Monomyth - Current Progress

Redglyph spotted Kickstarter update #20 for Monomyth:

State of the Game: Current progress

Hi, dungeon-crawling fans!

Another month has passed and it is time for yet another update on the project! A lot has happened in terms of gameplay implementation, characters, and level design. So let's get to it!

Current Progress

NPCs were among the most important things I tried to improve during March. The essential motivation here was to iron out some issues with their controlling logic and how they interacted with one another depending on their individual factions.  All of this work was based on a perception system I implemented during the code refactoring I mentioned in previous updates. The perception system itself remained largely untouched during these improvements, which gives me confidence that, for now, it is in a good state. As a result of the work, NPCs can now actively fight each other without any big hiccups in terms of background logic. They properly recognize enemies (both player and non-player), orderly cycle back into their peace state after combat, and correctly perform subsequent actions. Especially the latter has been a constant source of headaches in the old codebase, which had an ad-hoc structure that was replaced by a more robust state machine architecture (see December update). 

There have also been multiple improvements with regard to character animations. As you may remember from one of the last updates, every character requires a "skeleton" to be animated. Thanks to the standard UE4 skeleton, which is now a core element of Monomyth's humanoids, various animations could be standardized across many different characters. As a result, NPCs now show behavior that makes them appear more realistic. For example, characters are turning their heads, following the (sighted) player, sheath their weapons whenever they are not in combat, and sometimes carry torches. These torches are not just for decoration but have an effect on player stealth.

[...]