Hi everyone, welcome to our next community update. Sorry it's been a while but it's pretty difficult to put these together without spoiling juicy details to you. Relax (enjoy death), though, because we will be releasing another update much, much quicker than usual after this one to help satiate your cravings for more Kenshi 2 #content.

Things are good with the Lo-Fi team; we’re making excellent progress, sharpening our tools and constantly evolving our processes. That sounds like corporate nonsense we know, but the detail would bore you and basically it means we’re getting Kenshi 2 made at a good rate. We are fully on schedule, and even ahead of schedule in some areas, we’re just not telling you what that schedule is just yet.


So a few of you have been asking for merch and we are pleased to announce that we’ve partnered with the awesome folks at RobaRoba. They’re a spin-off of the excellent Indiebox, so they’re highly experienced with distribution and production.

We’re launching with a total of six different shirts for you to get your hands on. They’re going to be available in a range of sizes and will ship to a wide range of countries. For now, we’re only stocking the shirts in black but we will soon be adding some more colours, more fits and variations, and more merch in general.

Check out our official Kenshi shirts!


We also have some beautiful die cut stickers to get your hands on! They should be available on the RobaRoba launch but if you don't see them just yet, they'll be up there very soon.




This week we’re going to take a little look at the design behind the beloved Hivers, which we have some big plans for in Kenshi 2. We’ll let our 3D Artist Vitali lead you in...

Vitali: “As our fans will know, in the first game, we had different Hive sub-races but they all were using the same model, and only had color variation in terms of textures. We decided to change things up with Kenshi 2 and give them the love they deserve by making a new unique design for all additional sub-races (the exact variations will remain a secret for now). As for the Western Hive we decided to keep it as close as possible to the original”

Christopher (Concept Artist): "The Hiver is beloved by fans, and a really interesting design. I remember being filled with wonder at my first encounter with one of those stick-legged creatures, wandering alone through the desert. So working on the Hiver for Kenshi 2, a main point was to not implement changes that are too drastic and would change its visual identity.



Our 3D Artist Vitali started out with the main body of work, modelling the Hiver while refining the design. After that I made some over-paints to try different suggestions we came up with and see if they would improve the design further.

For example: We tried implementing the softer wrinkled skin from the elbows, at the shoulder as well. The Idea was to create further visual distinction between drone-types, other than the head.



Another thing we tried was changing the look of the horns. The idea here was to strengthen the appearance of them and underline the fact that soldier drones would be able to utilise their horns in combat as well as in social disputes. We decided to keep the original appearance of the horns, but will keep the possibility of more length variations via morphs within the character editor.



In the end we decided for some adjustments and discarded others. The result after Vitali worked his magic can be seen here. The final version turned out beautifully."

Kenshi update 1.0.55 (experimental) is out now.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Fixes:

• Hotfix for mods not loading header info

Kenshi update 1.0.54 (experimental) is out now.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Fixes:

• Hotfix for the popup message box showing no text

Hi folks, we’re here, it’s the next community update! It’s nearly June and the weather is absolutely horrific here in England where much of the Lo-Fi team are based (okay, so it's actually getting a lot better on the day of publishing this, thank Okran).

Since our last update we’ve still largely been locked down but we’ve just recently been able to get back into non-essential shops and (thankfully) back inside pubs again. Hurrah! 




Here’s an old friend rethought and remodelled for Kenshi 2: the River Raptor. On the process of getting to this point, Lo-Fi Games 3D Character Artist Vitali Ivanov said:

"I started from the Kenshi 1 low poly model, then I made a sculpt in Zbrush with what I consider to be more believable anatomy, while still staying close to the original.

Our Concept Artist Christopher Schlesag helped with the overpaint, and with feedback from head honcho Chris Hunt and our Lead 3D Artist Mohamad, we got to the point it’s looking at now. We used a whole range of references to influence its direction, but the ones we’ve highlighted here show the more pronounced features that I tried to implement in the new model. 



Raptors are omnivorous and are more like a vermin in Kenshi 1, so the idea was not to make it a ferocious predator but a clumsy, fat creature that’s not naturally aggressive but can fend for itself when need be. We'll be incorporating two variants of the model into Kenshi 2: one with and one without spikes.” 


