Just several months back, Kinsfolk demo went live. And, thanks to you all that played it and submitted feedback I collected a lot of ideas how to improve the game further.

I incorporated those in the main game already, but also wanted to push a new demo so we can continue building the game together, and as a thank you to the community and everyone that gave feedback. If you get the chance, please give the new demo a go.

So what did change?

Story and Narration Mechanics

One of the main pain points and feedback themes I heard from the players was that gameplay did not feel interactive enough, and that story wasn't engaging.

The main problem was that the dialogue was full of long exposition dumps. To solve for that, I broke it down into multiple segments. Both subtitle- and dialogue-wise. Now instead of listening to the story for 30 seconds, you need to explore and find multiple pieces of dialogues to combine them to understand the wholes tory.


This also allowed me to highlight different parts of environment and reward exploration more.




I also noticed that besides exploring, there was a lot of feedback about the story missing interactivity. To improve that, now some dialogue is dependent on player actions. Like this small gif, where the story is conditioned on the player's action.

UI and UX

Another big area of feedback was the UI. To get the demo out, I did not think much about the UI, so I did it as fast as possible. But now I made sure the UI matches Kinsfolk's aesthetic and feels cohesive. You all reminded me how much this is important, so I did my best to clean it up.

Here are a few before and after shots to highlight the difference.

Controls (old vs new)

Main Menu (old vs new)

Subtitles (old vs new)

Other Improvements

A collection of smaller improvements that made it into this update as well. Mostly minor thing related to UX that folks mentioned in the feedback form.

• Better controller support
• UI now scales well with ultra-wide monitors
• Added tooltips to make it easier to understand controls
• Subtitles now are shown one piece at a time to match the dialogue
• New animations to make the character feel better
• Better movement
  

Closing Thoughts

Once again, thank you to everyone that played the original demo and took the time to give me feedback.

Please Wishlist the game and join the Discord Kinsfolk community to follow for more.

Cheers,
Vinko

[ 2025-02-10 23:44:07 CET ] [Original Post]