Weekly update 4 (Patreon)

Here we gooooo-

What's being worked on?

Rig testing

I mentioned last week that I'd be testing the new rig stuff this week, since that was the main barrier to getting a playable version together. Given the amount of changes to animation code and the rigs themselves, I was expecting a lot of pain. It turns out, there were some minor (user) errors, but it just kind of works, I guess? So, um, yay!

I'll be doing some further testing on the more advanced animation features I'm relying on. So far though, it's just... working. I'm not sure how to handle this.

Automating assets

Real quick since I've talked at length about this in the past- it's going well. Actually, going a lot better after the rig testing. It was slowing me down trying to figure out if errors were happening because of my character data file changes, or because of my code. Now I know it's the data! 

Yay! But also >.<'

Camera motion

So... it's now possible to zoom and pan the game camera. There are some derps that result from a big change like this, but I think I can get the coordinate systems working to support it. 

Honestly, I'm embarrassed I didn't do this sooner. I'd always assumed it was much harder than it was. This game's layout has always been starved for vertical screen space, and more player interactions at head-level (for oral) made it so much worse. Tall characters were game-breaking.

Ever since the first versions of this game, a lot of restrictions came from the static camera view. That forced the game's design down some weird paths. I'm hoping to start correcting that weirdness over time (and future updates, not this one). Mostly, I see the opportunity for better handling of bigger characters, a better stage, and most importantly, better UI.

I'm getting ahead of myself though. For now, there's camera motion... with only minor jank :3

Performance improvements

Some of FPS issues I've seen were caused by... unexpected sources. Text effect rendering, little boxes, things like that. Stuff you'd expect the engine to be good at rendering. I accidently blew out the renderer during some tests and realized there were ways to cache and bake in basic graphics a lot better. 

Dunno what differences the average player will see cause my performance testing isn't sophisticated enough to compare it. But hey, this'll probably help?

Debug tools

Technical stuff. Adding more tools for tracking invisible things in the game like hitboxes and constraints. Needed for testing the big changes happening to the rigs without driving me insane.

Q&A

When game done? 

Um, well! I think we're actually nearing a playable build. There'll be some jank, maybe some temporarily disabled characters or items, but stuff's actually "working". You know, from a developer's perspective. 

Does the ability to zoom out mean more character slots, bigger characters, etc?

Possibly! Bigger characters seem really fun for the future. 

For game design reasons, I'd prefer to keep the number of on-screen characters to be capped at a maximum of three. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but to boil it down: this just seems like a game that's better suited for close-up interactions, not a room full of characters all at once. For that, I'll look at Factory.

But I'm not set on it, so player input will help guide design decisions like this. We'll get to test this stuff a little later on, after the Oral and Portal updates.

Yeah so I'm a day late on this again. Gotta set a reminder or something. 

Thank you guys so much for sticking with me on this project. I'm still blown away by your consistent support. Will try to start spicing these updates up with visuals and stuff, for those who don't get to see the streams. 

That's all for now! <3