Over the past few months programmers Sam Gynn and Craig Tinney have been hard at work on The Forgotten Construction Set (FCS), making changes that will have an impact on both Kenshi 1 and Kenshi 2. 

For the uninitiated, the FCS is currently available to Kenshi 1 modders and is the exact same tool we use to edit the game.

This week we’re releasing an update to Kenshi 1’s FCS that brings in a huge amount of these changes (this will first appear in Steam's experimental build). We caught up to have a little chat about the update:

Dan: First of all, can you both give me a bit of information about what you do at Lo-Fi?

Craig: I’m Craig, I do programming, push buttons and occupy space. Sam and I are responsible for developing new features on Kenshi 2 and the Forgotten Construction Set application, which our writers use to write all the narrative for our games and much more.

Sam: I’ve been working at Lo-Fi for a long while. I’m a Senior Programmer: I press buttons, make bugs and try to fix them again!

Dan: So the lovely bonus of you working on the Kenshi 2 FCS is that we can incorporate some of these changes into the Kenshi 1 FCS. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Craig: So there’s two elements: quality of life stuff that our artists and writers ask for, usually improving the usability of the tool, all stuff that can be easily brought over to the Kenshi 1 FCS. And then there’s things which we have to make code changes for that go straight into Kenshi 2, which can’t be hammered back into the first game for boring technical reasons. 

The update that’s coming out this week will be a load of bug fixes and quality of life updates that we’ve been sat on for a little while. 

Dan: What are the highlights in this update?

Sam: The biggest one is the ability to simultaneously copy duplicate dialogue objects, which hasn’t previously been possible due to how dialogue is actually many objects rather than being one. 

Craig: My favourite is probably the layout saving, which you did Sam; you can have a million windows open for editing and have them open back up again once you close the application. And it’s different for every mod, for example, you open up my [insert secret Kenshi 2 feature here] mod, and it’s got all the relevant objects open, whereas if I was to open the dialogue mod, I’d have all the dialogue packages and conversations open up that I was last editing, like dialogue stuff etc. which  It saves a lot of clicking around and makes things much easier. 

Dan: Do you have any expectations for what modders are going to do with the Kenshi 2 FCS?

Craig: Every feature is designed with the FCS in mind, and right now we’re working on a lot of features we can’t yet talk about, which are what I’m largely thinking about when imagining what modders will do. We are going to great lengths to make sure people can do whatever wacky stuff that they want, and our game (hopefully) won’t break as a result of that. 

Trust me, the new features are really cool, it’ll be amazing to see what people do with them. 

Dan: Is it safe to say Kenshi 2 will be friendlier to modders than Kenshi 1? 

Craig: I’d say just as friendly, yes.

Dan: Will the point of entry be similar in terms of knowledge for modders? Is there anything extra people are going to need to know for modding Kenshi 2? 

Sam: It should be about the same; it’s the same tool, so any knowledge people have picked up while making mods for the original game will be relevant, but with lots of fun new features to play with.

Craig: You should be able to identify things you might like to change in the game and edit them within a couple of minutes. It’s the same kind of data relationships, a very small amount of that has changed. 

Dan: So has the engine change not caused any issues with the FCS?

Sam: The assets we use have changed; we previously used ogre.mesh files, which I had to write an export tool for Blender for people to actually use, but that doesn’t work with Unreal, so we’re now using Unreal.asset files. But that is just the assets, the actual underlying data, such as lists of items, descriptions and all that stuff, that is just raw data that can just be read directly out of the files we use for the FCS, so it doesn’t matter which engine we’re using.

Dan: Will people that have some experience with Unreal be able to put it to use with Kenshi 2?

Craig: There has been some talk of modding blueprints 

Sam: We hope so. 

Creating buildings will require some knowledge of the Unreal Blueprint editor, as that’s where they’re created now, rather than how that previously worked where you’d be working entirely in the FCS. 

When creating buildings, working with doors and multiple floors will be much easier and more visual than it was before with Unreal Editor.

Craig: We’ll be making the same how-to documents available to modders that we give to artists, just with slightly plainer English so they can make better sense of them. 

Dan: Awesome! Well, to wrap things up, do you have any favourite Kensh 1i mods?

Craig: Yeah, the one I made to extend the spider attack range, as I don’t think it’s long enough. 

