Dev Log: Lighting The Way (Patreon)

ONE OF THE IMAGES IN THIS POST CONTAINS A STROBE LIGHTING EFFECT IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO THAT PLEASE BE WARNED

Hello gamers. This Dev Log is going to be a long one, we've been working non stop since launch to get everything we need into the game to start pumping out content. After this dev log I plan to provide more frequent and shorter/focused status updates as we add new features! With that said here's what we've been up to these past couple weeks:

Recreating our Prototype in Unity

I wrote our original prototype game that you saw in the trailer in Javascript. I am most familiar with NodeJS in my day to day work so I felt very comfortable building up the prototype in it to get something awesome looking to show everyone with functioning battle logic and special moves! After we received overwhelming support from you guys on our launch it was clear that this was definitely happening so I immediately had a long think about the roadmap to successful game completion and decided it would be much better for the quality of the game long term to take what we have now and put it in a proper game engine like Unity. It helped my decision that I am very familiar with C# so it didn't take long to get back up to parity with the prototype. The game logic I wrote from the prototype has been reimplemented in Unity we're and we're working on new features! 

Why we switched + new features

Live2D

We want to be able to make the waifus lewd scenes in Live2D. If you don't know what Live2D is it's a tool from the promised land (Japan) that lets you take a 2D piece of art that (e.g. that Kuso makes) and turns it into a model that can be animated in game. This will make our lewd scenes really shine. The WebGL implementation of Live2D for Javascript by my assessment is lagging behind, lacks english documentation, is difficult to work with due to lack of documentation and doesn't seem to currently support the more advanced masking techniques available in Cubism Editor creating some very creepy missing iris effects among other defects. Before getting to work implementing our waifus in Live2D we used their sample files to ensure that everything works correctly and immediately spotted issues.

Eyes visible in editor, how it should look.

Undead Zombie in prototype engine seeking live flesh

As you can see the implementation seems almost right however it is not quite working. Unless you don't mind never seeing eyeballs this is not going to look very good in game. I thought maybe the issue is in that model and took to try implementing another and ran into the same issue.

Another sample, no twinkle in her eyes, mouth closed.

Even trying some of their simpler samples we came up with issues. This was one of the major reasons I decided to switch to Unity. I really want that sweet Live2D animation! Implementing Live2D in Unity has been a breeze and we're up and running already with it.

Live2D support implemented in our new Engine! Begone WebGL!

This will make a huge difference when you see the lewd scenes, the fluidity and movement will be worth the effort it took to get it right!

Antialiasing

WebGL support for antialiasing is poor right now, FXAA at best with caveats, switching to Unity will help smooth out the jaggies something that will make a lot of difference in the finished game.

Lighting + Performance

I feel like the mood for a cyberpunk game is set through its lighting and I have more ways to implement lighting that doesn't destroy performance in Unity. Cool lighting effects  really hurt performance in our prototype and I was finding it was going to be time consuming to add effects like fog, shadows and other things I want in the final game. I don't really want to wrestle achieving peak performance when we have a game to get out there! You can also see some of the blooming effects I'm implementing in the header image of this dev log!

Scene Tools

While a minor factor switching to Unity allows me to quickly place objects in a scene accurately with a fast preview which was cumbersome in my previous environment and rapid game development is important to me.

More effects

ONE OF THE FOLLOWING IMAGES IN THIS POST CONTAINS STROBE LIGHTING IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO THAT PLEASE BE WARNED

I am able to do crazier and cooler effects in Unity than our previous engine, lighting, smoke, distortion effects which will really pay off.

A power up status effect I'm working with

Extreme example being worked on for a special attack.

Spine Rigging

As previously mentioned we have added in Live2D animations to our dialogue & lewd scene system with the intention to use it to animate the sex scenes using it. We also have switched from static sprite animations to Spine rigging, similar to Live2D but more suitable for our RPG combat system every character has a skeleton now and they are animated around it! This will allow us to make even cooler battle animations than what we've shown so far, look forward to that in a future update!

Original idle movement through skewing static sprite

New idle animation (with nice coat flow!)

She walk (with heavy test lighting)

She shoot, now with gun lighting effects (this is her basic attack animation we'll be implementing into battle scenes very shortly!)

UI

Work is in progress on a sweet UI now that we've switched to Unity. I'm not so hamstrung by web conventions, preview to come shortly, I wanted to focus mostly on effects in this dev log.

New Environment Art + Boss

Since starting to write this dev log we have previewed our first boss Mia in a post here so I will omit talking about her, we will have more on her very soon including some in game sprite work and completed promotional art. Probably our next patreon post.

We have been working on some sweeping ground level concept art, one of the first areas you visit will be the streets so we took to work starting off at ground level

Preview/WIP of ground level view concept.

Preview/WIP looking up into the city from ground level

I don't want to spoil too much at this stage in terms of art as we're focusing on dev work here but what you should expect some sweet and futuristic environments! We really want you to feel like the city is real and feels like a cyberpunk environment.

Hope you enjoyed our first dev log, I hope to show off some of the new UI and Dialogue/Conversation system in the next dev log so please look forward to it!