside of the studio, eagle eyed users on the Kenshi subreddit noticed Eugenia Peruzzo’s recently shared ‘Samurai Military Guards’ armour set.



This was created following on from concept art by 5518 Studios, which should give a small peek at one aspect of the aesthetic users can expect this time around.



Concurrently, inside of the studio we welcomed two additional members to the team, joining the programmers there’s Harrison aka ‘Boodals’ who’s currently working on GUI and a number of things we intend to keep from Kenshi 1. On the art team, we’re joined by concept artist Guy Warley who’s been drafting incredible buildings and environments that we’re keeping a secret for now. Finally on top of all of that we’re searching for an experienced technical lead and a lead artist to join the team full time.

Blasts from the past:
In our original post about the engine change Chris mentioned that creating Kenshi 2 in Unreal would likely make modding "more powerful but more difficult", though we’d do our best to keep up the trend of allowing users to a relative sandbox in how they modify their playable sandbox (it’s sandboxes all the way down, ideally...). Access to the project and Unreal Editor’s toolkit means we’re expecting to see even more depth to community mods but also raised some concerns about the average player who may want to tweak the game without learning a new and complicated piece of software, regardless of how powerful it may be. To that end, we’ve been exploring what functions can be kept from the Forgotten Construction Set and current methods of map editing. The overarching aim here is to retain a lot of the ability for players to make small modifications similar to what’s popular in Kenshi 1 and fan translations without needing to touch Unreal Editor, though it’s important to stress that it’s too early to promise an exact feature set right now.

The world of tomorrow:
In addition to what to keep from Kenshi, we’re investing a lot of time in understanding what the features in Unreal can add to Kenshi 2. To give some obvious examples, unlike the older systems used for Kenshi, Unreal supports more detailed lighting, expansive weather conditions and more intricate time of day cycles which make sense to investigate as we build the new game. As with above, it’s too soon to commit to specifics but if and when it’s time they would comfortably warrant their own posts to detail how they change character interactions in the world.

Future reveals:
As a firm believer in managing expectations, posting during exploration and investigative stages will leave the initial updates lighter than those further into the project but a monthly schedule will probably seem almost too infrequent later down the line. To that end, we’re sticking with it and things may get a bit more technical for the next few.

[...]

Friday - September 27, 2019

Kenshi 2 - Development News

by Silver, 05:32
The latest development update for Kenshi 2 talks about a switch to unreal engine.

Kenshi/Kenshi 2 Development News

Directly from Chris Hunt, Lo-Fi Games CEO and the man behind Kenshi:

"Good news everyone! There has been a change of plans with development, and we have switched to the Unreal engine!

Now, what does that mean?

GOOD SIDE:
  • Amazing graphics with little effort
  • Better performance
  • Less work for us long-term, as we don't have to worry about engine bugs and features. We can focus more on gameplay.
  • Fancy features, like maybe cloth physics for example
  • Better stability probably?
  • New pathfinding system


BAD SIDE:
  • More work for us short-term, porting is a huge job
  • We have less control over the engine
  • Modding support will be more complicated, Unreal is a difficult engine to work with and has limitations in this respect. I don't know the engine well enough to say how exactly. The likely scenario is "more powerful but more difficult". The FCS will remain the same, but will control less stuff. Mod support will be a high priority for us though, so don't worry.
  • Kenshi 1 update now uncertain:
    Here's the kicker: Porting Kenshi 1 to Unreal engine is now way more work than making Kenshi 2, because we have to port assets and make the old stuff work, where for Kenshi 2 we are making the assets from scratch in the Unreal-compatible way. We have started porting Kenshi 1, but I'm not sure whether to finish it because it is a lot of extra work and will delay Kenshi 2

So I'd like some feedback from people. Personally I feel like it would be better to focus on Kenshi 2, which will have exciting new features, new content and world to explore and mechanics to play with, rather than remaking kenshi 1, which would be essentially the same game."

To get some more definitive feedback we've also put up a poll here: https://www.strawpoll.me/18697532

P.S. This does not mean Epic Exclusive, it's just a game engine choice. Don't panic.

Information about

Kenshi 2

Developer: Lo-Fi Games

SP/MP: Unknown
Setting: Unknown
Genre: Unknown
Combat: Unknown
Play-time: Unknown
Voice-acting: Unknown

Regions & platforms
Internet
· Homepage
· Platform: PC
· To be announced
· Publisher: Lo-Fi Games