Sam: I tend not to use many mods. Though I do like the one that turns off the map marker, so I can properly feel lost. 

Craig: That is a good one. Actually, the one we were talking about the other week that makes it so that when someone’s arm’s cut off it says “LMAO, Kenshi vibes”. I really liked that one.

Sam: There are lots of amazing mods, it’s great to scroll through and see what crazy things people have come up with.

Craig: I’m also partial to “Hippety hoppity, you are now my property”. 

Dan: Thanks guys.

• Added auto-complete added dropdown certain dropdown boxes
  
• Dialogue condition effects, targets
  
• Reference lists for items
  
• Added alphabetical sorting for dialogue conditions
  
• Added alphabetical sorting for dialogue events, EV_PLAYER_TALK_TO_ME is still first in the list as it's the most commonly used
  
• Events with invalid entries are now highlighted red
  
• Added support for duplicating dialogue
  
• Added additional error detection for dialogue data
  
• Added window layout saving
  
• Opening a mod will also load the windows last opened with that mod
  
• Also remembers any custom columns setup from previous use

• Added periodic automatic backups
  
• Added notes to dialogue lines
  
• Uses the todo list system
  
• Notes are displayed in translation mode
  
• Notes are exported to .pot files
  
• Can close todo window with escape
  
• Added additional detail to missing dependencies error
  
• Now shows what specific items are missing
  
• Added soft reference list limits
  
• Added error suppression for loading a mod has just been merged
  
• Added tags to conversation and dialogue packages to make sorting and organisation easier
  
• Added a new mod merging system tracks versions on a per Item basis
  
• Added a fcs_settings.def file for changing default root path and data folder location
  
• Added ability to traverse item properties with just the keyboard arrow keys

• Added filtering by reference count
  
• Added find and replace function
  
• Added button to search for assets that have been moved to a different folder
  
• Added filtering on referenced items
  
• Improved reference list filter speed
  
• Selecting things in the reference list automatically changes the add reference button to the selected list

• Clicking a merge checkbox will check all selected items
  
• Delete value right click option hidden when not applicable
  
• Fixed crash in dialogue validation on invalid references
  
• Fixed being unable to delete invalid references in dialogue editor
  
• Fixed exception if no layout data loaded
  
• Fixed dialogue lines losing their link flag when deleting lines
  
• Fixed a null property crash in Set Field window
  
• Fixed crash if base mod directory does not exist
  
• Fixed deleting an item not flagging as a change
  
• Fixed custom enum column display
  
• Fixed exception if filtering by enum with invalid values
  
• Fixed dialogue conditions and effects being editable on locked items
  
• Fixed deleting dialogue objects not deleting all associated line and condition items
  
• Many other misc. bug fixes too boring or technical to mention here

Hi! I’m Colton! I’ve been a writer at Lo-Fi for a few months now and wow, I’m happy to confirm that the people behind Kenshi are as smart and wonderful as you’d expect them to be. Currently I’m working on the finishing bits of Kenshi 2’s first big faction and a giiiiant migration of our internal wiki to a cool new platform. Ooh, and we recently added some context to a controversial mystery from K1. I think people will enjoy the direction we’ve taken.

I’m coming in as a big Kenshi fan already, so being able to add to such a wonderfully crafted world is a real dream. It’s also nice to know what Kenshi 2 is going to be about. If you’re worried that more writers = more things to read and obscure knowledge to wonder about, worry not! So much of our effort is spent coming up with very, uh, “Kenshi” scenarios and creating experiences for you to build your stories around. The lore is still there, obv, and it’s very good, but Kenshi is a sandbox game with a rich world to immerse yourself in. My job is to add flavour to the broth, with the occasional spicy tofu thrown in.

Life Balance

A bit about me! Aside from writing, most of my creative juice goes into making small games with my friends at Bad Pet. Devil Express is our most recent project and I love it a lot. If you want a sample of my writing style that’d be the best place to look hehehe. The pandemic has killed most of my non-playing video game hobbies (drinking with friends), but I still make time for the important things (drinking with friends on Discord). I was exercising for a month, that was nice. Now I just play Satisfactory and order take-out with my partner.

