Weekly update- July. (Patreon)

It's friggin July. I live on the west coast of the US, and the heat wave melted me a little. Anyway...

What's being worked on?

Been talking to musician SkySprinter about game music/sound design, something my projects have seriously been lacking. I have some ideas about experimenting with adaptive background music in SHF3, and how to utilize music in the potential side projects I've mentioned. We're still working out details, so I'll keep y'all updated as stuff develops, but I'm excited for the potential! ^^

Next, I've been finishing up the asset work I talked about last time. The torso and head have special requirements, so they take a lot of tweaking if anything is slightly broken. Heads are all similar enough, so it turns out I can treat them all as essentially identical (which I wasn't really doing before).

Torsos are all over the place. But I can still break them down into sensible groups. They're symmetrical shapes, unlike the limbs, so standardizing the way I create these kinds of assets takes a lot of the guesswork and funkiness out of the process.

Been working out a decent hierarchy to group together swappable body parts. This is another part of the make it not horrible to debug the rigs effort. So, now, different body types have the body shape "archetype" as its base. The archetype moves the bones into the correct places first. Then variants of the parts that don't change the larger shape can be applied piece-by-piece, as needed for each character. 

The pic below is from Spine, the animation software, and is showing the hierarchy of skins being applied. Each skin contains all images related to its specific variant of the named body part.

She's missing a face but she's supposed to be.

Also, I've been doing something I dread: working with git. Git is version control software. Sort of an advanced cloud backup for code that lets you travel back in time and see every change you've ever made in your code. I... fucking hate git. But it's also extremely necessary. For the other programmers reading this- I know git "isn't that hard". I am a person that can't read or follow instructions though. Git is hard for me.

Git is meant for code, but there's more than just code in a game. There's sound, images, and source files for Sai, Illustrator, Spine, etc. It's actually a pain to put this stuff in git because it's kind of useless in there, but also I kinda need it there? Switching between working on my laptop and desktop needs to be seamless, which means I need always up-to-date versions of all source files.

I finally bit the bullet and set up git-lfs (large file storage), which gives me a git-friendly way of uploading non-code files for the game into my repository. So now, all the source files are in there. My repo is a bit of a monster, but it's fiiiine.

The commit won't even display on Gitlabs.

All good though. I can finally sync my workstations properly. 

The next step is make sure the game code accepts the structural changes I've made to the skins, and then take stock of how close I am to an actual release. Will let you guys know when I get to that point. 

I'm pounding away at this thing >.<'

FAQ

Will you release sounds or other assets made for the game? Yes! All assets are already available in the unpacked downloadable versions. For stuff like sounds or voice acting (which is unlikely to happen in SHF3 but probably will for other things), I'll wait until there's enough to actually release, then I'll pack them all together and put them on my website or something. It'll all be freely available for anyone to use. 

Also. Once I hit a good point on SHF3, I'll make the git repo public, meaning all source files for assets, animations, and code will be free to steal. This won't happen for a while, but it's the end goal!

What about 15.ai for voices? It's not reliable enough yet. It's okay at reading lines, so I'm keeping my eye on it for any project with extensive dialogue, but its delivery is too robotic to work for SHF3.

That's all for now! I am going... a little crazy. I had no idea shit would take this long, but as long as you guys are still on board, imma keep plowing forward and see where it takes us.

<3