Progress update- July 24th (Patreon)

A couple days late on this. Gotta remember to post these directly after the streams >.<

What's being worked on?

Spine updates

I finished the animation code! Woo! 

Okay, technically, inverse kinematic restraints are a little bugged, but I'll fix that some other time. But yay! This means I can use all the fanciest improvements in the Spine editor. It gives me a whole new animation workflow, which is a big change. Now that I'm grasping how to do it though, it's great. 

Its strength is in creating breakdown poses, which are important mid-way poses between the beginning and end of an action. Breakdowns give life and realism to a motion, and I've always struggled with them. 

You can see the curves of motion being adjusted on the right, pushing the leg motion just slightly ahead of the body's. This is... way easier than it was before.

Completing animations

Turns out there's a lot to work through with animations. Some of the complexity comes from old hacks that I had to use before. And the rest just comes from there being tons of animations, and hundreds of bones removed from the skeleton. I figured I could kinda blast through this bit in a day or two, but as always, it takes more time than I wanted/hoped. So my current task is completing all animations to a workable level. Meaning one decent cycle for loops, and primary and minor secondary motion on the non-loops.

This is the minimum viable product that I'm shooting for, but it's pretty decent even at this level. Given time for refinement, I'm excited about how much this can improve going forward!

Also, messing with pose options. The front legs always bothered me...

Completing game data

Certain things are broken just because they didn't need to be fixed yet. For example, now that I'm on the final run of animations, it's also time to ensure all paths in the data point to correct animations. The hierarchical nature of the new animation features means this is done in a super-standardized way now, which makes it wayyy less error-prone.

Still, I want to finish automating this part of the pipeline ASAP after this update is done. It's just busywork.

A soundtrack!?

SkySprinter made me some background music. I have ideas for how to integrate music into the game better in the future, but it'll already be a great improvement over silence! 

Project "Maple"

I teased an unnamed project with PussPuss before. It's a little non-pony oneshot game idea we had. I'm loving the progress on it so far. Right now, I'm not devoting dev time to it, but PussPuss has been hard at work on the character assets! 

I'll be breaking this project off into its own posts from now on, and PussPuss will be dropping art when they're ready on their Patreon, so follow us both to see everything! :3

Q&A

The Sirens and/or their pony forms? Yes to the pony forms. I'm not adding a bunch of characters atm for obvious reasons, but these characters will probably make their way into the game at some point. Their dragon-like forms are a solid 'maybe' depending on how much the animation features will help in adding new species.

Thunderlane and other Wonderbolts? Yes! But same as above- I'm not working on new characters right now. I held off on the full wonderbolts team in the past because I got stumped trying to make their uniform work on the rigs (the layering got crazy), but with all the new improvements, I think it'll be wayy easier now. So, not this update, but yes!

You're working on a non-pony project! Is the era of pony over? Not exactly! I still love pony, but also recognize its limitations as a creator. Some minor projects, like Maple, might be straight-up furry. The next 'big' project is still intended to include pony. 

Beyond that, I haven't fully decided yet. But there'll probably be a pony-compatible approach for future projects. E.g. a text-only game may have a pony/name change option if someone wants the npcs to resemble characters from a specific IP or franchise. Stuff like that. ^^

That's all for now! I've been cleaning up my discord community a bit, but there's still a lot to do on that front. When I start doing art streams, I hope ya'll will be able to join in. We're getting a lot of creative people participating in the streams now with music, art, 3d art, etc. Dunno if this'll end up as multistreams on Picarto, Discord streams, or what, but it's very exciting :3

Follow PussPuss btw <3