Work Setup



I’m one of the few non-Bristol based staffers, currently working out of this wonderful coworking space in Toronto, Canada with my friends at Laundry Bear and Reptoid Games. 



Most people are working from home so it’s pretty quiet. I am counting the days until we can all work together and make jokes. There’s a Korean corn dog place (K Seoul Hot Dog) that I go to for lunch! It is the light of my life. Here’s a picture:



Okay, that’s all from me! Looking forward to sharing more of the very good things that are happening in Kenshi 2. 




Hi, I’m Vitali, and this is my third year working for Lo-Fi. I'm currently creating characters, creatures and armour for Kenshi 2. 

I have many hobbies but I'm not committed to any of them, or maybe the only consistent hobby I have is playing video games. I played Kenshi a lot and it was the motivation to join the team so I can work on a game that I actually like and will play. I prefer indie games because they have a soul and are not bound by stupid rules invented by people that never played a game in their life.



I also have pets... right now I have a dog, cat, two rats and a hermit crab, at some point we had a rabbit, chameleon and a turtle (not at the same time :D) So although I'm home alone during my working hours it still feels crowded.



I used to do hang-gliding but I fell and gave up before I got any good, I tried riding a motorcycle but I crashed before I learned to drive properly... most of my outside PC hobbies are like that :D




Thanks for reading folks, don’t forget to join us over on our Discord, find us on your favourite social platform and, if you don’t yet have Kenshi, or you know a friend that’s been wondering whether to pick it up, we’re on sale at 40% off this weekend as part of Steam’s Open World Sale! Bye for now!

Kenshi update 1.0.53 (experimental) is out now.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Fixes:

• Generate distant towns is now an option, disabled by default.
  
• Hopefully fixed the crash from 1.0.52
  
• Bed recovery rate multiplier now displayed in tooltip
  
• Font loading deferred to when splash screen is displayed (to prevent long initial black screen for heavy languages)

Kenshi update 1.0.52 (experimental) is out now.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Fixes:

• Towns can now be seen from miles away instead of popping into view at close range.
  
  
• Disguise quality is now affected by your UNMODIFIED stealth skill. Before your disguise would be negatively affected by things like the armour you were wearing, but this was the disguise itself so wasn't quite as intended

Hey everyone, happy new year to you all! Since the last update we’ve had a Christmas party, a Christmas break, a new year and a new national lockdown in the UK, so we’re all working from home again due to that pesky old C-word that we’d rather not mention. Regardless of being locked down, spirits are up and good progress is being made with Kenshi 2. Check it oooot:


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.


From time to time we'll be hosting Steam key giveaways and competitions where we'll be asking the community to take part by sending questions for the devs and posting mods and screenshots. Keep an eye out for info on these in the Discord server.

An "ask the devs" channel has been added from the off where we'll pick our favourite questions from the fans to answer on a monthly basis.





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."






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."








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…"




Here's a little something we thought you might appreciate seeing. Originally recorded back in 2017 at GDC (remember events?) and posted yesterday: "Kole Hicks & Chris Hunt share the details behind crafting the music and sound for the gritty, unforgiving, and indifferent world of Kenshi."




To attempt to prove that Kenshi isn’t made by an evil artificial intelligence, we’ve recently been giving our team the chance to let their personalities shine with profiles in community updates. This update is no exception, so here’s a few words from Nat, Sarah and Dan:

 
Hi, I’m Nat, and I’ve been with Lo-Fi for around 8 years now. Currently, I’m organising and writing base dialogue in and around our first Kenshi 2 faction, thinking up all the different ways we can troll y’all.


Outside of work, I try to conserve my creative energy for Kenshi and not exhaust it on personal projects! So, because of that, my hobbies revolve more around physical stuff: weight training, calisthenics and pole. I just got over a 2 year back injury and lockdown has actually been quite useful for me to try and train back to where I was at before.

My hobby started all the way back when I was 20 years old. I jumped off a speedboat to swim in the sea, then found I didn’t have the strength to pull myself back up onto the boat to get out! I had to be hauled back up like some kind of sack of dead fish. It was since that day that I vowed to be strong enough to pull my own bodyweight up onto a speedboat, should I ever jump off one again. Simple goals!

