Weekly update! (Patreon)

Quick talk and FAQ catchup!

What's being worked on?

Today I kept working on rigging and the asset creation stuff I mentioned yesterday. All the hind legs are now meshed and skinned, and the arms are ready to do the final grouping. Here's what the vector/grouping part of the process looks like on the legs. 

The colored boxes are the mesh sizes. Anything that fits into the same box uses the same mesh, making it easier to tweak individual body parts across all the characters.

FAQ

Those were a lot of crazy-looking errors in yesterday's post. Are things okay? Yes. That's pretty much what things always look like between updates. Don't worry, AJ is now back in one piece and is experiencing no distress. Here, see?

Don't mind all the debug text and floating shit. It's supposed to be there.

Are you adding kirin? We talked about adding the kirin species on stream. Basically, I just need to get the assets together and it's doable. This is a definite "yes", but like many things, it's been pushed to the side to try to get this update finished.

Can we have little voodoo dolls of the characters, that we can then use as fleshlight-type toys? Yes, probably! This is a fantastic idea that was brought up last stream. I thought about it, and code-wise this would use the same mechanics as portals, which are planned as the next big feature. I'll talk about this more when we move on to portals, cause I love it.

Can you release the update in parts to make it go faster? That's the plan, if possible! Sometimes a project like this can go from 0% working and slowly climb up to 100% working. Sometimes it's at 0% until the very end, when it suddenly all works at once. Or it's somewhere in between. So yeah, if chopping it up works, I'll do it.

Bro. Use like, a code architecture pattern. I wish I'd known how to do that from the start. I've been learning about SOLID principles, which have helped a lot lately. But I didn't know anything about SOLID back when I started this project, and had no experience with making a game with this many interacting systems. A lot of the most important code is also the worst-written. I've fixed stuff as I've run into problems with it, but the only way to really make this project properly structured would be to uproot the main classes, and much of the instantiation stage, and rewrite it.

You could fork the project and rewrite the old stuff? I think this is a good plan, but not yet. I'm so much more comfortable with thinking about separation of concerns, proper inheritance, and how to move important information around than I was at the start. Web development wasn't really good training for game dev like this. So, all the code that handles toys and machines, for example, is a confused mess spawned from the mind of a noobish web dev. A mess to handle later, though. I've already rewritten plenty for the sake of this update, and I need to get a playable build out ASAP.

When's the next public build coming out? Same time as the current dev build I'm working on. So, sometime hopefully soon! >.<'

Why don't you respond to your Discord messages? I'm shy.

Did you know that people are pirating your game? Yep.

What about an art stream? I also draw, but have neglected it for a while. But! I am planning on adding an art stream to my schedule at some point. I have a lot of plans like this that I've told myself I'll do "as soon as this update is finished", so... yeah. Soon (tm).

That's all for now! Thank you all so much for sticking around! <3