Progress Update 9 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! <3

I don't have an estimate for when the next playable build will be ready yet >.<'

But also- I'm going to start making weekly progress updates here on Patreon. They'll happen on Thursday nights after the development stream finishes. The updates will cover whatever I'm working on, plus any juicy questions brought up during the stream. Hopefully this helps the lack of communication, which is something I've always struggled with as a creator. While I do answer questions live during the streams, anyone who doesn't attend those has been left in the dark.

Streams are at picarto.tv/DaiLevy on Thursdays at 12pm to 4pm PST. 

What's new? 

Engine work. More of it. 

Everything I've been working on has been related to the massive animation library update I mentioned in my last post. The game is up and running (as in, not crashing) with the new features, and I've spent this last month making use of the new stuff. There's a million things I want to add, but right now, I'm only doing things that are vital to finish the next playable build. 

It's a bit technical this time, but here's the big stuff I've been doing:

Animation loop builder.

Looped animations like struggling, breathing, etc, are a big time sink. Different kinds of characters need different animations to look right. The old way to do it was to make one struggle loop, then copy and paste the keyframes of that loop, and make minor adjustments so that there was some variation. The problem was that if I wanted to tweak the struggle loop (for example, if I tweaked the leg positioning), then I'd have to go through the entire copy-pasted loop to adjust every keyframe, and then do it again for all versions of the loop (stallion, filly, dragon, etc). I realized I was subconsciously avoiding doing work for this part of the rigs, cause it was such a pain. A lot of them had no variation.

So my current task is automating looped animations. I can animate the base loop once, then make any variations I want that'll be added intermittently. Then the system will randomly string together the segments into a completed animation. It adds time dilation and some other things stuff too. So with only a few keyframes, I can generate the major animation loops for the game. When I need to make changes, it'll only be to a few small animation segments, but it'll make the changes for the entire loop.

Bone simplification.

One of the biggest benefits of the animation library update has been simplifying the rigs. A bit hard to describe this one. Basically, the old system required a lot of hacky solutions to allow multiple animations to affect the motion of one bone. Characters in most 2d games rarely have more than 1-2 animations playing at a time. Think a sword slash or a jump animation. No real need for a lot of dynamic overlapping motions. In this game, though, you might have ~5 motions affecting any given body part at once. To make that work, I had to stack a ton of bones on top of each other. Bone 1 is parented to bone 2, then 2 to 3, etc. And for the overlapping motion, animation 1 affects bone 1, animation 2 affects bone 2, etc... and repeat this for every type of motion that might happen at once.

Now, I can apply simultaneous additive motions to a single bone, eliminating the need for all that fuckery. It's hard to overstate how much of an improvement this is. I can just animate each motion normally, without needing to manage the hundreds of bones in the old rig. Freedom at last. I've been slowly unfucking the rigs to account for this.

Bone accuracy.

A lot of the rigs use the same skeleton, meaning their bones don't quite match their size. This makes their motions slightly off from where they should be. When several motions overlap, the errors become more and more obvious, and it breaks the rig. This has been a constant issue, requiring multiple attempted solutions.

With the new system, I'm altering the root skeleton to match the size/shape for each character type. That way I can keep on using the same rig for everyone, but not be stuck with body parts that don't follow the skeleton. I think this problem finally has a good solution.

Automating toy creation.

There's a lot of manual work involved in adding toys and setting their animations up. It's a little absurd. Makes it hard to want to spend time adding new toys, or even make minor adjustments.

I'm working on making the game automatically find/request animations needed for a toy. So adding a new toy, or adding a new use to an existing toy, both become wayyy easier. Since animations are now stored in a folder-like structure, I can just make all the animations I need, place them in the right folders, and the game will use them automatically.

That's all for now. I'll see you all tomorrow for the first weekly progress update, or maybe you'll join me for the stream :3

I can't thank my patrons enough for their seemingly infinite patience and generosity. I'll keep working to make sure I've earned it. <3