I also study writing and game design in my spare time, that includes playing games as case studies (lately I’ve been *ahem* ‘studying’ Last of Us and Ghost of Tsushima). I tend to write up the stuff I learn and think about on my blog I feel like it cements stuff for me. I often work on so many different aspects of the game, it could be another 2 years before I work on the same type of thing again; I don't want to have forgotten the important lessons I learned the first time around!

I also volunteer at a charity I feel very passionate about, One25, a support service for women on the streets. I make sandwiches and drive the outreach van on night shifts. At Christmas time we give out little goody bags, cakes and make sure women have warm clothes and hats. We meet some lovely women having some hard times, and the charity does a hell of a lot of good, I’m super proud to work for them.




Hi! I’m the Studio Manager for Lo-Fi Games. I came on board (lol) in April 2020 to help out with the ever-growing team we have in place for Kenshi 2. I am currently Working From Boat managing all things office/HR/finance/welfare/H&S/happiness from afar!



My day to day tasks are running all the things business related! Mostly keeping everyone communicating together, managing the finance and legal sides of the business, and making sure everyone is OK, especially while working from home. I have been given the secondary title ‘Chief of Happiness’. The team sometimes struggle with not being able to work together in a creative environment so we put lots of things in place to try and make that better, including gaming nights, monthly catch up meetings and happiness packs sent to everyone including snacks and beers.

My background is in managing game studios, music festivals and event build sites around the world and I am now bringing that experience to Lo-Fi to help create an exciting and engaging studio environment for the team. Now we just need Covid to go away so we can all go in and enjoy it!




As I’m currently "working from boat" I thought I would show you my tiny 12v setup! I have a mobile WiFi router which (depending on where I moor up) is pretty good (around 300mbs). My teeny keyboard is still ergonomic so works surprisingly well! The setup is great for admin and the online stuff for my job but not for mega gaming unfortunately!




My boat is on a canal to the south of Bath and I travel up and down it enjoying the countryside life. It takes a lot of work to keep the engine and boat going but going for walks then coming back to a fire and cosy living space is awesome!

During the winter I’ve been getting together with some fellow boaties and we play a lot of card and board games, like Pandemic, Munchkin, Exploding Kittens, Code Names, Backgammon and Chess. It’s a simple life but a beautiful one!

I also have a studio in Bristol where, alongside sketching and painting, I create interactive sculptures using a variety of materials and Arduinos. I love to see what happens when people interact with my designs. I usually design stuff that emulates natural phenomena such as bioluminescence in jellyfish or firing synapses in a brain. Sometimes these get featured in various festivals or National Trust gardens too!




This very update is being put together by a chap referring to himself in the third person by the name of Dan Page. He’s the new Head of Marketing at Lo-Fi Games, responsible for being the mouthpiece of Kenshi across English-speaking social media channels. Dan can also be found lurking around reddit and the Kenshi Community Discord.

In a clumsy switcheroo I’ll be changing perspective and referring to myself in the first person from hereon, which is actually how my mind works, usually.



I’m fairly obsessed with music and from time to time I do try to make a bit of it. You’d think lockdown would be the perfect time to do more of that but it’s not always been an easy thing to focus on. The only things I’ve made public recently are me jamming with the Behringer TD3 I bought last year and this little work in progress thing. That is not much output for a year, 2021 will be different (maybe)!

If you’ve any strange desire to find out a bit about what I listen to, have a look at my Bandcamp Collection and Wishlist here if you like.


Lockdown has meant gaming for me: Persona 5, Cloudpunk, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Disco Elysium (so so good) and Ghost of Tsushima have been the games that have had me pretty absorbed. 

A 2020 resolution was to finish more games. I can’t really remember how well I did with my backlog but I did fiiiiiiiiinally get round to finishing Spec Ops: The Line, which if you’ve never played is a beautiful modern study on the absolute horrors of war.

I’ve a pretty keen interest in VR, having previously run a coworking space called Bristol VR Lab, and put on a conference by the name of VR World Congress. I don’t really have the room for recommendations here but I do make them on the twitters quite often.

Board game-wise, I’ve been playing a lot of Codenames: Duet this year. Big recommend.




I’ve watched a lot of telly of late but I think everyone has so I won’t go on about that much, other than to insist you watch Giri / Haji, a beautifully shot story of crime, friendship and family drama based across London and Tokyo. Seriously, watch it, though be warned, it’s not being renewed for a second season for some sad reason.




In my office/studio I have a gaming PC with a 4K monitor, Fostex PM2 monitor speakers, a MicroKorg, the aforementioned Behringer TD3, an old Carillon MIDI controller I nicked from my friend and a little Akai LPD8. For console gaming and TV I have a PS4 with a 55” 4K HDR Sony Bravia and a Sony STR-DN 1080 7.2 amp and speakers that I recently bought and am loving. I also recently got myself an Oculus Quest 2 to add to my headset collection.


That's all for now folks. Stay safe out there, stay in touch, and don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. If you'd like to get these updates straight to your inbox then sign up to our mailing list here.

Kenshi update 1.0.51 is out now.

Please report any bugs or feedback to either the Steam or Lo-Fi forums

Fixes:

• Fixed deleting saves from new save location
  
• Fixed bar squads not spawning in Heng due to multiple towns in one zone
  
• Fixed issue with initial player health if race was changed during character creation

After 12 long years of development, Kenshi was released 2 years ago and are now played by more than a million people. We continue to nurture and support the game and the growing Kenshi Community.

We hope you'll nominate us for the Labor of Love Award in this year's The Steam Awards.

Hi there, here comes another community update on Kenshi. In this update, we'll go over, a sneak peek on new modes to place interior objects and furniture in Kenshi 2, some news from the Studio, and more introduction to Lo-Fi's team members.


One of the key elements of Kenshi is the Building feature; finding the right spot to build an outpost or buying some buildings as a base and filling the external and interior space with furniture and objects. Building feature continues to be the key element of Kenshi 2, with enhanced modes that enable players to build and place objects with ease.

In this update, we asked Craig (his profile below) about the new modes for interior object placement for Kenshi 2. You'll find below some sneak peek videos and descriptions on what we could expect from the feature.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Kenshi 2 will feature a number of tools to help placing objects indoors substantially easier. Let's start with the improvements made to the Kenshi 1 method of placing furniture, now called Free-Placement Mode.

As the name suggests, this mode allows you to place furniture at any valid location at whatever rotation the player sees fit. We've now added collision correction to this mode to allow players to place objects up against walls and other objects much easier. There's also an option to allow you to snap the rotation of your object against whatever you collide against, making alignment to walls and other pieces of furniture much easier.

For some objects, however, this mode is not exactly ideal. Say I want a neat line of hydroponic farms inside the building, we could try and line them up neatly by hand, which could take some time, or we could use the new Grid Snapping Mode for perfect alignment.

But what if you want to align objects at an angle? What if you want some things aligned differently? Well, that's where our final new mode, Furniture Alignment Mode comes in handy. Now players can select any interior object and generate a grid to align to the building.

With these new tools, it'll be easier than ever to create interior layouts for Kenshi 2.

Below are the interior views of the building provided by Nicolò (his profile below). Furniture is still being modelled (no spoilers!) so you'll only see the shapes here, but the images demonstrate how the objects are placed against the curved walls and straight alignments such as shelves and internal walls.






Starting 5 November, England has gone back into another lockdown for at least a month, which means everyone at Lo-Fi is now working from home. The lockdown can be difficult for some members who prefer to work in the Studio, but we're planning lots of online gaming sessions to keep our team from going stir crazy!

We are all embracing remote communication and online meetings during the lockdown, but our virtual experience reached new heights when we attended the China Game Fest in late October. Lo-Fi set up a virtual booth within the virtual conference centre where visitors walked around led by a friendly virtual escort. The event was visited by more than 50,000 visitors over the 3 days (23rd – 25th) with impressive media coverage in China.




In the last update, we introduced several new team members who have joined the Studio for the development of Kenshi 2. We'll continue the introduction of 3 members, old and new, on who they are, how they are set up at home, and what they are up to outside of work.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

Chris Hunt – Head Developer and CEO

Home Setup



Life Balance
Outside of games I have 2 major interests. The biggest is motorcycle adventures. I have a 1989 Kawasaki KLR which is basically the AK47 of bikes: simple and reliable. I can repair it by the side of the road in the middle of a desert with nothing but a spanner and some cable ties. I once rebuilt the carburetor in the darkness on a beach with a torch in my mouth, without knowing what a carburetor was. I once rode up a ski slope in the Pyrenees and camped at the top, and found the next morning that a gang of wild horses had beaten up and possibly molested my bike which made all the battery water drain out. I rode across half of Spain with no battery, making sure I only parked on the top of slopes so I could bump-start the engine again. I love it, these little things add the adventure and create memories.



I’ve since rebuilt and upgraded the bike from the ground up preparing for a big adventure that I wanted to do in summer 2020 but the virus ruined that, so we’ll see. My dream is to cross Mongolia.



I’m also building a 4x4 camper van to go snowboarding with, but that’s still in early stages. I was originally going to use an old army truck, but that proved way too impractical.



Snowboarding is my other love, but it’s a very season and weather dependent thing so I don’t get to do as much as I’d like, especially as I’m so fussy about snow conditions.

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Nicolò Zubbini – Environment Artist

Hi, I'm Nicolò, an environment and hard surface artist. I specialise in architecture, but also work on natural and mechanical environment elements, and vehicle models. I have a passion for sci-fi, and any weathered and grungy setting.

I studied architecture, and have initially worked on architectural visualisation, followed by historical documentaries and hi-poly vfx environment. I started using Blender in 2008, and became passionate about its community and open source software. In 2012 I worked for the Blender Institute on the VFX open short movie, "Tears of Steel". More recently, I've been involved in game development, including Kenshi (for 2-3 months working for Sebastien Froncek, from whom I learnt a lot!)

Here are some of the works I've done for Kenshi (Warning! These are from Kenshi, NOT Kenshi 2! My work on Kenshi 2 appers in section above in ‘Interior Object and Furniture Placement Modes in Kenshi 2'). Please also note these are portfolio renders in Marmoset (a render engine for game assets), not in Ogre (Kenshi's actual game engine), so the models look a bit different from how they look in the game.





Having worked often with small indie teams, I have experience in level building, shading and light, using Unreal, Unity and other engines. I also do some scripting to automate my art workflow, using Python.
For Kenshi 2, I'm working on buildings and related props, such as furniture.

Home Setup
I've always worked remotely, and my home-studio setup is made up of a 'normal' mid-high tier gaming PC as a workstation, just with a colour-accurate monitor and a keyboard with custom layout and macro-pad.
Most game development tools are Windows-centric, so my workstation runs Windows, but I also keep a reliable Linux PC on the 2nd monitor with KVM switch, acting as spare/backup and files/media server.

Life Balance
In my free time … well, before 2020, I used to socialise more, like going to my favourite pub with friends and ride or work on my bicycle, but now I have more time to spend on my nerdier side: I guess I'll finish building my 3rd keyboard, start another career in Kerbal and find 10k pages of sci-fi saga to read.

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Craig Tinney – Programming

Hello readers! I'm Craig, the newest addition to the Lo-Fi Games programming team. I've been helping to port Kenshi to Unreal Engine 4 for Kenshi 2 since I started back in April of this year.
Since I joined Lo-Fi during the UK lockdown period, I've yet to actually work in the office with the rest of the team, and I've been communicating with everyone online. Safe to say at this point, I'm itching to meet everyone face to face!
So far I've been involved with the new building placement tools mentioned in this post as well as general porting to unreal and a lot of things we're not quite ready to talk about yet (but they're really cool, honest!).

Life Balance
Outside of work, I make my own games on a much smaller scale than Kenshi. Usually, I make things in Pico 8, which is just about the cutest game engine in the world and everyone should know about. If you fancy checking out my games, they're all available for free at https://ctinney94.itch.io/

Lately I've been trying to find some non-screen focused hobbies due to spending so much more time indoors this year. As a result, I've gotten into building terrain for tabletop games with my housemate. Check out these rocks we made!





I've also started to make tapes of some of my favourite albums since acquiring my Dad's old hifi stack.



Please do not judge me for this, 2020 has all affected us all differently.

That will be the end of this community update. We love to hear your thoughts, especially on new interior furniture and object placement modes in Kenshi 2. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook for news if you haven’t already, and if you'd rather receive this blogpost in a non-Steam way, they are available on our website and via our mailing list.

Stay safe and keep well!